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News Xchange 2002: Session Transcripts
11 october 2002
Session 6:
Broadcasters and the Populist Far Right: Do broadcasters act responsibly in its coverage or reinforce stereotypes?
How does broadcast journalism cover alienated citizens who are now supporting extremist political parties throughout Europe? Is there a danger that extremist leaders pandering to alienated viewers get uncritical coverage? What responsibilities do broadcasters have to protect shared values and at the same time remain fair and balanced and open to the voices of minorities and outsiders? We also examine the explosive issue of the coverage of asylum seekers.
Case studies from the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, France, and UK will be offered.
Chair: Milica Pesic, Media Diversity Institute
Producer: Media Diversity Institute
Confirmed Participants:
• Marieke de Vries, Reporter, Voice of Holland, SBS6 Netherlands
• Rod Liddle, former Editor, The Today Programme, BBC Radio 4 (via satellite)
• Ulla Terkelsen, Chief Foreign Correspondent, TV2 Denmark
• Sheikh Abu Hamzah al-Masri, Finsbury Park Mosque, UK (pre-taped interview)
TRANSCRIPT:
Milica Pesic (MP): Good afternoon and welcome to session 6 of the News Xchange about broadcasters and the populist far right. Before we go to the panel and the questions I’d just like to say that the success of this session depends on you the audience, I would like to encourage all of you to take part in this discussion to share your dilemmas and questions with us. So our first two questions are do broadcasters fear that they may become a platform for extremist views? And then hoe important do they think the picture coming from TV is? We all know that there is a difference between the picture in the newspaper and the picture coming from TV and if the panelists don’t mind I’d like to ask this question first of Rod Liddle.
Rod Liddle (RL): Are you asking about the power of TV, which one do you want me to answer first? The extremist views I can deal with very quickly, of course broadcasters will occasionally appear to be a conduit through which extremist views are broadcast but we’re there to mediate, to question and to cross examine. And I think it’s extraordinarily presumptuous, even the question is presumptuous to be honest that we should decide what is extremist, that we decide whether things appear or don’t appear because of some imagined political antipathy we might have to them.
MP: But what about maybe becoming a platform for extremist views?
RL: I don’t understand the question to be honest, of course we’re journalists and we have to report what happens, if there’s a political party that appears to have extremist views or views that you Milica or the audience might consider to be extremist we still have a duty to cover it and indeed to expose whatever those views are we certainly shouldn’t be taking it upon ourselves to censor it because we might find their views antipathetic to our own.
MP: Thank you Rod, I’d like our panelists, Ulla?
 Ulla Terkelsen (UT): I agree entirely, I don’t find any problem reporting on this people, I think you go ahead and report on these people and these movements, they are the sort of Roy Keanes of international politics, they’re trouble-makers, they do things we don’t expect them to do, they are not like men in European institutions who dress up nice and talk in flowery language that we don’t understand, even if we know the language. So I think they are a refreshing element. I also think that they represent a lot of our viewers and readers, I think if you look at the figures about 30% of people in Austria voted for Heider, about 27% voted for Pym in Denmark Piet(?) as she’s called has one of the biggest parties and her party is now one of the supporting parties to the government, and so on, we all know how well Le Pen did. Our viewers vote for these people and it is not up to us to judge that in any way and I think it’s a very dangerous way of seeing yourself as a journalist. Apart from that they pose a lot of questions these people that a lot of our viewers and maybe some of us feel are not being answered. They ask whether immigration is on a level they like, they ask about globalisation, they’re afraid of jobs and the European Union. So I think it would be a total disaster for our profession if we handle them in a different way to the one in which we handle Mr Blair or whatever. You can say that they are extremists but most of all they are realists and that is why they appeal to so many people, Pym’s party was our second largest party at our last election in Holland and that was because of his realistic views. We’ve been governed for almost 16 years by a left party or a middle party with a left wing coalition. Its been 16 years and people got fed up with it because problems like integration problems and problems with ghettos that were being formed in the big cities, they were just not being discussed by left wing parties. You couldn’t discuss it or you were being called a right extremist or a racist. That’s what Fortuyn did and Pier maybe did, they put it out in the open for people to discuss it and give it a platform even. To keep it open so that people didn’t just discuss it front of the TV instead of out there in politics. They’re realists I don’t know that we should label them extreme right wing politicians.
