Time to Get the BNP Out of the Closet
Sooo… the BNP are going on Question Time are they? That should be interesting.
I know there’s been some complaining from Anti-Fascism sorts and other parties about this ‘legitimising’ the party in some sense by actually bothering to engage them in debate, but I think I am in agreement with the broader consensus which says that you really have to get their opinions out in the open and debate them in public. I was raised in Austria and the general refusal to engage with the somewhat euphemistically-named Freedom Party* led to their ideas and propaganda going so entirely unchecked that they were actually legitimately elected to power a few years ago – to the sudden horror of everyone who had hoped to make them go away by ignoring them.
Now, I take Hain’s point about the BNP being quite simply illegal because they don’t allow non-Caucasian members but basically it’s too late: the BNP have been legitimised to take place in national political debate, not by anything the BBC might be doing, but by the fact that an awful lot of people have voted for them. That’s one of the things which I think people tend to ignore – the problem with the BNP is not so much the pernicious nature of their policies or their tendency to lie about just how racist they actually are, it’s the fact that so many people in Britain might just actually agree with them.
There are a few reasons I think we really need to get these weasels out in the open:
Firstly, quashing opinions because you don’t like them by means other than directly countering them with argument is ethically dubious. The point of politics is to argue about policy and principle and then govern the country by the best ideas which emerge from this debate. If your ideas can’t stand up to this kind of robust debate then maybe they aren’t as good as you think. And if you can’t defend them, then maybe you should reconsider them.
Secondly, ignoring the BNP allows them to play the martyr and compare themselves to the suffragettes and Galileo and the human rights movement and various other movements or arguments which caused an awful stink because a lot people weren’t ready to hear them yet. The martyr position can unneccessarily legitimise ideas in a backhanded way: if they are so dangerous that they need to be suppressed they take on the status of being pretty important ideas, rather than common-or-garden petty bigotry.
Thirdly, refusing to engage in debate allows the BNP themselves free control of the publically available information about them. All that will exist will be their propaganda, which allows them to get away with saying that they ‘are just trying to protect British jobs’, which in itself is a reasonable statement. If you let them do all the talking the silently appended ‘by getting rid of all the darkies’ will never come to the surface. They claim not to be racist, but they won’t allow non-Caucasian members. The people combatting the Intelligent[sic] Design cretins in the States have learned this one: let them talk, argue with them, and sooner or later the un-sanitised version of their agenda will leak out.
Fourthly, we can get really lazy about our own opinions if we don’t actually argue about stuff. I am fond of making stupid statements like ‘I hate vegetarians’ as a way of riling up people and getting them to defend their ideas, but I myself had gone unchallenged on that particular one for so long that I accidentally started to subconsciously allow myself to believe that I had some sort of disagreement with vegetarianism, which is ludicrous. Basically I really don’t like it when people adopt opinions too lazily – it’s nothing to do with vegetarianism. Animal rights people who care more about fox hunting than battery farming get on my nerves, for example, or vegetarians who are protesting about battery farming but will happily eat fish, the decimation of whose populations largely goes ignored because they are out of sight and not terribly adorable. This applies to racism too – you can’t say that judging people on the basis of race is bad, and still blithely ignore statements like ‘black people are really good dancers – they just seem to have a natural sense of rhythm’. It’s no good just assuming that racism is bad if you can’t actually explain why – that’s not an opinion, it’s just herd behaviour.
Fifthly, the BNP might be right about some things – they aren’t wrong just because they’re the BNP. They are at the extreme of the anti-immigration spectrum, and as a mongrel immigrant myself I am probably pretty close to the other extreme (I’m white though, so they probably don’t mind me, even though I did quite literally come over here, exploit the state-subsidised education system, take your jobs and marry one of your women – thank fuck I’m not black or I’d have been run out of Dodge years ago). But for all I disagree with their draconian (and demographically utterly incoherent) immigration views I would never claim that the debate was so absolutely cut and dried that the more extreme views at either end of the spectrum don’t have any place at the table whatsoever.
