Paid Media for MPs like Farage Could be Banned

Nigel Farage could be banned from hosting his GB News show under a Labour Crackdown on MPs making paid media appearances. Parliament’s modernization committee yeah, a real thing which is being chaired by Labour front bencher Lucy Powell today published a memorandum agreeing to look at tightening rules on second jobs but is this move actually a chilling attack on free speech and crucially as well GB News I’m joined Now by Reform UK’s immigration and Justice spokesperson Ann Widdecombe, Ann thank you very much, now l think that they’ve got a tricky time getting at us through Ofcom and all of this stuff but actually if they can just knock Nigel Farage out of play by doing something like this then why wouldn’t they do it?

Well, indeed and I think if you look at the whole argument around MP second jobs you know you have to make so many exceptions at the end of it what you’re really doing is choosing who you’re going to prevent from doing second jobs and that seems to be what’s happening here. They’ve said right well you know it’ll be people with paid media appearances, but where are you going to stop, I mean supposing you’ve got somebody who’s come from the media who’s still got a profession there who wants to make say a documentary, I mean, never mind present a program, just wants to make a documentary.

I did plenty of those while I was an MP and it didn’t interfere with anything that I was doing as an MP and nobody thought it was peculiar, the only reason they would want to do this as far as I can tell is if there was someone with a prominent platform that they didn’t like who they thought that they could significantly inconvenience and I look around, David Lammy doesn’t do his LBC show any more you know, Ed Balls is a retired Labour politician now, despite of course being married to our home secretary so actually really the only person this affects is Nigel Farage, well certainly the only person it affects in terms of you know an ongoing regular appearance, but what are they going to do about people who do one-offs?

How To Silence Nigel Farage

As I’ve just said you know, are they going to include them as well and if not what possible grounds can they have for excluding Nigel? So, conceivably what could happen is that the Labour party every single day the government gets the opportunity to put a minister up for a morning round, they also could maybe decide which ones of their Labour politicians were allowed to do columns in newspapers for example, but if another MP from another party (Farage for example) wanted to be paid to write a newspaper column or do a television show that would be banned and I think that’s quite shocking from a freedom of speech point of view.

Well, they’ve got to decide exactly what they’re going to ban, are they going to ban you know one off articles in newspapers on subjects of expertise are they just going to do a blanket ban on anything to do whatever with the press and media? What are they going to do they haven’t actually told us Patrick?

We don’t know, there is an argument though and some people really do fully subscribe to this argument that if you are elected to be an MP for a particular constituency then your entire sole focus should singularly be on that, i.e. just to continue with this with Nigel Farage as the example, that the fair people of Clacton might benefit more if Nigel Farage spent all his time there focusing on them.

I can’t imagine anything worse than a parliament full of people who have no connection with the outside world beyond the job that they actually do, I can’t imagine anything worse and then of course you start on the exceptions, you know, you’ve got the doctors, the dentists, well they can’t stop practicing, after you know 10 years would you want your teeth pulled by somebody who hadn’t done it for 10 years? And so the exceptions start, as they always have and then as I say if you have enough exceptions then you come down with people you’re discriminating against, like Farage.

A Possible Ban will have Exceptions

Do you think that if this did become law Nigel Farage would just break the law? Well of course Parliament can impose its own penalties on MPs who do that, I don’t know what he would do, you’ve got to ask him that, but I think the best solution to this is to resist it becoming law.

You raise an interesting question there, it ties in with, it’s the second jobs issue when it comes to MPs and I have my own theories about why Labour might want to climb down on this and I will just say it, which is that if you have some somebody who is desperate to work in the private sector and go and make a bit of money in the city or set up their own business or do all of this stuff that would therefore essentially excluded them from going into politics, so you might end up with the kind of people who are not particularly inspired by any of those things and I do not want to generalize overly here but I suspect most of those kind of people would lean towards the left and therefore you could stack the deck with a load of lefties.

You could certainly have a very second-rate Parliament if you’ve got people who can’t carry on with paid interests in which you know they have a legitimate, not only legitimate interest but from which they can bring expertise into the House of Commons, it’s why do so many barristers in the house of common practice? The answer is because if they didn’t they wouldn’t be capable of doing it in a few years’ time, what could the possible justification for this be though?

Second Jobs for MPs

You know let’s have a look so they would say well, we want to spend more time with your constituents who want it to be the sole focus, they could say that it might get rid of vested interests, they could say in the case of Nigel Farage here on GB News presenting a show Monday to Thursday or back you know prior to Jacob Rees Mogg well I suppose is the case against that isn’t he, because he lost his seat but you know that Nigel Farage can use that platform to self-promote and therefore politically promote and that that is in some way unfair okay, then so you get an MP who writes bestsellers do you forbid that as well because you know if somebody is in the public eye because of that, you know are you going to forbid that.

There are just so many as I say, in the end you’ve got to end up making a whole raft of exceptions and therefore you end up with a small persecuted minority if you want to put it that way. The cynic in me would say that Labour might have weighed this up. I’ve got no doubt they would deny this that Labour might have weighed this up and thought it might be a bit too tricky to come after Farage through the means of Ofcom and get us taken off air or anything like that, but if they can knock out a big hitter like Farage at GB News by doing something like this then maybe, maybe they would do that of course.

I’m sure that’s featured in the discussion, well of course there is no suggestion of that at the moment I wouldn’t want to, I’m not saying that that’s their motive but I’m saying, I’m sure it’s featured in discussions. I do wonder, one wonders don’t they and thank you very much Ann Widdecombe there who is Reform UK’s immigration and Justice spokesperson, great to have you in the studio thank you very much.