Patrick Lecocq (PLC): (Mr. LeCocq's comments were made in french, and unfortunately we are unable to provide the translation.)
MP: In which way are you accused of preparing ground for these parties?
PLC: (Mr. LeCocq's comments were made in french, and unfortunately we are unable to provide the translation.)
MP: Thank you, I hope that Rod still has time just to see the interview we did with Sheik Abu Hamzah al-Masri.
RL: Always a pleasure to hear Sheikh Abu Hamzah.
Sheikh Abu Hamzah (SAH): I think the media in the west and especially in Britain has been really unfair to Muslims, I’m not talking about the media in America, that’s really been aggressive against Muslims. I’m talking about how Britain has not been tackling the Islamic issues and the so called war against terror properly and objectively, in a way they do not allow people who have a deep understanding of Al Qaeda warfare and where they come from or of Jihadi groups. They don’t really allow them to speak out properly and they always interfere and they always have censored interviews and if they take a risk to interview us live then basically they jump up and down and down and don't even give us 20 seconds to put our points across. Which I think is bad because they have a moral responsibility to the audience those who pay the license. And lately the response from the public has been really good for us in a way because they feel they’ve been deceived by the whole media they have found a lot of information which they have not been given through Al Jazeera and the internet and Islamic groups and neutrals. So it did help in a way that politicians decisions and the media warfare against terror hasn’t had that effect on the British audience because they have lost faith in their media. I would love if the media showed some more transparency and neutralism and professional journalism in the way that they talk and they discuss the point for two reasons, one if we are wrong then (???) and if we are right then truth has the sweet and importance in people’s minds and hearts and it should be tackled. So I think in the future the media will be more aggressive against Islam and Muslims and that will give us some difficult times as individuals but it will give Islam as a religion a lot of gravity and people will more interested to learn about Islam and this is what we call potential future Muslims.
 RL: I agree with almost nothing Sheikh Abu Hamzah believes in either politically or religiously but on this point he is absolutely right and he’s right for a number of reasons. The British government and a large proportion of the British media finds it expedient to believe that Sheikh Abu Hamzah’s views are of a tiny minority within the country and time and again that’s proved wrong. Shortly after 9/11 last year Britain’s Muslim leaders were gathered together and made various statements that they agreed with the war on terror, British Muslims were behind the war on terror, all the time Sheikh Abu Hamzah was saying well actually they’re not. And various opinion polls that came out shortly after then made it clear that British Muslims were opposed to the war on terror by an overwhelming majority. But it was thought not very nice to know that at the time and this is one of the reasons why Sheikh Abu Hamzah wasn’t really kept off tv or radio or out of the press, there were calls for him to be arrested he was stopped from preaching at his local mosque and the charity commissioners withdrew his status as an Imam and he was pretty much hounded and vilified, absolutely no question about it. I can’t abide the man but I don’t feel that I have the right not to represent his point of view on the Today Programme which we did.
MP: Generally you would air these kinds of thoughts or statements?
RL: Why would you not?
MP: The president of the BNP said at the Cambridge event that he wanted to be on air and then once he is heard the audience can destroy him or his opinions
RL: I think the premise for all these questions is that in some way the audience is stupid and that if we allow them to be polluted by the views of the BNP or Sheikh Abu Hamzah, they are in some way more stupid than we are and cannot decide that these views are wrong, that these views are repellent or that these views are good. They’re not allowed to make up their own minds. I find it an extraordinarily presumptuous and arrogant question.
MP: What about the public would they agree?
RL: Every time we put Sheikh Abu Hamzah on air ten or 20 people ring up and say don’t put him on air we don’t want to hear him - so turn off then! Similarly the BNP, there’s always a group of people who don’t just disagree with what somebody’s saying but actually deny them the right to be allowed say it, there’ll always be some people like that but I think the vast majority of the audience are capable of listening and making up their own minds.
MP: Thank you Rod if you have something to say which you think is important because unfortunately we can’t have you until the end of the programme.
RL: Very briefly I do think there’s a growing tendency to stop people saying things and to object to not only what they’re saying but to their right to say it at all. We’ve certainly seen it across Europe with the parties that you refer to as the far right parties or populist parties, I’m not sure they are far right parties and we see it in our country as well. That this liberal hegemony in Europe actually reacts in a very illiberal way indeed when views that come from the outside such as radical Islam or on the other side radical populist policies. It reacts very illiberally indeed and tries to stop people putting these views across and I’d be very interested to hear what your panel makes of that?