Sixthly, we can’t exactly win over their supporters if we simply dismiss them all as racists. Some of them have very legitimate concerns about government policies which might well have a negative impact on their lives. Now you can argue that they have simply misdirected their personal insecurities and found completely the wrong target to blame for them, but you’ll never persuade anyone of anything if you simply write them off as bad people – that’s the same non-person categorisation which enables racism itself.
So get ‘em out, I say. Let’s see the likes of that vicious little cunt Griffin defend his opinions, and lets see if he can do it without falling back on some abstract and utterly meaningless definition of ‘real’ British people when he gets really cornered. Let’s see him try and defend his anti-immigration stance without letting it leak out that he simply doesn’t want any more dark-skinned people in the country.
And let’s see if he can honestly talk for an hour or so without revealing that deep down he wants a country of people just like him. But we can’t prove that we are different, can we, if we don’t let him speak.
The Men They Couldn’t Hang – The Ghosts of Cable Street
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Morrissey – The National Front Disco
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
*A borderline Nazi party led by a homosexual of immigrant descent – who would have fucking thought it. Bye bye Joerg, you hypocritical old prick.
Good point well made. A worrying number of young folk don’t seem to realize that fascism was such a defining force of the 20th C that it continues to ripple through society. Underestimating or ignoring them. like bullies, in the hope they will dissapear is in my estimation utter folly.
Unfortunatley, watching question time may not be enough. It’s a local as well as national problem. In the last Month the BNP have been holding meetings and recruitment drives in the Lothians.
With freedom comes responsibility – and that’s exactly what someone as unpleasant and evil as Nick Griffin is trying to dodge. It is deeply worrying that they have got to the level they have – and if people have made the free choice to vote for them, that is their choice. However, they have blood on their hands. Immigration as before so many times seems to be a classic case of ‘They’re welcome over here to do the shitty jobs in a boom time but we’ll scapegoat them when the economy goes into recession.’
We should have taken far more action against the likes of this evil man long ago. We haven’t, we must do all we can to expose them for the evil creeps they are. Some things go even deeper than freedom of speech, and I would argue that that one of those things is freedom from persecution.
Sorry for the rant, but as a man descended from people who fled a country [France] fleeing persecution becuase of their religion {Hugeonot], now married to a mixed-race lass, and as a human being, I feel utterly disgusted that more than sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, people can actually chose to vote for someone like Nick Griffin,
I also find that is stinks of cowardice to ignore them. Do we really feel that a well educated eloquent debater can’t take these guys apart. Every time I read the BNP manifesto (and it’s been a few years) the glaring holes are so obvious that someone with half a brain and five minutes of preparation could dissect the flaws in their logic. Some fellow was on question time some years ago and said something about immigrants and the Lib Dem MP pointed out that since WWII immigration has always been a net gain to the British economy. And the room went quite as if on one had ever heard this argument before. And it was very obvious.
Debate your enemies, that you might better crush them I say.
What’s with the BNP in Scotland? I was in holiday on the Moray coast in May, and was surprised to see BNP leaflets coming through the door of the holiday cottage. Never happened in my time in the homeland. I mean, it’s not like there aren’t plenty racists up there, but it seems that a party which use the Union Jack as their main emblem aren’t going to go down that well in Scotland (apart from certain kunckleheaded parts of Glasgow). It strikes me as bit worrying that Scots can overcome that oldest prejudice to vote for an English (British?) gang of racists.
i can’t make my mind up with the whole BNP on Question Time thing……
….but i’d happily take any racist to task over their views.
anybody watch Panorama last night, if you didn’t then catch it on iplayer…..truly shocking and breathtaking!
So are you bemoaning the fact that people have voted for them or the fact that they are being allowed to debate their views on national TV?
its all up in the air for me…but the debate, regardless of what actually happens, will give more legitimacy to the whole BNP movement. Cunty balls is not going to loose his cool, he is going to give measured and correct answers, that could and will sucker some people into this whole the BNP party has changed thing that they have been trying to achieve over the past 8-9 years.
