Moment BBC Question Time audience turns on Labour minister for ‘outrageous’ claim most small boat migrants are women and children

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

It’s a lie. The fact that he can say it with a straight face and then try to gaslight the audience is utterly extraordinary.

I think the latest Home Office figures show that 75%+ are adult men.

So the question is will he apologise?

I thought the narrative they’ve been spinning for a decade plus is ‘they aren’t refugees they’re working and military age males coming to work, and leaving their women and child at home’.

But apparently we’ve always been at war with Eurasia…

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Lying MP. Pretty obvious from the thousands of videos over the last decade that most are men in the 20-40 range, my eyes don’t lie. This is why people hate politicians

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I think this one of those polarization of politics things that leads almost all of us to be pretty intellectually dishonest and to have an answer in our head before we really know.

I guess I probably lean a little more toward liberalism on immigration. Or, rather, I associate some of the most anti-immigration views with people I broadly don’t agree with and values contradictory to mine.

So if asked this question – or about hotels, or money, or crime, or whatever – my instinct probably would be to immediately think that those talking points are overblown or skewed heavily. The Daily Mail has been saying the same shit for decades, with the same sense of hysteria, and it wasn’t that bad. It’s like the Guardian or the New York Times talking about fascism.

That’s bad though. My instinct is bad. How we have these discussions is bad. The way we immediately categorize people in debates and draw immediate conclusions is bad.

I think we need a politician – not Farage, not Boris, not Starmer – who can reground this debate in reality, because it’s threatening to send our democracy the same way as America’s. What’s actually happening – the exact figures that we know, what we don’t know; what are the impacts; what are people’s opinions; what are our options and what are their consequences; and what is the timeframe of implementation?

Democracy needs to reconcile with the reality of our age and we need to deal with these big issues like immigration in a way that doesn’t result in our entire society being poisoned by the vitriol of the discussion and the emotions surrounding it. Our refusal to talk honestly and openly about it is what leads to so much misinformation and tribalism and political opportunism.

I believe globally the majority of refugees are women and children (according to the UN, in 2024 40% were children), but even as a wokey lefty type it’s patently untrue to say that the majority of people crossing the channel in small boats are not men.

Now, a person sympathetic to refugees making that journey might say that the reason it is mostly men is because the journey is dangerous so men make it with hopes of securing safer passage for their families at a later point. But the claim he made is silly and doesn’t help de-escalate tensions there

I’m glad he said this.

Shows him up for the lying cunt that he is to a national audience.