News
Louis Staples
Feb 24, 2020
It’s been a little over a week since the BBC came under fire for airing a "racist rant" from an audience member during Question Time.
During last week’s show, a woman from the audience said that she wanted to “close” the UK’s borders to foreigners. During a rant that was labelled “racist” and “unhinged” by people online, the woman made several claims about immigration which turned out not to be true. (Read our fact-checker to see why everything she said was completely wrong.)
The clip went viral, obviously, sparking a conversation about facts vs “feelings” when it comes to immigration.
Photographs then emerged which appeared to show the same woman at a “free Tommy Robinson” protest.
Now a shocking video has emerged of what appears to be the same woman at a far-right rally, making some extremely disturbing claims about Muslim people.
Continuing the same bizarre relationship with facts as the woman on Question Time,the woman in the video claimed that anti-Muslim Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was “locked up for nothing”. (In fact he was imprisoned for live-streaming during the trial of the Huddersfield grooming gang after express orders from a judge not to, almost sabotaging the whole proceedings.)
She then launched into a rant about how Muslims are “taking over our country”, and said that “enough is enough”.
Inevitably, the emergence of this clip and the accompanying images has prompted some people to ask if it is the same woman, and how a person who shares such extreme views on immigration was allowed to appear on national television in an uncensored rant.
In response to the questions about how the woman was allowed in the Question Time audience, a spokesperson from the BBC told indy100:
Thursday night’s Question Time included a debate about immigration which featured a broad range of views from the audience members and panellists. We posted five clips of people expressing their different views on the issue, including a panellist responding directly to the views of an audience member.
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