It annoys me that the general public take they political guidance from papers like the Daily Mail, The Sun, and The Mirror, it annoys me that i think like this……
Well that’s one of the reasons I think getting them out and vocal might be good. Letting them express their views on immigration when they can be directly countered is a lot better than watching the same shit go unchallenged in the Daily Mail. And it might just show how bloody racist some of those papers are in the first place.
Some ballbag scrolled BNP on our private parking sign. I am not sure what the significance of that is. But if I saw the scrot I would probably say something……quietly to myself *cough cough*. Basically a racist BNP moron is more than likely a thug. They work on fear. Batman should exist. Then he should kick some ass on my behalf.
I agree let them talk. If you force some to be quite you give their view a certain underground cool. If you ban someone from talking it makes them glamorous.
You don’t need to get Clegg to lose his cool, simply to expose his lack of research and knowledge. Making idiots look stupid actually easy so long as you have confidence in your own argument and don’t debate on their terms.
Your claim RCC seems to be that people simply won’t understand if they have a political debate presented to them. I don’t agree, and I certainly don’t agree that that belief applies to the viewers of Question Tim.
Also, I am going to start my own television show called Question Tim.
it’s not the normal QT viewers that concern me…….
also it’s Griffin that is the leader of the Scum BNP not Clegg!
sorry for pointing that out!
Well I think he is also quite rightly pointing out that people decide on which sources they trust and tend to believe them whatever they say.
In other words, even if some Lib Dem were to humiliate Griffin on television it would have little impact on his target audience because a Lib Dem is, by definition, wrong.
We’ve seen this time and again with Creationists and Homepaths and so on: no matter how completely their arguments are shredded, they claim victory and their followers believe them.
I know core supporters will never really be converted, but the fringe ones might be and the very fact of the debate itself should also galvanise some activism on our side.
Well that much is true. But the more out in the open the BNP is the more they will be discussed from sources from all around the spectrum. The wider the debate, the more voices you will hear from all sides. Closeting them away can only help their cause in my view.
On the other hand, having a political party in parliament that doesn’t allow non-whites is clearly wrong.
Gah!
watch this and it’s hard not to think that we’re fucked already
I’m entirely ignorant when it comes to the polices of the British National Party. So all of my knowledge is filtered through the media, but the general consensus is that the BNP are a “bunch of racist cunts” (or words to that effect) .
Then again, I am an opinionated wanker, so I’m not going to look into their political policies and form my own opinions on the BNP when I see what Nick Griffin has to say for himself on Thursday.
They’re called the British National Party, so I can see the appeal to the kind of people that buy the Sun, watch Jeremy Kyle and drink builders tea. Then again, that’s what people quantify as “British”, I suppose.
Well Ben that’s the simple part which I just don’t get. If, as Peter Hain says in the clip linked above, they are illegal onthe basis of membership discrimination, then how are they allowed to even run for election, neverind win seats?
Chutters, don’t be silly. We’re talking about a UK veering slightly too far to the right during a recession, not the return of Oswald Mosely!
well you should try living in LS10 or BD7 (which i did for 5 years)…..or Bristol as the Panaroma duo did…..and you’ll find that racist beliefs are the norm.
us middle classes are insulated from the general day to day racism that goes on.
Chutters I played amateur league football in London, I do have some idea. Ideas like that are never going to be completely stamped out, but for the time being their popularity and real influence are pretty negligible really. They seem to be on the rise and need to be addressed, but their net importance is still pretty small, that’s all I’m saying, unpleasant as it is.
Matthew I’m not saying you’re wrong, or don’t know what the whole story is.
But i think this (racism) is a lot larger then we realise and one consequence of this could be people get to thinking “hey, look there’s a party that is saying what I’m saying and they are on question time, maybe i will vote for the BNP next June”
and then we have this snowball effect going on…..more legitimacy then more votes.
I’m not convinced that QT will provide the level of scrutiny needed to ‘out’ Griffin. I mean, its always rhetoric that’s being spouted on there. Griffin will spout his rhetoric, the others will probably bark out some other cheer-winning rhetoric and it will end up as yah-boo moral high ground battle to see who can be most indignant. I mean, it MAY end up like that. But it might not. Maybe he’ll let the hatred show. But he’ll be practicing how not to.