Khan: Prisoners to Get Social Housing Priority

London mayor Sadiq Khan has once again sparked outrage after he said that newly released prisoners should be prioritized for social housing so on Tuesday more than 1,600 violent criminals sex offenders Etc. will just be let loose onto Britain’s streets under the government’s early release scheme and speaking to the Times’s crime and Justice Commission yesterday Khan said we need to have an honest conversation with our constituents about the reasons why people who have come out of prison may need to jump in the queue to get housing to avoid them reoffending again.

Well, those comments were slammed by to leadership front runner Robert Jenrick who earlier today accused Labour of putting decent people last, well there we go. I’m joined now by former Labour adviser Matthew Torbitt, Matthew great to have you on the show thank you very much for making the time for us this evening.

Is he right then Robert Jenrick, they’re putting decent people last, putting a criminal up the housing waiting list? I don’t know, I mean it wouldn’t be like there’s a leadership competition on its all for Robert Jenrick to be diving in on something Sadiq Khan said but I think I don’t know that the framing of the question suggests that people that end up in prison can’t always be decent people. Many people in life make mistakes, some much bigger than others and again you know you alluded to it in your introduction, I would reserve judgment for things like sex offenders, paedophiles and other things but for those that sometimes-initiate crimes of potentially poverty or for want of other reasons.

Commit a Crime & Jump the Housing Queue

I wouldn’t necessarily say that people have been to prison aren’t decent, yeah, I do appreciate that look I do. I do appreciate what you’re saying there what I would say though is well, what message does this send out to anyone who just abides by the law so people who might have gone shoplifting when they were hungry but didn’t and have waited on the housing waiting list then all of a sudden the London Mayor says, I’m really sorry but this blow with you know even if it’s petty crime but convictions as long as your arm does go above you in the housing waiting list it feels a bit like the social contract would be broken there?

Well, I would agree the social contract for me feels broken in that you know me and you probably always were brought up in that if you work hard and you abide by the law and you get on in life you know you’ll be able to afford a home and have sort of quite a nice life it doesn’t seem to be the case I think with regards to prioritizing.

I think what Sadiq said is we need to have a conversation I think that’s fair enough in many ways I think the other thing is there are many, the evidence is there that if people that leave prison are found relatively permanent housing they don’t go on to reoffend and reoffending costs us all through the home office £20 billion a year, so I think there’s an economic argument to show that certain people should be prioritized but that can depend obviously, you can have prisoners that are of old age that are potentially mentally ill or have learning difficulties, physical disabilities or maybe fleeing violence or persecution as such for whatever they’ve been involved in and I think you know how you prioritize those and for those that are already on the waiting list is a tricky thing.

Population Explosion Causing Bad Decision Making to Multiply

I think the main thing is we need to be building more housing yeah, we do need to be building more housing, I just think it plays into the perception that in Britain very often it seems to be law abiding Brits who are the back of the queue for everything but on the flip side of that if we we’ve got to ask ourselves how do we wish to treat prisoners once all is said and done.

If you have broken the law you’ve ended up in prison you’ve done the punishment you’ve been in prison for maybe five or ten, however many years, you’ve got a criminal record that could last up to 10 years maybe longer, you’re going to find it hard to get on in life and you know it’s right that people are punished.

I’m not saying you know people shouldn’t be going to prison for certain things but ultimately when is enough, enough? Once you’ve done the crime and you’ve done the time, surely, we have to ask ourselves. I would hate, I would hate for a situation to occur where the one of the victims of those crimes gets bumped down a social housing waiting list for the for the man or woman who did commit that crime against them though and I’m not quite sure how, I’m just not quite sure why Sadiq Khan says this stuff, like is he trolling us.

Do you think, I think it’s popular to dislike Sadiq Khan he does say some things at times where I think well I would certainly, wouldn’t have advised that but I think I don’t know, he’s opening up a question actually, politicians may not have the courage to even entertain the idea that you know economically is causing chaos.

Two Tier Law & Order

The fact that we are even more recently in the more recent riots we’ve got people going to prison that really probably maybe shouldn’t be going to prison for saying things online and whether that, whether we’re too harsh with our conviction sometimes Keir Starmer has a record of that previously with the 2011 riots when he was head of the DPP so it also opens up the argument of whether we’re sending people to prison far too easily which you know the current Minister would agree. He seems to think two-thirds of people shouldn’t be there at all, I do worry right, so there’s a lot spoken about especially by the likes of Sadiq Khan and Keir when it comes to language’s importance in policy.

Language really matters, language really matters in life okay all right I get that but you know we’ve had Sadiq Khan who relentlessly seems to be calling out things as racist you know, if you’re against what’s going on in the channel and you might be a racist and all of this, if you’re against all the pro Palestine stuff you know you might be a racist, you might be a member of the far right and a lot of that stuff for me comes from things that actually people have got a legitimate right to be angry about.

Well now if you’re angry about the idea that someone who’s you know either battered someone in the street or done some crime and gone to prison for it skips the housing waiting list now are we being told that we’re unkind. I can see your point, I don’t think you’re unkind but I think we maybe need to look through the other end of the telescope and actually ask ourselves what do we want? Do we want a society that that gives people second chances or do we cast aside people for the rest of their lives which ultimately the victim of a crime may not want because it may cause another victim of a crime because somebody has felt they need to go and reoffend further because they’ve not been allowed to get on with their life post prison yeah. No look hey, we, I think we can have a perfectly respectable conversation about this as indeed we just have Matthew massively appreciate your time this evening you take care all right, Matthew Torbitt with their former Labour adviser.