Caroline Lucas on Question Time

Our Caroline sparkled on Question Time last night, getting several rounds of heartfelt applause.

One recurrent theme from the audience was the abysmal coverage of the European Elections. It really is totally unacceptable, compared with the obsessive coverage of the American Presidential elections, in which we have no vote whatsoever. What is going on in the minds of the programmers to come up with such a massive imbalance? Nothing, I suspect. Nobody home. Lights out. On autopilot.

Of course, Caroline could not say that, because you become a non-person if you dare to criticise the media. But it is true nevertheless, and blogosphere is the right and only place to do it.

The last question was a gift for Caroline "What real choice do we have between the morally corrupt parties and the BNP?". Unfortunately, Caroline was left until last, and told by Dimbleby that she had just one minute "without hesitation, repetition or deviation" to answer. Her innate modesty seems to have prevented her from pointing out that she came joint 10th out of 785 MEPs on the OpenEurope Index of MEP's transparency and effectiveness, the greens generally were in the top decile, while Ukip was languishing at the bottom. She spoke for 16.02 seconds, summarising what people were voting for in voting Green, with the Dimbleby making little hurry-up noises. Then he had to witter on, repeating himself, because there was loads of unused time.

We have to get this message about Green probity across. The Green Party put out a press release on this matter yesterday, but I can find no coverage of it in a Google News search today. Again, in their infinite wisdom, the news controllers have decided that the electorate have no need of an objective survey of how MEPs perform.