ITV has defended allowing the home secretary to be interviewed by her husband on Good Morning Britain, arguing the exchange was “balanced, fair and duly impartial”.
Yvette Cooper appeared on the breakfast show on Monday morning to defend the government’s response to the continuing riots. She was cross-examined by co-host Ed Balls, a former Labour cabinet minister who is now a regular presenter on the show.
Balls asked his wife: “Can I ask, because we’ve talked about this a few times in the last few days – like many of our viewers will have done at home since those terrible killings in Southport – there have been identifiable individuals on social media who have been inciting not just riots but violence.
“They’ve been using racist language and falsehoods. This is happening on the social media platforms. What should be done by the social media companies and the police and the government to stop this happening? It’s been happening for a week.”
Cooper responded: “Well you’re right, Ed. We have seen things appearing online that are clearly criminal. Social media has put rocket boosters under far-right extremist organisations and also some of the violence we have seen. Things that are criminal offline are also criminal online.”
Cooper, who was taking part in a morning media round in which she appeared on multiple outlets across different broadcasters, was also questioned on Good Morning Britain by Balls’s co-host Kate Garraway.
The issue of politicians hosting current affairs programmes has been highlighted in recent years, after the decision by GB News and the now defunct TalkTV to pay a number of serving Conservative politicians to host shows.
A spokesperson for Good Morning Britain said: “Following a weekend of rioting and national unrest, GMB featured a range of interviews and discussion around this national emergency on today’s programme which included James Cleverly, shadow home secretary, and Yvette Cooper, home secretary. We are satisfied that these interviews were balanced, fair and duly impartial.”
The media regulator, Ofcom, recently looked into the issue of politicians hosting current affairs programmes and concluded that the British public was “instinctively uncomfortable” with it but there was “no clear consensus for an outright ban”.
ITV has argued that the issue is different from GB News’s employment of Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and Lee Anderson because they are serving politicians, while Balls lost his seat in the 2015 general election and has since pursued a media career after a brief stint on Strictly Come Dancing.
Earlier in Monday’s episode, Balls criticised another guest, the leftwing Labour MP Zarah Sultana, for demanding that his wife’s government describe the rioters as “Islamophobic”.
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Balls repeatedly interjected to argue that “Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and Rishi Sunak” had all definitely called the riots “racist” over the weekend.
Sultana said far-right protesters “are telling people like me to go home” and said Labour had contributed to the current culture over recent decades: “If we look at the language used by politicians and the language used by people in the streets, we will see a direct correlation.”
She cited the 2015 general election mugs pledging controls on immigration and an article Balls wrote for the Guardian during his 2010 leadership campaign arguing that the UK had accepted too many immigrants from eastern Europe.
Balls told her: “Well, I was totally right in that article.”
