My night with White Dee – and Channel 5’s Big Benefits Row

What do you get if you mix the Jeremy Kyle show with Question Time? Channel 5 tried to find out this evening in a one-off debate about welfare called the Big Benefits Row.  I was one of the 25 – yes, 25 – guests they asked along. Matthew Wright tried to keep the order, and the debate ranged (or, rather, raged) from the morality of benefits for immigrants to high MTR rates for welfare. It was more of a verbal explosion than a debate – you’d have working single mums screaming (‘give me a job, innit!’) at benefit-dependent single mum. Edwina Currie baiting the lefties, with visible enjoyment. Even a mini protest (‘every mum’s a working mum’) and Katie Hopkins who, with her ‘they’re all scroungers!’ message, wound up the audience perfectly. And Jack Monroe, her of the austerity recipe fame, who was admonished for using the f-word. It was kind of political panto.