IN a world full of injustices, will no-one think of the London-based pundits who didn’t get to vote in the 2014 independence referendum?
That was the cry that came from one such talking head on the BBC’s Politics Live show on Tuesday afternoon.
On air with no Scots at all but great thinkers such as Ben Bradley – the Tory MP who publicly and embarrassingly failed to realise that Channel 4 doesn’t receive public money – the BBC saw fit to discuss indyref2.
“You talk about who gets to decide,” pundit Alys Denby chimed in.
“Well in the Scottish referendum [in 2014] Scots who lived in England had no say. English people had no say over the integrity of their own country.
“So I think this is rightly a matter for the whole of the United Kingdom as a family.”
— The Jouker (@ScotJouker) November 29, 2022
We’ve heard these same pointless arguments enough that the Jouker won’t waste time going into it now. But who is Alys Denby anyway?
The BBC broadcast told its audience that she is the “deputy editor” of “CapX”. But what’s that exactly?
Well, CapX is an online news website founded by – and still explicitly linked to – the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). If that name sounds familiar, it may be that you’ve read it in the context of the failed 44-day prime minister Liz Truss.
After Truss’s disastrous mini-Budget – which plunged the UK into economic turmoil – the CPS were over the moon.
Tom Clougherty, its “head of tax”, said in the wake of the mini-budget: “I think that frankly both the overall message and the specific announcements contained within [it] are fantastic. Exactly what we would have hoped for and what people like us have been calling for for a long time.”
How did that turn out?
Or it could be that you’ve heard of the CPS in the context of Margaret Thatcher, who co-founded it.
Either way, CapX’s close affiliation to the Conservative think tank might have warranted some mention on Politics Live…
When will the BBC learn?