What I mean to say is, its not reasoned scrutiny that QT can bring to bear on Griffin, its a counter-rhetoric from politicians who will probably be trying to win votes in doing so. That might work to expose the underlying racism but it might not. I hope so.
Well I get what you’re saying, but they already have won parliamentary seats, have they not? I mean, how popular do they have to get before they need to be met head on?
And I also reckon that trying to stifle them by other means confers a legitimacy of it’s own and implies that their ideas are more important than they are.
If you reckon racism is that powerful a motivation for people, do they not already have UKIP and to a not-inconsiderable extent the Tories to vote for already? Does the relative failure of UKIP not suggest that, whilst far from trivial, this bigotted point of view is not quite as pervasive as all that?
Sorry Mahatma, my reply was for Chutters.
No, I doubt he’ll crack on live telly and start thumping the table demanding all the darkies be given until noon to leave the country. But ideologies like theirs can’t stay hidden for long if they are forced into general debate. Sooner or later someone will say something, and the benefit of them being more in the public eye is that when that happens it really will be out there for all to see.
I also take your point about rhetoric, but that’s just a general problem across all fora at the moment. QT is better than most, isn’t it?
I actually only realised half way through this discussion that we were talking about PM’s question time and not the television show.
I take RCC’s point. I worked on a market stall in Oldham and left about a month before the race riots broke out in the early 2000’s. The general feeling was that the BNP were the only party that engaged anyone on a local level. Those riots broke out simply because the white districts were depressed but the Asian districts were more depressed. When the slightly poorer people got a bit of council funding it all kicked off. And frankly Olham looked like the third world at the time and I don’t blame anyone who lived there for rioting. What was disgusting was who the anger got aimed at.
I always felt that there was a strange confusion as to where Patriotism ended and Nationalism began when I lived in England. The BNP have a habit of exploiting that.
But Matthew, has the UKIP not faultered of late simply because they are having to have grown up debates in a grown up political setting (wrote the man who lives a long way away and is only just now starting to realise how much British politics is escaping him)?
I find all of this interesting because at times I’m left feeling like America is the last backwards land, and everyone else has moved beyond things like this. So in a strange way I’m comforted that you folks across the pond still find time to defend yourselves and your beliefs against insipid ideologies like this.
For the record, I agree with you. To deny them the right to speak only reinforces the persecution complex they operate under, and appears to legitimize their ‘Help! Help! I’m being repressed!’ argument.
Yeah, I agree with the basic point you’re making Matthew. They should be brought into the public forum for all the reasons you say. But I dont think one episode of QT will be enough to do it. I’m sure you probably agree with that too.
I was so clear on this early this morning. You have to debate openly and honestly and have faith in you views. But you can’t allow parties that discriminate into parliament. But you can’t simply ban parties. But you can’t have the House of Commons actively support discrimination. But…
G’ah!
“But Matthew, has the UKIP not faultered of late simply because they are having to have grown up debates in a grown up political setting”
Well this is my point exactly, beyond bluster and petty, empty feelings of disenchantment with no real target they really do have nothing, and the best way to expose this is to get them involved in the mainstream and see if they can cut the mustard. I am saying that if the BNP being involved in real national debate, as they want to be, was such a threat then UKIP wouldn’t have disappeared into irrelevance the minute they were asked to actually formulate a coherent argument.
Sean – well typically your Republicans seem to scoop up all the nutters at this end of the spectrum which, as we saw during the last election, can lend a surreally barmy flavour to they party’s rhetoric. Over here the one benefit of UKIP and the BNP being isolated is that they suck up the real right wing crazies and stop them having too much influence on actual serious debates. This might change that a little, but at least it should give us the opportunity to take these fuckers on directly, instead of letting them hide behind their contrived and pathetic persecution complex.
Mahatma – No no, point taken, one episode of QT ain’t going to be enough.
Ben, I don’t exactly get that bit. If they’re illegal as a party because of their discriminatory membership policy then how are they allowed to run for election in the first place?
If, on the other hand, they fulfill all the requirements then we really have to take them on in an open forum, because otherwise it really is tantamount to outlawing a party simply for being meanies, which would pretty much exclude Labour, after their participation in the Iraq genocide.
