I give the BBC stick quite a lot of the time, but I will always give credit where it is due, and it is due to the BBC trust this evening. They have decided that the BNP will appear on Question Time, I believe it is right a proper course of action for a party that holds two seats in the European Parliament and polled around a million votes in the recent election.
Usual and predictable caveat. Snowolf does not support the BNP and holds only one of their policies close to his heart, to get the UK out of the EU. Although I suspect we approach that conclusion from different angles.
I do not support the Labour party, nor the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats or the Green Party, but I understand that they have a role to play on a political discussion programme.
Again, as I've pointed out time and again, the only way to ensure the BNP go precisely nowhere (beyond actually representing and speaking for the people you claim to represent) is to give them every single opportunity to espouse their nonsense. People aren't stupid, they'll see them for what they are.
Peter Hain's protestations about them not being a legally constituted party were a right chuckle and hold very little water.
Personally, as far as I'm concerned, it is their party and they can have whatever rules they want, they can restrict membership to whites only, to men only, to married men only, to married white men aged 48 called Nigel and working as greengrocers only if they want. I don't care.
Whether they are 'legally constituted' or not really doesn't bother me, and it doesn't seem to be a condition of entry on to the panel of QT either. If it were, Ian Hislop, Janet Street-Parker, Him out of Blur and the Chakrabati woman wouldn't be able to go on either, they are not legally constituted parties, and no-one has ever voted for them.
Still, what's to stop the BNP from trotting out the same excuses given by the Labour politicians? They could have said it was a technical breach of the law, in the style of Baroness Scotland. They could have claimed that everyone knows who they are, so what's the problem? Like Harridan Harperson. They could have claimed it was an oversight or an error, like countless MPs. No-one would have believed them, but that doesn't seem to bother the others.
No, the BNP admitted that this was the case, and Nick Griffin gave an undertaking to rectify the situation. From where I'm sitting, and as reprehensible as he is, that puts him way ahead of a large number of other elected representatives, and maybe makes him less reprehensible than them. It is not only views which marks a person out, it is their actions and the way they conduct themselves.
I don't like them, but accept that until things change in this country, they are here to stay. I can deal with that, it would appear that many others cannot, and they would stamp out a corner of democracy in the name of the same.
For shame.
1 comment:
I am not sure who came out the winner on this. Griffin often looked rattled and stumbled through it quite badly. With the whole panel and Dimbleby against him, together with a fairly partisan audience it looked like a score draw or a narrow defeat for Griffin. They did succeed in exposing his suspect past and had him on the ropes a few times. However I suspect there are a lot of labour supporters who will view him as the underdog now.
Baroness Warsi should get the prize for the most fatuous remark when she claimed there was no such thing as a bogus asylum seeker.
Overall Straw came off worse I felt. Bumbling through the issue of the Labour's record on immigration. Huhne came across as a complete Hoon when he highlighted the difference between the governments claim of 13,000 East Europeans vs the hundreds of thousands who actually turned up. I wanted to scream hypocrite. How does the Liberal policy differ from Labour on Europe? You couldn't get a fag paper between them.
Overall the winner I suppose is freedom of speech.
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