The Presence of Absence

Ben Wildsmith

I’ve sworn off BBC Question Time for years now. It was bad for my mood, my blood pressure, my marriage, and my spiritual wellbeing.

Audience members were found to be planted Conservative councillors with a regularity that suggested organisation and I don’t like feeling as if I’ve been had, especially on a Thursday night when I’m easing into the weekend.

The programme’s most egregious democratic crime has been to platform Nigel Farage so relentlessly that his profile finally rose to justify his inclusion.

From way back in the murky past of UKIP, Farage and his strand of politics had the arc lights of primetime exposure illuminating the way towards respectability and mainstream acceptance.

Without Question Time’s patronage, that path would have been longer and steeper.

So, when I forced myself to watch the Cardiff edition this week, it was more than a little puzzling to find no representative from Reform UK on the panel.

Scrutiny

When Nigelistas were so thin on the ground that Farage was losing an election to a bloke dressed as a dolphin, he seemed to be on the show every other week. Now that Reform UK stands every chance of being the largest party in the Senedd, nobody from the party was there to face scrutiny.

Farage’s popularity was, for decades, injected with performance-enhancing media presence, pumped-up beyond its natural abilities like a sprinter with yellow eyes and bulging veins.

Now, it seems, he is being ushered towards the winner’s rostrum without actually running the race.

Something similar is happening at Question Time in Parliament. Keir Starmer is routinely batting away underarm lobs from the hapless Kemi Badenoch whilst his actual opposition is in the pavilion scarfing down the egg and cress sandwiches.

From being a puzzlingly inescapable feature of political life, Reform UK is now conspicuous by its absence.

That, unfortunately, is further evidence of how canny an operator Farage has turned out to be.

UK politics, at the moment, is hamstrung by circumstances. Both Labour and the Conservatives now have their fingerprints on our dying economy, so Reform UK need do nothing but exist to soak up the discontent of a nation that has truly, really, finally had enough of the lot of them.

Plaid Cymru has had no such privileged spotlighting. Rhun ap Iorweth is obliged to appear on anything that will have him as he tries to create a distinct impression on voters.

New MSs

Such exposure, however, comes with risks and a good, passionate performance from Plaid’s leader was undermined when Fiona Bruce managed to hang the 36 new MSs around his neck as if they were an overpaid albatross.

On that subject, the obvious argument for them is that backbenchers curtail the power of governments.

Make the case for the new intake as a brake on government and the public might listen…

The teaspitting moment of this edition, however, came courtesy of Chris Bryant. Responding to concerns about cuts to benefits, the Rhondda MP assured us that ‘nobody’ would be having their PIP cut.

He did this whilst mentioning either empathetically or contemptuously, it’s hard to tell with him, that his, and my, constituency has one of the highest uptakes of PIP in the UK.

There was a moment of stunned silence as it seemed that Bryant was announcing a change of government policy. When pressed by Fiona Bruce he clarified that nobody would have their PIP cut immediately. They would be having it cut at their next review.

This sort of dishonest shithousery is, I suggest, why virtually everybody despises the Labour Party less than a year after it came to power.

Terrifying 

The prospect of losing PIP is terrifying people who have mental health conditions. Even those who are in no immediate danger of being disqualified are anxious because Labour has suspended Damocles’ sword over them when even the Tories did not.

In the audience, discontent with everything was palpable. Lived experience of the NHS in Wales was related by bereaved people who will never trust in politicians again.

As Bryant and the Conservatives’ Mims Davies sat mired with their parties’ records in government, Rhun ap Iorweth appealed to the audience with a pitch for decency.

The worry, though, is that voters aren’t in the mood for that. They are hurt, betrayed, angry, and exhausted.

In the unaccountable void where Reform UK should have sat is an inviting furnace where those emotions can be hurled.