Nigel Farage will appear on Question Time on Thursday evening as the Reform UK man – who is not standing in the general election – returns to the show for his 36th appearance.
Fiona Bruce will present the hour debate from Epsom in Surrey with guests lined up for the show including Tory MP Damian Hinds, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, Rose Hudson-Wilkin and Piers Morgan.
Farage will also be making an appearance, prompting an outraged response on social media.
The Reform honorary president, who has declined to stand as an MP in favour of helping Donald Trump out in America, launched his party’s campaign at a yacht club on the Kent seafront on Tuesday, which he described as the “frontline of the great national debate on immigration”.
His latest appearance on Question Time has prompted questions over “massively unbalanced” panels, which are often bereft of left-wing voices.
Figures collected by author Steve Paxton for 2022 showed a significant bias towards right-wing panellists from media outlets, as well as for politicians not elected to Westminster, Holyrood, or the Senedd.
Paxton wrote at the time: “Twenty-three appearances for right-wing media, but only two for the left. Fifteen employers but only five representatives of employees. A single Green MP, but two appearances for a politician who was paid £20k a month by a fossil fuel company while he was an MP [Nadhim Zahawi].
“It’s pretty difficult to reconcile these with the idea that the BBC’s flagship political debate programme retains any semblance of balance.”
In 2017, research revealed right-wing party Ukip appeared on almost one in four of the BBC’s flagship Question Time programmes in seven years prior – despite never having more than two MPs.
Huff Post UK analysis of the the 258 regular Question Time shows since May 6 2010 shows the anti-EU party had a representative on 24 per cent of the programmes.
