Had an argument with a relative about my attitude to journalists. Boiled down to whether an interviewer's role is to:

▪️ Just extract the messages from the politicians and relay them to other politicians.
Or
▪️ Come up with their own arguments against politicians' narratives
1/3
Them: If the politicians are bad, it's up to the people to see that and remove them. Journalists have no such electoral responsibility.

Me: The public aren't experts in all political issues, so journalists have to provide the info the public needs to judge MPs accurately.
2/3
e.g
Journalists accepted the "Will of the People" narrative because neither Labour or Tories were saying: "If 52% want different incompatible EU-UK relationships, it's not possible to please them all".
And here we are.

Journalism shouldn't depend on Westminster Wisdom alone.
3/3
That's the thing. e.g.

If an MP tells an interviewer "It's thanks to Brexit that we were able to approve the vaccine quickly"...

The body that approved the vaccine has confirmed it's objectively not true.

So is that 'news' or 'opinion'?

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More from @Femi_Sorry

16 Feb
Without our shop staff, nurses & bin men during lockdown, we'd have been starving, dead or living in our own sh*t.
Have the Tories forgotten that already?
#Budget2021
It's working class people who've been keeping us alive more than any hedge fund manager.
It's working class people who've been less able to work from home, and therefore more exposed to Covid 19 so...
It's working class people who've sacrificed the most during 2020-1.
#BudgetDay Image
Therefore statistically...

Middle class: Job + work from home - travel costs.

Working class (unless furloughed/fired) : Job + travel + extra safety procedures + PPE + viral danger + childcare but with less academic support + downgraded A-Levels - Wages.

#BudgetDay
Read 4 tweets
6 Feb
I once cheated on my girlfriend with her mum; she dumped me and stopped taking my calls. #CancelCulture.
My political party caused the worst death rate on the planet and then some people refused to vote them into office again. #CancelCulture
My favourite teacher used to read Mein Kampf to us every day in Year 2 and now there's a petition to ban her from teaching. #CancelCulture
Read 5 tweets
5 Feb
Hi @GrantShapps
Apart from freight drivers, you need to restrict the number of people who can enter the UK to the number of hotel rooms available for mandatory quarantine.
If we get Covid down to low numbers by May, but a vaccine-resistant strain has already got in, It's on you.
Thanks @Lee4NED for publicly saying the reason you won't impose mandatory hotel quarantines on travellers from all countries is that the policy may become permanent. (from a government with 15+ U-turns)
Makes holding you to account for the consequences much easier.
@SkyNewsIsabel
Thanks @MattHancock.
You just publicly admitted that you're only going to impose mandatory hotel quarantine on countries where you've already identified that there's a new variant.
Waiting for a Covid disaster before you take preventative measures has worked really well so far!
Read 5 tweets
4 Feb
#ProjectReality
How it started. How it's going.
#ProjectReality
How it started. How it's going.
#ProjectReality
How it started. How it's going.
(Ben Wallace is now a minister of the hard Brexit Tory government)
Read 6 tweets
2 Feb
Proportional Representation can fix the gender balance problem in Parliament on DAY ONE.

Under PR each party puts forward a list of candidates in order of preference depending on how many votes the party gets.

So you make it the law that it alternates woman-man-woman-man etc.
Anyone who thinks I'm suggesting some crazy new idea that's never been done before...
Please look across the Channel. Just for one second.🙄
Also, you see women make up 34% of UK MPs, and me suggesting that we make it 50% and you're like "NOOOOOOO!"...
Read 4 tweets
29 Jan
Thank f*** for that. I had a 3-part thread ready to go, slamming the commission over #Article16.

I'll put the it below because it's still useful to say.
news.sky.com/story/covid-19…
1/5
If not for the pandemic, the path we were on was going to see the UK government unlawfully allowing unchecked goods into Northern Ireland, forcing the EU Commission to tell Ireland "To avoid a hard border and protect the Single Market, we need France-Ireland border checks.".
2/5
That would put the Ireland in a position of having to choose between being letting Brexit damage peace, being dragged out of the Single Market or uniting Ireland.

That's a horrible position, entirely the UK government's fault, but it avoids any abrupt border disasters.
Read 7 tweets

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