Last night’s episode of Question Time saw David Dimbleby relocate to Cardiff to join Charlotte Church, Charles Moore, Stephen Crabb, Labour’s Stephen Kinnock and Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood for a Welsh debate.
While questions were raised about the future of Plaid Cymru after a lacklustre election result, the first topic on the agenda touched on whether Jeremy Corbyn could still be Prime Minister now he has said that he would never, ever use a nuclear weapon. With Kinnock struggling to defend Corbyn’s comments while also sticking to his own views supporting nuclear weapons as a deterrent, it fell to Corbynista Church to praise the Labour leader’s comments as ‘commendable’:
‘I think that it’s commendable. I think that if nuclear warfare occurs then you know, you’ve got the start of World War Three, so I actually think it’s a really commendable place to come from to say “no I would not be prepared to destroy hundreds of thousands of people”. Yeah I think it’s a commendable place to come from.’
While her comments were met with polite applause, things took a turn for the worse when the panel were asked whether the UK should rule out airstrikes in Syria.
With both President Assad’s regime and Islamic State held responsible for deaths in the country, Church said we should ask the Syrian people who their real enemy is. She then turned her attention to another Syrian ‘enemy’: climate change:
‘Another interesting thing with Syria actually, lots of people don’t seem to know about it, is there is evidence to suggest that climate change was a big factor in how the Syrian conflict came about, because from 2006-2011 they experienced one of the worst droughts in its history.
This of course meant that there were water shortages and crops weren’t growing so there was a mass migration from rural areas of Syria in the urban centres which put more strain and resources were scarce etc which apparently did contribute to the conflict there today, and so no issue is an island, so I also think we need to look at what we’re doing to the planet and how that might actually cause more conflict in the world.’
With her comments were met with silence from the audience, after the show Church took to Twitter to complain that the hostile crowd did not feel like any Welsh crowd she would recognise:
Can't say I had a ball on question time, that's not a Cardiff/Welsh audience that I would recognise. However thanks for your support twitter
— Charlotte Church (@charlottechurch) October 1, 2015
and the people who dismiss my points out of hand, go do some research- come back to me and we'll have a conversation about "the real world"
— Charlotte Church (@charlottechurch) October 1, 2015
Still, judging by the reaction online from viewers, it wasn’t just the audience inside the studio who took issue with her comments:
https://twitter.com/IanBorrett/status/649720030146469888
Turn over to Question Time. Hear Charlotte Church blaming the Syria war on climate change. Jump out of the window.
— Will Heaven (@WillHeaven) October 1, 2015
https://twitter.com/RyanThomas_94/status/649715440038580228
Mr S suspects she’ll have more luck winning over the People’s Assembly crowd in Manchester this weekend when she heads up to Tory conference as part of an anti-austerity protest.
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