Gary Monro’s blog

Did anyone watch this in BBC1 the other day?

More fly-on-the-wall stuff… I’ve only actually watched one of these types of programmes before (‘Laddette to Lady‘) but I feel like the formula is now ancient. Take a group of people, put them in a new or unfamiliar environment, set them tasks, watch them fight and argue.

This David Dickinson chap I’ve seen before (mostly in television adverts, actually). Basically, he’s big in antiques - an expert, probably - so myself and the Mrs thought we’d try a bit of cultcha to see if we could learn something about old stuff.

I was disappointed from the outset. Seems you can’t make a programme these days unless you’re prepared to swear a bit and so, to show us all how game he is, we’re treated with the intro of a heavily bleeped Dickinson doing what the BBC wants him to do - swearing. I guess this is just so the BBC can demonstrate it’s not grown too high-brow while our attention was diverted. BBC, worry not. We know there’s no chance of you doing that…

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Blair yesterday (quoted in The Telegraph) (emphasis mine):

At lunchtime, the Prime Minister said those who advocated suicide bombing ‘’whether it’s in London, whether it’s in Afghanistan or Iraq, or it’s in Palestine or it’s in Turkey or Kashmir, or anywhere … have got no place in our country'’.

So is Yusuf al-Qaradawi allowed into the UK or not?

As I mentioned yesterday, this chap - who has been banned from the US since 1999 - regards suicide attacks as “the highest form of Jihad”. So I think he meets Blair’s criteria for exclusion.

If we are to send out a serious message to the haters and racists that come here we have to be resolute and uncompromising. For Blairites - who, let’s face it, just don’t get it - this means: not pandering to correctness but to rightness, putting Britain and the British first (now there’s a radical idea), stopping crawling to the Muslim block vote - they don’t want haters here either and, in the event of possibly making a wrong decision we should be erring on the side of the British people’s well-being rather than the foreigner’s.

So. We watch. And we wait.