The BBC Debate between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak summed up the entire general election: two people with more money than you trying to convince you that they’re different to the other guy while the country continues to fall apart and you’re slowly realising both of them are habitual liars and are almost identical.
However, a distraction from both men’s inane waffling was frustrating for the Beeb – but maybe welcome for the rest of us.
BBC Debate: let’s hear the protesters please
Yes, it was the pro-Palestine/anti-genocide protest happening outside Nottingham Trent Uni, where the BBC Debate was taking place:
What the media aren’t showing you outside the BBC Sunak v Starmer debate at Nottingham Trent University pic.twitter.com/cxDkXYQ5kr
— Animah Kosai (@SpeakUpAtWork) June 26, 2024
@NottsTV @BBCBreaking @BBCNews @itvnews huge protest for the final debate here in Nottingham – you should come down and join the fun! pic.twitter.com/kIv8quxkcQ
— Holly Tea (she/her) (@misshollytea) June 26, 2024
Not that the protest led to either the BBC sanctioning an audience question on Israel/Gaza, nor either avowed Zionist on stage addressing it.
Of course, corporate hacks couldn’t contain themselves over the fact that politics and politicians were sometimes subject to noisy protests – especially when they happen to be two cheeks of a very similar arse:
If the protest noise in the broadcast doesn’t get stopped soon, people are going to switch off. It’s annoying/distracting, & we can’t even hear what they’re shouting about.
People turning off would mean they wouldn’t get to hear what the potential PMs are proposing.#BBCdebate
— Ben Bloch (@realBenBloch) June 26, 2024
Bring back John Prescott lumping protesters and John Major getting egged by them, we say:
Brain-dead liberals licking their lips
“The excitement is palpable, here” dribbled Sky News correspondent Ali Fortescue live from the BBC Debate Nottingham spin room. Obviously she was not referencing the protest – but the thought of Starmer and Sunak going head to head to see which one could out-Tory the other:
“The excitement is palpable here” @AliFortescue and @SophyRidgeSky discuss the atmosphere in Nottingham ahead of the final leader election debate tonight between PM Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer.#PoliticsHub https://t.co/GlTNastFii
📺 Sky 501 pic.twitter.com/rNmcTNc1D9
— Politics Hub with Sophy Ridge (@SkyPoliticsHub) June 26, 2024
Which kind of sums up this general election: the only people aroused by any of it are the Westminster bubble hacks: so brainwashed into thinking that seeing the two most uninspiring men ever to grace our screens since Smashie and Nicey Brylcreem-it out is somehow important.
Or, if you live in the potentially brain-dead world of the liberal commentariat – then Starmer was destroying Sunak, mate! I know, mate! Fabtastic!
“If you listened to more people in the audience and around the country you might not be so out of touch”
Starmer is cooking Sunak here.#BBCDebate
— Supertanskiii (@supertanskiii) June 26, 2024
Others weren’t buying it:
“You’ll increase tax!”
“No I won’t!”
“Yes you will!”
etc. ad infinitum.
How about taxing the ultra-wealthy a bit more to pay for a decent level of healthcare & public services?
The Green Party: YES WE WOULD!#BBCDebate #LeadersDebate #VoteGreen
— Tom Scott 🇺🇦 (@Tom___Scott) June 26, 2024
And clearly, neither is most of Britain.
They’re both thundercunts
As Mishal Husain pointed out at one point during the BBC Debate, most people do NOT approve of either Sunak or Starmer – yet here were are, lumbered with these thundercunts:
As we enter the final week of what has been the most stupefying general election in living memory, it’s clear that neither Sunak nor Starmer really give a shit anymore – but both for quite opposite reasons.
As the Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski summed up:
The metaphor of the two establishment parties on stage talking nonsense whilst people protest outside – and they pretend it’s not going on and carry on anyway – all feels a bit too on the nose.
— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) June 26, 2024
Of course, the UK public isn’t the only ones thinking ‘what have we done to deserve this pair of dead-behind-the-eyes humanoids?’ From the US, as James Robins wrote for the New Republic the Tories have left the UK with:
There is mold in the walls and shit in the rivers, posh butter in the supermarkets has anti-theft tags stuck to it, the trains run on schedule about half the time, the average pub-poured pint of lager—the blood of the nation—is nearing the criminal price of 5 pounds ($6.34), and on May 22 a new general election was announced to the people of Great Britain by a prime minister who is richer than the king.
BBC Debate: when will this all be over?
However, as Robins also said of Starmer’s Labour Party:
The party today is a clean and characterless beast, open for business. Corporate lobbyists, rightly treated with scorn under the previous leadership, have already suckered on their tentacles. A “smoked-salmon offensive” has party operatives going palms-open to the financiers of the City of London. Thus the hurried evacuation from the party’s platform of anything that might resemble policy. “Starmerism” at best might be described as a Giro d’Italia of backpedalling:
Vanished are the promises to impose rent controls, limit bankers’ bonuses, reform the House of Lords, or give the Commons a deciding vote on war. One of the Tories’ most nakedly cruel schemes was to cap welfare payments to out-of-work families at two children; three kids means no extra cash. Labour will not throw that out, either. A transformative climate change scheme once pledged investment of 28 billion pounds per year; that figure is now 4 billion pounds per year and receding quicker than Prince William’s hairline.
The public know this. Regardless of whether you’re left wing or right wing, you know that a) the Tories are fucked, and b) Labour will fuck you.
I predict now that the turnout on 4 July will be the lowest since the 2000s – and who can blame us?
Featured image via BBC iPlayer
