OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | Fireworks On BBC’s Question Time… Will AI Investments Lead To Bonanza Or Fraud? | Farrukh Dhondy

“Yours was the sun that gave my day its light

Yours was the moon that graced my lover’s night

Yours was the breeze that blew my cares away

Yours was the tide that swept fortune my way

Your words contained promises that made the clouds ascend

Your sighs were predictions that all this had to end.”

From The Odes of Bay Sharam, by Bachchoo

One of the popular news and current affairs programmes on the BBC is Thursday night’s Question Time. Its presenter, Fiona Bruce, invites a panel of four prominent figures from across the political spectrum each week to face a few hundred potential “questioners” in an audience, presumably of as diverse political persuasions as the panellists.

I’ve always noticed that the applause for some right-wing or some left-wing pronouncement from the guest panel meets with qualified applause from different sections of the audience.

Not so last Thursday.

Two of Fiona’s invitees were Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England and Nigel Farage, MP, the leader of the national-socialist Reform Party.

The format of the programme solicits pre-vetted questions from the audience.

So, for instance, in recent weeks, Fiona would ask the first questioner from the audience to stand and address the panel. The questions are always to do with current affairs and so this week would perhaps be about Donald Trump and the Strait of Hormuz.

Last Thursday, an audience member asked about what people were supposed to do about the rising cost of energy and subsequently the difficulties wage-earners were facing as they coped with the balance of spending on food, fuel, heating, etc. Fiona turned to Andrew Bailey for an opinion.

I was watching it on the box and Mr Bailey looked extremely patronising as he answered, saying that individuals should budget their expenses “strategically”.

He even said that they could take out loans against property they owned to tide them over.

Though Fiona didn’t turn to him, Mr Farage, in enraged tones, interrupted. He pointed his finger accusatively at Mr Bailey and raising his voice said words to the effect of “how dare you say this to the British public, preaching to them about strategic budgeting when you are on a salary exceeding half a million pounds and a nurse is struggling on £24,000 a year?” In his popular rhetorical way, he went on to name other workers such as lorry drivers, etc, who were struggling with the cost of living.

Mr Bailey was, as they say, thunder-struck -- or was it more like being hit by lightning? The audience went wild, clapping as Nigel Farage continued with a diatribe against bankers who charged 20 per cent on loans and only provided interest of one per cent on people’s savings. I have no idea if these figures are accurate, but again the audience went wild, some of them standing up as though in an ovation for a reborn Maria Callas –no, sorry, wrong allusion -- these were presumably an audience that identified with working class cost-of-living angst.

The applause went on for three minutes. Fiona tried to ask for calm, but like King Canute…

She turned to Nigel and asked him what he would do, as Nigel rose from his seat and pointed an accusing finger in Mr Bailey’s face.

Through the hubbub, Nigel addressed the microphone saying that he would tell the public what all bankers wanted to keep secret, and that was the absolutely legal way of investing £250 in an Artificial Intelligence investment outlet which worked the stock markets to increase the investment by guaranteed leaps and bounds. He provided the name of the AI investment portal and quoted figures of the gains people he had researched had made even in an hour and then in a month.

Mr Bailey muttered some words about Nigel Farage misleading people, but he was obviously flustered. He ripped off his microphone, clutched his papers and walked out, to even louder applause from the audience.

In all Fiona’s fifteen years of conducting the programme, there has been nothing like this. Nothing that she did, apart from not anticipating the antagonism that would inevitably flare up between these two, was reprehensible. She was behaving as presenters do. Nigel Farage’s naming, or numbering -- I don’t understand these things -- of the AI investment portal immediately resulted in millions of viewers accessing it and impelling it through being flooded, to set a 24-hour deadline for new investors.

The few thousands of these new investors may indeed reap the sort of bonanza that Nigel Farage advertised, but then, gentle reader, I’ve also accessed texts and information which say that these AI investment schemes are actually Ponzi schemes, which may pay out at first but then scam and defraud subsequent Investors, whose £250 get swallowed up without any returns. Time will tell?

And what of Mr Farage’s seeming compassionate popular dig contrasting Mr Bailey’s half-a-million pay packet to that of a hard-worked nurse on 24K a year? Fair enough, but Mr Bailey may have retorted that Mr Farage receives literally millions of pounds for his right-wing party from donors and himself earns, apart from his MP’s substantial salary, £1 million from broadcasting on extreme right-wing platforms.

And as for his professed sympathy for the low-income nurse, his Reform Party proposes to defund the tax-funded National Health Service and adopt an insurance-based system. Will that really help the cost-of-living sufferers, or even the nurse? Will the Pope soon convert to Zoroastrianism?