MP: We’ll let you know when we come back to London, thank you very much for joining us.
 UT: Well I agree entirely with what he has said and it would be against everything that our profession stands for to decide that such and such views should not be aired. And another thing that I agree with is saying whether these people are right wing populists or not. They’re very different, sexually very different, Pym was a very committed very loud homosexual, Pier was a girl, and I don’t know what Heider or Le Pen are. But also they’re very different on very basic views, somebody like Pym was known as a very pro-Israeli politician very staunch in his defence of Israel. Heider cannot in any way be described as pro-Israel or pro-Jewish he has a silly tendency of always teasing the chairman of the Austrian Jews and so he’s different. You have Pier in Denmark who’s very strong on helping old people an old left wing cause. They’re very varied political points so this whole idea of calling them right-wingers I think is very wrong. They’re people who go outside of the established political parties and say what the established political parties don’t say and this is why they get support. Then they have rather hideous habits, of course they appeal to the under-belly of our political awareness rather than the head, they say what they think people like and so on. But the rejection of them by the established political parties is dangerous and I think if we media jump on to that then I think we’re wrong. Also I find it quite exciting covering these things and it’s not because I have some obscene attraction to political movements on the sides but they raise some moral questions and it’s more interesting to cover that than some EU meeting where they discuss details of agricultural policy, desperate things.
MP: I’d be interested to hear what Marieke and Patrick Lecocq have to say and also whether there’s anybody in the audience that disagrees with Rod?
Marieke De Vries (MDV): What we should remind ourselves of is that journalists for the most part vote for the left wing parties, in Holland there’s been research, 92% of journalists vote red or green and we shouldn’t impose our political preferences on a public which we have to serve. If the majority of the Dutch people feels attracted to Pym Fortyn then we have to research where that comes from, we have to research who this man is and what he’s saying, why is he saying that what are his motives. Why do people really want to listen to him. And what I also noticed when I was doing a lot of reports on him I was also working on a documentary about him was that my colleague journalists were attacking me for doing that, and I think that shows some weakness, your piece is as good as you yourself as a journalist are, if you show this man the way he is, go to the bottom of his case, you go to the bottom of his motives then you show an objective piece. It’s so strange to see journalists go into some sort of a cramp when populist parties arise, they are phenomenons in our societies, if there’s another phenomenon in our society we treat them as the way it is so we should do it with these parties as well.
PLC: (Mr. LeCocq's comments were made in french, and unfortunately we are unable to provide the translation.)
MP: Just to correct Sheikh Abu Hamzah Al-Masri is not representative of British Muslims he is a just a fundamentalist cleric. If there is now someone in the audience who disagrees with what we heard from London?
Unidentified speaker from Norway: I believe that for broadcasters and for some of us public broadcasters we do have some basic values that we ought to defend, we should be unbiased and professional but for instance democracy, human rights, anti-racism are values that we should defend and yes we should let all voices be heard but in order to let them be exposed and we should defend the basic values and if Christianity or a branch of Christianity are intolerant we should expose that, if a branch of Islam is intolerant we should expose that. Unbiased and professional but not without any values.
Unidentified Indian speaker: We cannot go on treating these things like a phenomenon because a very dangerous pattern is emerging, not just in Great Britain. Even in a country like India where as a result of September 11 we are seeing a Hindu backlash and it’s one thing to treat it as a phenomenon, Hitler was also a phenomenon he led us to a disaster in world war and these things are now appearing and unless the media holds them in a full responsible way it’s one thing to report but another to expose it. And expose it in such a way that it doesn’t hurt the basic values of our democracy, our civilisation and human rights. We are heading toward a very serious situation as things stand.
MP: We’ll see now the piece produced by Ulla on Jorg Heider and I would like Ulla to do a little introduction and then we’ll talk after actually.
UT: We covered intensively the struggle between the EU and the Austrian political system basically, there was an election in Austria and Heider’s party got 30% of the vote and with the ruling People’s Party they had they had the majority they started parliamentary negotiations to possibly form a government and when those negotiations started there was a threat of boycott by the EU.
