What Jeremy Vine Learnt, plus Samira Ahmed's Nigelophobia

Someone Samira Ahmed wants to hear less from

This morning's Broadcasting House featured an opinion piece from Jeremy Vine (brother of comedian Tim Vine) based a book he's going to publish next year called What I Learnt: What My Listeners Say - and Why We Should Take Notice. 

Jeremy's argument was that the views of you and I are more valuable than those of experts. Experts have disgraced themselves over everything from diesel in cars, to fat 'making us fat', to the financial crash of 2008; indeed, they've done serious harm. He'd rather hear first-hand accounts from the man and woman in the street than listen to experts, as the people have a wisdom derived from lived experience. He'd rather hear from the astronaut than the astronomer. "An expert in parenting is a mother of five. An expert in Lyme Disease is someone who's had it for five years. An expert in ladders if someone who's fallen off  one." This is the future, he said.

Well, well! Jeremy Vine the Populist!

What followed was a lively discussion between expertophile Samira Ahmed of the BBC's Newswatch (who disagreed strongly with Jeremy) and expertosceptic Toby Baxendale of the Legatum Institute (who thought there was some truth in his argument). It's well worth a listen.

Incidentally, in the course of this discussion, Samira mounted one of her favourite hobby-horses again. Citing "viewers", she said, "They'll challenge, 'Why does Nigel Farage get on so often?'".

Now, as regular readers will know (see here and here and here and here and here), that's also Samira's own view, expressed umpteen times on Twitter over the past year or more. She doesn't believe it's "responsible" of the BBC to give him such airtime.

The discussion ended:

Samira Ahmed: What really worries me as a person listening to the audience is how often it's the same privileged people who are pushing their personal point of view. That's not expertise, and that's not experience either. Nigel Farage is not the experience of the nation. 

Paddy O'Connell: No. I think that is probably...no one is going to write to disagree with you there. Thank you very much indeed, both of you. 

Does anyone fancy proving Paddy wrong and writing to suggest that the man who led a often lonely-seeming campaign to get us a referendum on the UK's EU membership and whose apparently unpopular cause eventually received the support of 52% of the UK population (17.4 million people) might just perhaps reflect more of 'the experience of the nation' than, say, Samira Ahmed?