And if they are legit enough to vote for, and their real agenda does come out into the open and people still vote for the cunts, then we have to admit that we, as a country, have a really serious problem – in which case the issue really does have to be tackled in a nationwide and very public manner.
(This kind of got forgotten, but I had to laugh at the Daily Growl’s comments about the Scottish BNP being so insecure and weak, and hence so determined to be part of the particular herd of sheep to which they aspire, that they are prepared to fly British flags despite almost certainly hating ‘English bastards’ as well. That always makes me laugh when I see Rangers bigots flying Union Jacks too – ‘Ooh, so you’re proud to be an English colony are you?’
I’m not sure that the BNP have nothing Matthew. They very successfully took on the problems of the “common man” in the local elections, while every major party was busy slinging mud over the expenses nonsense. And it’s easy for them to spout rhetoric and policies about how they’re going to solve these issues because they know they have no way of actually being elected into a powerful enough position to act on them. Well, not at the moment anyway. But back home in Bradford they were the only party that got their PR campaign right, and I’m sure you’ll agree that’s something. A lot more than any of the big three managed.
I obviously agree with all the sentiments that they’re deluded idiots, that goes without saying. But it may have been on these very pages that I read the quote “Never argue with an idiot. By the end, no one will know which is which.”
I can’t help but think that until we address the massive social problems in our deprived ex industrial towns and cities, having the BNP on or off Question Time isn’t going to make the blind bit of difference.
Never argue with an idiot, christ these comment threads would be chock full of tumbleweeds if we all took that one to heart!
I don’t think they’re as stupid as they are malicious, actually, although like every successful political party they have a knack for roping in idiots.
I don’t disagree with you about the rest though. As I said in the main article, they aren’t necessarily wrong just because they’re the BNP, and it’s feasible that they might be right about some things. Certainly what we have to learn from is how they have managed to engage so many more people recently, and what exactly it is that they’re addressing which seems to resonate with so many people.
So whilst we can’t necessarily change the ‘my life is shit and someone must be to blame’ free-form hostility which motivates a lot of folk, we can at least, as you implied, try and deflect politics away from partisan mudslinging and towards issues which make a day-to-day difference to people.
So basically I don’t think that they have nothing at all, in terms even of serious points to make in current political debate, but that they I doubt they are a massive threat in terms of serious growth and influence, because we have already seen that when this sort of hollow rhetoric gets to those sorts of situations, as with UKIP, it hasn’t exactly captured the imagination of the population in massive numbers.
Becky
I certianly second the notion that the BNP is the symptom of a problem, and not the cause of the problem itself. If that is what you were saying Becky.
It’s interesting because I just read an article that explained that one of the few things the far left and the far right in the USA manage to agree on is that the government is trying to kill us all with Swine Flu shots. Idiocy is apparently fond of all political leanings.
Expose them all, beat them to a pulp and feed their entrails to the fish.
In a more considered moment: I don’t believe censorship is a good idea, nor do I think it will work as fanatics tend to find different and very direct communication channels anyway. Let the fools speak and lets make sure they’re exposed for what they really are.
Hear fucking hear.
I wish it was that simple!
Well frankly this decision has been made.
The debate is really “Are the National Front a legal party”? It’s an interesting question given their discriminatory policies.
The question as to whether you can ban a recognised and legally registered political party from question time is crazy. It goes against a everything that a civilised society stands for.
Or this?
That video actually shows how bad we are at countering relatively simple arguments.
Paxo made so many excellent points: which views should disqualify you? Hain made the stupid argument that Abu Hamza should never be allowed to represent his own particular brand of craziness on Question Time, but that’s completely wrong, as far as I am concerned. If you want the world to know how mental he is then that’s exactly where he should be expressing them.
If he represents a sizeable chunk of the population, which even Abu Hamza does, then fucking hell, let’s bring the stupid fucker on. You cannot deny people a public forum, open to all, by insisting that their particular opinions are wrong – that’s what the public forum is for in the first place: to show just how wrong they might be.
