Friday, March 16, 2012

I'm cross with Willie Rennie........

Well, kind of. Even though it's not his fault that he found himself having to high tail it to St Andrew's last night to take part in Question Time at the last minute.

There was even a sort of symmetry about one great by election winner taking a role on the national stage exactly 50 years after another's ground breaking win.

But, did it really have to be the night before the F1 practice sessions started in Australia? I need my sleep, otherwise I turn into the Witch Queen from Hell. There was no way I'd manage to get up at 5:30 for Free Practice 2 if I'd been up till all hours watching Question Time. So who was it going to be, Michael Schumacher or Willie Rennie?

I did wonder if little month old Michael Green would be up watching his namesake for the first time. His daddy works for the Mercedes team and his mummy is probably an even bigger Schumi fan than I am.

Anyway, I digress. I couldn't really go to bed without seeing how Willie had done. He was on with Janet Street Porter, Humza Yousaf, Ruth Davidson and Frank Field.

I felt that he really didn't get his fair share of airtime, but when he did speak he talked sense. If any random, normal people had been watching, other than the political geeks who normally gather round on Twitter, I think they would have seen a reasonable, articulate, very sensible guy. He's much wiser than I am because I was urging him on Twitter to have a go at Humza Yousaf over the SNP's economic failures over the economy and its Plan MacB, but it wasn't the right place. I wish he'd got the chance to bring up Alex Salmond's close links to Rupert Murdoch and this grubby little association they seem to have going on independence. He really had Salmond flailing on that last week and I think actually it's relevant to a UK audience that a vengeful Murdoch is quite happy to try to break up the UK over Leveson.

It was very interesting to see Ruth Davidson take credit for the rise in the tax threshold and Nick Clegg's Youth Contract - both Liberal Democrat ideas.

Humza Yousaf showed why the leadership contest he'll have with Nicola Sturgeon after the Independence Referendum will be an interesting one indeed.

Willie talked about how the argument we need to put forward on wind farm isn't just about jobs, it's about protecting the future. On minimum alcohol pricing he said that we could either sit and do nothing on harmful alcohol consumption, or do something we know works. On jobs, he talked about the difficult tightrope the Government was walking at the moment between spending enough to keep the economy going and spending too much which would cause problems with our credit rating and markets. It's good to see politicians acknowledge that it's a tough environment and it's hard to steer the right course. Labour would just go on about how it was a global recession and nothing to do with them, but then take credit for saving the world. Willie's comments were very real.

Anyway, I've done my usual Storify of my tweets and some interesting Twitter conversations I had along the way last night and you can see it for yourself here. Enjoy.

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1 comment:

Unknown said...

I think I might have to watch this edition of BBCQT on iplayer...

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