Yahoo News The Londoner: Broadcasters blasted for migrant ‘rubbernecking’
Broadcasters’ coverage of attempted migrant crossings in the Channel has been “deeply unethical and dehumanising”, according to a leading immigration charity, as one MP told us “the waving and gawping with cameras helps no one”.
“Journalists shouldn’t be making a spectacle out of people’s trauma,” Minnie Rahman of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants told The Londoner, adding “they should be asking why people have to risk their lives to seek refuge in the UK and why the government won’t step up and provide safe and alternative routes for people seeking asylum.” Neil Coyle, the Labour MP for Bermondsey, also hit out at “the hideous rubbernecking of journalists in boats making the refugees’ journeys even more perilous”.
TV reports in recent days on the BBC and Sky News have featured reporters in boats tracking and interviewing migrants as they cross the world’s busiest shipping lane in dinghies. A BBC spokesman said Simon Jones's report (pictured above) “was a stark illustration of the significant risks some people are prepared to take to reach the UK ... we always endeavour to cover the story sensitively.” Sky have been contacted for comment.
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Sadiq Khan should be using “creative or positive thinking” to save London’s restaurant industry, says St John owner Trevor Gulliver. Suggesting a suspension of the congestion charge and free public transport, as well as stricter policing of social distancing to make people feel safe, Gulliver tells us City Hall has been “sitting on its hands”. Gulliver thinks City Hall should use celebrity endorsements to get people eating out at the weekends, to supplement Rishi Sunak’s food vouchers early in the week. He told us: “The actors are out of work — they will come and stand on a barge and make a noise.” Singing for someone else’s supper.
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Peter Morgan (above) has a real way with words. The Crown creator praises Olivia Colman’s “everywoman quality”, which he says meant she could play the Queen well. In an interview with IndieWire Morgan then described Her Majesty herself as “the woman at the bus stop” despite being "the grandest person in the country" and later called Colman “a four-quadrant connectability woman.” Maybe stick to “everywoman”.
SW1A
Boris Johnson may emerge from his two-week Scottish holiday (starting this weekend) as an EU federalist. The PM is taking Professor Brendan Simms’s book Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Co-operation on his break. Simms tells us the lessons he hopes will be learned: “I hope he will learn also the necessity to concentrate not only on Britain’s future relationship with the continent... but also the need to think about how it thinks the EU should evolve (in my view into a full political union)” Simms told us. He addded: “Some sort of new bespoke Confederation with Europe is required to reflect Britain’s role”. Not another European battle...
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John Nicolson MP (above left, with his party leader Nicola Sturgeon), whose broken garden chair we reported on earlier in the week, tells us that while he may not actually be starting a diet as he joked, he’s “definitely getting a new chair”. “The collapsed one is really ancient and it was an accident waiting to happen,” he says. “What’s annoying is that it happened to me rather than a guest or my partner which, obviously, I’d have found infinitely funnier.”
Ronnie rolls out 100 artworks for show
ROLLING Stone Ronnie Wood posed in front of his work The Show, which features in an exhibition of nearly 100 of his artworks at Ashridge House, including some painted during lockdown. Rapper Dave enjoyed his time in Dubai, DJ Edith Bowman showed off post-river swim hair, and Nicole Scherzinger took a time out paddle-boarding. Blissful.