(runs video footage)
UT: This is an example of that situation, and the reason we picked that was because of the political correctness personified by the EU throwing themselves over Austria and that of course meant that the two sides that were negotiating found themselves much faster than they would have done and they were able to form a govt. After this the EU looked into whether it was right and proper to introduce that boycott and then they found out that there was nothing illegal happening there was no threat to human rights and this government was allowed to go on governing. It was a big story because as you know the Danes have a very critical attitude towards the EU and they were always being told don’t worry about it it’s not threat to parliamentary democracy to join the EU and then they said “Ah what about Austria?”, so this was a sort of test case of political correctness vis a vis a country where a lot of the citizens voted for this man whether we think he’s disgusting or not.
(runs video footage)
MP: Since then Denmark has introduced one of the toughest laws regarding foreigners and maybe that’s one of the questions we can discuss here immigrants badly needed in Europe but somehow with all these populist leaders coming in on this “no foreigners” approach so maybe w can ask the other Ulla how Pier is received in Denmark and how popular is she and what is the reaction of the viewers in Denmark?
Ulla Pors Nielsen (UPN): It’s all gone from where her and her party were the odd people in Danish politics and we covered them and the former prime minister said that you couldn’t really be in the same room as them and that’s just a few years ago and now they are one of the main parties deciding whether the government’s policies come to anything or not. So they have definitely become somebody that Danish politicians want to be in the sane room as the governing parties would prefer to be with them all the time basically. They have become a very prominent voice they are the ones that decide whether a thing will fall or stand in Danish politics. So it has changed a lot and one funny thing, they tried to be very provocative, they printed ads all the time trying to be provocative with populist views but know they can’t really do that so they have started provoking Sweden instead putting ads in Swedish newspapers to tell the Swedes hoe they have problems that they don’t realise. So they ‘ve gone from being a party that we had to cover every time they had a provocation in the newspapers to being a party that we have to take very seriously and they are not as odd as they used to.
MP: I’ll just what Pier also said recently, “Asylum seekers are often undereducated and illiterate, I don’t need them. Muslims have a taste for committing mass rape.” Maybe we can ask here Patrick about Le Pen and the message that he sends.
PLC: (Mr. LeCocq's comments were made in french, and unfortunately we are unable to provide the translation.)
MP: But Europe does need labour and Xavier Collin from French speaking TV Switzerland I guess would have similar views?
 Xavier Collin (XC): Yes but first of all I remark I love to watch TV and see interviews with people who say they are denied access to TV and this is true for a lot of populist leaders and this true for a lot of Muslim leaders whichever movement they represent. This is very hypercritical, I believe that all of us people here are doing a lot to open, this is our responsibility. And my second remark is, I’m happy to see that most of the members of the panel agree that our responsibility is to cover the far right I would hate to see people here as I have heard sometimes in my own newsroom that we should remain silent. The journalists that do that do not feel too happy about the far right these days are the ones who have consciously decided that they will ignore and the ones that feel good are the ones that did the story. One story we did on Le Pen was, most of his followers say if we could kick all the foreigners and asylum seekers out of the country then there would be no unemployment. Well that is a good story because it is just not true, so I was amazed covering the French elections with a Swiss crew, amazed at two things, one is that Le Pen was not denied access to TV, by law he was not but most of his followers were. And as a Swiss team when we went to little villages in France to interviews people that said they would vote for Le Pen they would tell us because we were Swiss that French TV would never come and ask them questions, whether that was true or not I leave it to them but they were happy to talk to us and not only because Le Pen has most of his money in Geneva. The second remark is we need some guidelines dealing with extremists there is one law and us journalists usually do not like laws that apply to our work and might jeopardize our chances to do whatever coverage we might want to do. But there is one law against discrimination it goes for everyone politicians, foreigners staying in Switzerland and for journalists. You cannot publicly state your hatred toward a community and this is really interesting because it does affect the way we can work if ever we had an interview of Le Pen saying what he used to say but doesn’t say anymore now, “Hitler didn’t kill enough Jews during the war” we would not be able to broadcast this interview. Whether he would say that on a live programme remains his responsibility. But that goes pretty far, we have had many Romanian gypsies trying to get into Switzerland lately, mainly coming from France, France rejected them so they try to get to Switzerland and to the Swiss people they are an amazement, who are they? Where do they come from? We went to Romania to find out where do they come from? Are they unhappy? Are they being persecuted? Is there a chance that they will be killed if they go back? And the only interview we could come up with was Romanian people talking about gypsies saying Hitler didn’t kill enough of them. We were not able to broadcast that interview. So sometimes the law is a burden sometimes it helps in telling how far we can go.