If you are going to deny people a right to express their views, where do you draw the line and who makes that decision? Because your average Daily Mail-reading, Tory-voting miserable old hag probably subscribes to an awful lot of views which entirely support the BNP, so shutting that perspective out of public debate actually denies the rest of us the chance to practise a lot of arguments we encounter on a regular basis.
The problem I have with the basic ‘give them enough rope’ argument is that I have absolutely no confidence at all, none, not even a little bit, that the other panelists or the chair will in any way counter the nonsensical filth that the BNP come out with. The example of Radio 1’s news the other day is an instructive one – the BBC neglected to mention that the two ‘bnp members’ they interviewed about immigration were actually the party’s Publicity Director and another national officer and allowed them to talk about how British born and English-through-and-through (wanker) Ashley Cole ‘was not ethnically British’ without saying a word to counter them.
As with other parties that are invited on, the BNP have been given an allocation of tickets in the audience which means that whatever he has to say he will be greeted with a good deal of applause and the usual fucked up respectful ‘well let’s be nice’ from the dullards of the audience who’d rather not even offend the offensive.
The BBC were perfectly compliant when Thatcher’s government introduced ludicrous rules forcing Sinn Fein members’ words to be spoken by an actor rather (brilliantly parodied by The Day Today ‘Due to Government regulations he can only talk after inhaling helium’). They could have turned around now and said ‘We won’t broadcast the BNP other than in circumstances like PPBs when we have no choice, as we believe that otherwise we are leaving ourselves open to prosecution for inciting racial hatred’ and then let them sue. We would have still had the debate about what exactly it was the BNP had to say whilst denying them a platform.
And they will use this platform to present themselves as reasonable people tapping into genuine public concerns, they will say more than anybody else has time to properly respond to even if they were able and minded to do so, and they will get a publicity boost out of it because they don’t need to be denied a place on the platform to moan about about other parties and viewpoints treating them as outsiders, pity poor them.
And I can’t believe I’m the first person on this thread to make the joke about not denying them the oxygen of publicity so much as denying them the oxygen of oxygen.
Adam I would agree with you if they were just mental cranks, but they’ve won elections. You can’t engage with every last looney in the bin, but going back to the likes of homeopathy and Intelligent Design, sooner or later the damage caused by giving them a public platform is outweighed by the damaged caused by allowing them come out with any old nonsense unchallenged.
As Peter Hain showed in David Dimbleby’s comment above, however, we are becoming pretty piss poor at arguing some of these points, and that’s bad enough in itself.
I think you’re referring to the video that can be accessed by clicking David Dimblemy’s name, aren’t you Matthew, and not the link in his comment.
The link in his comment would certainly make for an interesting edition of Question Time.
Oh whoops, yes, his name.
Did anyone see him on Channel 4 news last night? Perfect example of what I was saying. Although he did slip in his favourite lines about “ethnical British,” once, the majority of his approach to questioning was “I’m not interested in that, I’m interested in troops fighting for our country of all ethnicity being properly equipped” etc etc. Swing away from the politics and the tough questions about the existence of your party at all, and back to the plight of the common man. Every time. So people watching it already thinking the BNP are awful, come away thinking the BNP are still awful, but that he’s a relatively canny politician. People who voted for him come away thinking he’s the only guy out there looking out for their interests, and they don’t really care how he goes about it.
I think it would be fair to say yes Ben, I think they’re a symptom and not a cause. The bonkers Intelligent Design types have a huge amount of exposure in the States, yet 60 something % of Americans surveyed recently said they “couldn’t be sure” that the earth was millions of years old. I’m not sure the exposure has really done anything for the anti Intelligent Design cause.
Obviously you can’t censor the guy or the party. But I think it’s naive when the country is in the state it’s in to think that simply exposing these polarised views is going to do anything to convince the people who voted for them to do otherwise. And it could well persaude those in the middle to switch that way. Griffin may be a slimy and pretty mental (I was going to say toad, but that’s clearly the wrong animal on this website!) snake, but he’s got more charisma and PR knowledge than Gordon seems to have. And he knows his target audience and will do everything in his power to pander to them.
