Shelagh Fogarty's powerful takedown of "racist" Question Time rant
21 February 2020, 16:15 | Updated: 21 February 2020, 16:30
Shelagh Fogarty made a passionate statement about the viral clip of a woman's "racist" rant on Question Time.
This comes after the BBC faced criticism for sharing a “racist” and “unhinged” anti-immigration rant from a Question Time audience member on its social media pages.
After playing the clip on air, Shelagh, in a lengthy statement, said: "Some people won't wish to challenge it, it will just strip them and reassure them that actually all their views about Britain sinking and being overwhelmed by migration, and there being no education system to speak of left there being no services left.
"Any serious damage to services that we've seen over the last decade is not to do with immigration. It's to do with austerity and cuts to those services."
Addressing the woman's complaints about different languages being spoken in hospitals Shelagh called it "nonsense".
“We should completely close the borders … enough is enough”
— BBC Question Time (@bbcquestiontime) February 20, 2020
This audience member says the number of people ’flooding in’ to the UK is costing public services too much. #bbcqt pic.twitter.com/T5EshhWqQu
Shelagh said: "Do we want to be a country that leaves tourists to bleed to death on streets when they're injured because they are tourist. I don't think they do? Do we? That's not Britain.
"Certainly not the Britain I recognise or wish to recognise."
She added: "So, the woman had almost everything wrong in what she said. It was all based on fear or antipathy of foreigners. What she said. She may be a very nice lady, but she's afraid of foreigners, clearly. And none of it was correct. Nothing she said was correct."
Shelagh concluded: "So we have to we have to challenge these statements every single time if they have even the whiff of nonsense about them, and pretty much everything that lady said was nonsense. Not at least not true."
You can watch the full clip at the top of this page.