MP: Romania is very well known for the Roma living there and even though the authorities are trying to help, no one knows the official numbers they’re still the most vulnerable group not only in Romania but in western Europe as well
XC: Can I just quickly say something about asylum seekers, most of the Swiss people were impressed by our story that yes of course most of these people are poor, unhappy, probably discriminated against but yes they could go back home without being killed. So in other words the mere fact that we could go there meant that it probably helped the government too, that was not our wish, it helped the government make sure those people left the country.
MP: (question unintelligible)
XC: Absolutely look at the Kosovo war, at one point in Switzerland we had more Kosovars than there were Serbs in Kosovo and all the stories by all of you people and by us Swiss TV absolutely showed that if those people were forced to go back would absolutely jeopardise their lives and the lives of their own families.
MP: That was a time when Geneva was the biggest Albanian city after Pristina. Ulla would like to add something.
UT: The reason they threw themselves at Austria was I think because of what Heider said in Germany because if you look at the extraordinarily clicheed treatment that I still think you have in the English speaking world against Germany and Austria it’s extraordinary. And I think when the EU picked Austria they thought they could get away with it and because Heider had a terrible past, his parents were Nazis but lots of people who live in these countries have Nazi parents, you can’t kill your parents. And he also of course devious and he has a titillating ludicrous relationship with all of that stuff, so when the EU did that they said we’ll take a German speaking country and we’ll get away with it and I thought that was obscene in a way.
MP: As I said at the beginning Marieke de Vries has produced lots of stuff on Pym Fortuyn, some of it when he was still alive and this is maybe a moment to see the first story and then ask Marieke to tell us a couple of stories and the most important is the question about him while she was doing the programme about him which looks morbid now we know what happened meanwhile. And then to answer the question Ulla raised about whether we become obsessed with this characters/
(runs video footage)
MDV: That was Pym at his best, this was his big point. His message here was that there’s a big problem especially in the big cities and that the Turkish and Moroccan women don’t speak Dutch, therefore they stay in their houses and cannot go out and be emancipated like Dutch women which they have become, they have Dutch nationality but they cannot do that because they don’t speak Dutch and that keeps on going because 75% of Turkish and Moroccan men go to their own countries to get their brides. What was very provocative here and was very provocative in his whole campaign was that he kept calling the Islamic culture a backward culture and he even went as far as to say that he wanted to eliminate Article One of our constitution which is the article which forbids discrimination and he wanted to eliminate that to save freedom of speech and he was front man of Liberal Netherlands at that time and they threw him out and that’s when he formed his own party which grew to be the second largest in our country.
(runs video footage)
MDV: Can I just add something to this piece because otherwise people would think “wow” I’ve put him on a pedestal or something. This interview was done on May 1 and he was shot on May 6 so it was five days before his death and this was a documentary we were already making and we broadcast it the day after he died. Of course it was a completely different documentary than we set out to do because we couldn’t have included his big political enemies as well so it was more of a personal portrait like an in memoriam of a man that changed our political landscape in only seven months, the music you heard was Mozart’s Requiem which was his favourite music.
MP: He is still a phenomenon in the Netherlands and I wanted to point out that he wrote 40 books and all his books are now bestsellers in the Netherlands.
PLC: (Mr. LeCocq's comments were made in french, and unfortunately we are unable to provide the translation.)
MP: Well we are talking here about what media can do to slow down that process or change it. When I said that Europe needs immigrants I was referring to the article that appeared in The Times the same day the report on Pier Tjalgaard criticising asylum seekers, foreigners coming to Denmark, at the same time the EU report says that Europe is missing immigrants.
PLC: (Mr. LeCocq's comments were made in french, and unfortunately we are unable to provide the translation.)
UT: But we are having a discussion about how we as journalists can prevent that and you take some quotes, this is not the discussion I’m participating in I don’t think it’s the role of journalists to prevent people from expressing unease at the change in their environment all the things our French colleague has just been talking about I don’t think it’s our role to warn people “watch out take care these people are idiots” because that’s not our work our work is to describe it
MP: This is happening as well because the European market needs labour so maybe this is not such an attractive topic as Heider or Pym but this is happening and this is something that we journalists should report. Do we have anybody from the audience?
