Watch Grace Blakeley take BBC Question Time by storm

Grace Blakeley


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Economics commentator Grace Blakeley took BBC Question Time by storm on 14 February.

“Much more important than the nature of the exit”

In one contribution, Blakeley brought the Brexit debate into sharp focus. She laid out why the nature of the deal is much less important than government policy post-Brexit:

What happens next in terms of… what the government does in order to push Brexit forward, is much more important than the nature of the exit itself… Whether or not we’re going to have a stimulus programme that will absorb the impact of this… And also taking into account the climate imperative: we have twelve years to green our growth. And this would be an amazing opportunity to do something like a Green New Deal that would… transform the nature of economic growth over the long term, which is not working for anyone.

 

“Most regionally unbalanced country in the EU”

In another intervention, Blakeley called out the stark regional inequality in the UK:

We are the most regionally unbalanced country in the EU. London is this huge… black hole that sucks in investment, people, everything else from the rest of the country. And actually what we need is to invest in our infrastructure as part of a coherent industrial strategy… away from London and away from finance.

Blakeley presents an important counterpoint to the establishment’s celebration of UK-wide national growth. The issue is that growth is inflated by London. This is all too clear when you consider a regional picture. In fact, nowhere other than London and the South East has had much of a recovery since the financial crash. And some regions were worse off in 2015 than in 2007:

The UK desperately needs regional investment across the nation. On BBC Question Time, Blakeley’s contributions were a refreshing addition to a show that’s often a dreary establishment yawnfest. More, please.

Featured image via Kayn/ YouTube

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  • Show Comments

    1. so broke my ‘no watching Question Time rule’ just to see how Fiona Bruce is holding up (I prefer Dimbleby) and I liked Grace Blakely as I’ve seen her on BBC before making the Left-wing case for Brexit and advocating a Green New Deal and she’s intelligent as hell however I was annoyed with her constantly trying to start a fight with Jacob Rees Mogg and I say this as someone no fan of him or the Tories but she should’ve spent more time calling out Lisa Nandy a Blairite who are a bigger enemy to progress (though on the program Nandy was fair). As for Geoff Norcott he’s tolerable on the Mash Report but is insufferable in a format like this. as for Jacob, well I don’t support a No Deal Brexit but he’s consistent in that leaving the EU means leaving the single market and a form of customs union. The biggest waste of oxygen last night though had to be Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia whose been allowing people like Philip Cross to slander, censor, and mercilessly edit and malign anti-imperialist, anti-war, and left-wing voices. And for fuck sakes he’s a libertarian and he has the audacity to lecture Grace and Jacob about being utopian about respecting the wishes of people who voted to leave? do kindly fuck off my good man. And all that being said Grace did wonderfully in mythbusting Churchill and presenting the overlooked dark side/policies of him whilist Jacob Rees Mogg acted as a concentration camp denialist and presenting that as being for their own protection while oddly saying all was well in Scotland during the colonial period and the gas used to quash anti-colonial fighters in Iraq, Afghanistan wasn’t poison gas but the type of gas used as tear gas today haha! you can’t make this madness up.

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