THERE was a confrontation between two men on Good Morning Britain on ITV yesterday that featured an egotistical attention seeker trying – but failing – to browbeat Scottish Greens MSP Ross Greer.
The 24-year-old occasional National columnist had been taken to task by GMB presenter Piers Morgan over his tweet that Winston Churchill had been a white supremacist mass murderer. The post was a response to Tories yet again lionising the man who died 54 years ago last week. Morgan invited Greer to justify his comment on the programme yesterday morning, and the result was a lightweight contest about a dead man from nearly ancient history that few modern Britons under the age of 30 know or care about.
The discussion rarely got close to examining the real issues about Churchill – largely, it has to be said, due to Morgan’s aping of his hero Donald Trump’s tactic of shouting down his opponent.
Here’s a short account of the spat: Greer got in a dig at Morgan right away, managing to repeat his accusation that Morgan was “honey-glazed gammon” and then made a series of mostly accurate accusations of Churchill’s morally dubious actions – although he missed out Churchill’s conduct during the Tonypandy riots, the Clydeside strikes, and the General Strike itself. Back came Morgan to defend the man who, as he pointed out, was voted the Greatest Briton as he “almost single-handedly through the power of his rhetoric” saved Britain during the war.
Greer pointed out – again, accurately – that it was the soldiers and sailors who won the war and voted Churchill out when they came home. At this point there could have been a serious discussion about why Churchill lost the 1945 election. But Morgan wasn’t having it. Morgan then cheated by bringing on Bob Seely, the Tory MP for the Isle of Wight, whose great, great-uncle served with Churchill. He accused Greer of “eloquent stupidity” and having a “crude misunderstanding of history”.
A long exchange about the Bengal famine followed, during which Morgan quoted from Churchill’s letters seeking help from other leaders to deal with it – that would be letters sent a year after most people had died. Greer needlessly brought up Morgan’s sacking, but made a strong point: “We’re unable to talk about this without people like you, Piers, having a tantrum ... it’s very snowflake of you.”
Ouch, that one hurt, because Morgan finished off by saying: “I find you revolting. What you have said about Winston Churchill and your sneering, smirking performance today as you denigrate this great national icon ... I find you revolting and you offensive. It makes me sick to my stomach.” Thereby making Greer’s point for him. The verdict on the debate is that there was no real exploration of this issue. Why is it that in modern Britain you cannot criticise Winston Churchill or many other historical figures for that matter?
Greer has a viewpoint and defended it well enough but Morgan’s criticism that he had not given a rounded appreciation of Churchill was well made. As for Morgan, I hereby challenge him to a public debate in any forum of his choosing about the use of phone hacking by Daily Mirror staff during his editorship of the newspaper, an activity that has done so much to destroy public trust in journalism.
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