Unidentified Spanish audience member: Speaking French
Nik Gowing: I think we’re in danger of falling into our own trap here Patrick is still talking about Pym Fortuyn as a far right party it’s neither extreme or to the right it’s actually much closer to the centre it is a party of disaffection it’s not a party of the extreme right. I was very struck having been in the Netherlands in the period just after he was killed standing talking to many left-wingers who admired Pym Fortuyn, I remember being on air as well, it was a public holiday in Britain when he was murdered at Hilversuum and I think that all of us that are not Dutch stand guilty of very too readily calling him a far right politician. We fell into our own trap and I think that we should now accept that probably we were trying to stereotype in a way that was totally inappropriate particularly as he did so well in the elections in Rotterdam. And I’m just using this as an example because I think it’s wrong to keep talking about these extreme right parties right across Europe, there are so many dis-similarities, what we were talking about in the Netherlands was disaffection with a political system admitted by the politicians of both left and right which is why there’s been such a massive shock in the Netherlands by the success of Pym Fortuyn. So we’re wrong even today to be talking about extreme right we should be talking about something rather different which is similar to what we were talking about in the first session today about political parties and the way we’re reflecting politics and the way people are losing touch via us the broadcasters. I’m trying to join up a few dots here because it strikes me we can throw this forward as indeed we did three weeks in Germany when Schroeder actually got re-elected by invoking the issue of Iraq which was not central to the debate in Germany but actually about the economy.
UT: I agree with you entirely, I think we are not good journalists if we say they are all the same when they are obviously so different and have different reason from country to country and we are poor journalists if simply say they are right wingers and should not be put on tv. And I think we have to be thinking about the debate this morning how difficult it is to make parliamentary politics attractive in our news bulletins. It is exactly for those reasons that these parties emerge and there’s a sort of connection and I think it’s important that we as journalists go into that dilemma and are active in this and explaining why these people pop up.
MDV: That trap that you are describing is very realistic. What happened in Holland after the murder was that people turned their backs against journalism, the people in the streets don’t want to talk to journalists anymore they don’t trust them anymore. They accuse us of being manipulative and even now when the suspect for the murder is going to trial in December people don't want edited pieces on that, they are screaming for live cameras in the court which has never happened before in Holland it’s not like America. Now they are demonstrating because they do not trust journalists anymore.
MP: When you covered the exhumation what was the audience compared to the normal audience for your show?
MDV: There was 1.5 million people watching and normally much less, I don’t know the figure.
Lysette Pjulson: I come from Danish TV and Pier Tjalgaard the chairman of the Danish People’s Party that we have been discussing and her party has appointed a member of the board of my company as a spin doctor and as a result I have discussed quite a lot with the spin doctor and the party what they stand for and I quite agree with the point of view that we make a big mistake if we put all these parties in a box labeled “far-right” because most of the policies say in Denmark is hardly social democratic party, so we are mistaken if we label all these parties “far-right”. I think the media is part of the problem here because the disillusioned people who are voting for, for instance Pier Tjalgaard(?), are people who are against the Common Market and against globalisation, who try to stop the technical revolution, they think that the media don’t have their voice anymore that we are in another world and we don’t understand what they are telling us. I think we have produced a politically correct journalism that is part of the problem here and we should start listening to what is going on in all these movements around Europe. Listening in another way not the politically correct way that we as journalists often do. We are creating some of the problems here I think.
MP: There is one interesting question, when you get so close to the object of your story can you still be unbiased?
Unidentified woman: I just wanted raise another point. We don’t have in Ireland any of these far-right parties as such but we do have a referendum on the Nice Treaty which you all know about and having listened to some of the discussions here today I just sense that part of the disaffection with conventional politics is not being channeled into a far right party in my country but it is being channeled into this. It gives people an opportunity for people to express disaffection with all sorts of things in the political system and they find a useful locus for it in something like the Nice Treaty referendum. And I know if some of the other countries had referenda they might be facing the same issues that we are in Ireland.
UT: But in Ireland you have Sinn Fein, wouldn’t they play that part?
Unidentified person in audience: Yes there is some of that because in our last election even though there was dissatisfaction with the ruling party they still got back in power because of the failure of the opposition to capitalise on that, the vote went into Sinn Fein and it went into small independents it hasn’t yet formed into something like the parties we’ve been talking about today to provide a focus for it.
MP: Ulla reminded me when she mentioned Sinn Fein, what about Belgian TV does when covering Phillipe Bermed(?) they just cover what he says inside the parliament not what he says outside is that a solution?
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