(In a completely unrelated fashion, can someone recommend a free MP4a to MP3 converter that won’t fill my struggling laptop with spyware?)
iTunes x
You could look at this in two ways. Firstly, you have people like Peter Hain saying “By putting giving the BNP air-time (har har, Adam) you’re immediately giving him a leg to stand on, and their support is going to be sky-rocketed.” And he’s saying that the beeb are supporting the BNP by ALLOWING them to appear tomorrow. Giving them, as he put it “their seal of approval”. I doubt that the BBC support a corporation such as MacDonals, and yet they invited Steve Easterbrook onto the program in May.
Conversely, you could take the approach that most of you louts are, that is, by “letting the cunt appear we can see what a narrow-minded bigot he is. We can see that his policies are flawed. Let him try and debate them. He is a wanker, and smells mildly of blue cheese.” Which is probably where I stand, too.
Let him fight it out and get proved wrong, this isn’t 1930’s Bavaria.
The BBC have hit back and claiming its going to be uncoloured (LOL) by allowing BNP supporters into tomorrow nights audience. Which is perfectly just, really. Whether you like it or not, BNP have support. It might even make better television, sparking debate, jeering or maybe even a punch-up. Griffin, or one of his flying monkeys, will undoubtedly rub one some stiff-collared old man up the wrong way and provide the best television since Big Brother One.
Peter Hain has also said that they “shouldn’t be allowed on because they’re an illegal and illegitimate political party”. While that may be true, you don’t have to be a politician to appear on QT, I’m sure. Just ask “so-called” politician Alex Salmond…
Becky, check out http://www.zamzar.com It’s an online-file-conversion-deely that allows you to convert your files online, somewhat unsurprisingly.. You have to do it one-by-one which gets quite monotonous, but hey, at least you avoid all that hot kiddy porn!
Amongst the things it would be good for somebody to point out on QT would be that the Conservative party are in alliance in the European parliament with people who hold views every bit as odious as the BNP if not more so – it would be interesting to actually hear that alliance being justified as I’ve noticed a lot of criticism of it but very little response.
Yeah Daniel, I agree. As Paxman pointed out, if Will Young gets on there, what is the standard supposed to be?
The other thing muddying the waters somewhat is that Question Time is on the BBC and therefore pretty much a state product. People ignoring particular perspectives in their own private enterprise is one thing, but the government actively suppressing views because they don’t like them is another. We weren’t happy when the boot was on the other foot during the Iraq war, nor when the ads for aid for Gaza was pulled because the government didn’t want to upset Israel by letting anyone point out that they are an oppressive and murderous regime.
So now it’s the suppression of someone else’s speech, however unpleasant, under discussion I don’t think we can suddenly turn 180 degrees on whether or not the government should be preventing certain voices being heard.
As you say, and as I did in the main post, they have already been legitimised by the size of the vote they have won, so that particular cat is already out of the bag.
I am on the “let em say it” side. And not just so we can wow them with our superior execution of common sense and cutting remarks and maybe learn a thing or two about ourselves, but because a bunch of strange people do honestly hold these beliefs, and those beliefs should be represented. If they convince more people of their views, then sorry, but that’s democracy. I don’t the BNP’s ’success’ has anything much to do with their successful campaigning anyway, but changing views and moods of the voting public. Labour gets on TV a lot more frequently than the Tories, but they’re still going to get thrashed.
I have a much bigger problem with the BNP receiving front page coverage every few minutes, which seems completely disproportionate to their level of support, than their appearance on question time, which seems entirely proportionate. I’d love it if their press coverage was equivalent to that given to the green party or the socialists or whoever, partly because it would be a massive fucking drop.
Diane Abbott raised an interesting point on the BBC TV news this morning, basically reminding us that Question Time is a current affairs panel show, and it won’t simply be an interview with Nick Griffin and an opportunity to challenge him on the BNP and its manifesto.
Traditionally, each member of the Question Time panel is invited to discuss every subject raised, and while there will inevitably be some questions regarding the BNP, you can also expect questions about MPs expenses, the Royal Mail strike, the recession and so on; and allowing Griffin to comment upon and discuss such matters that lie outside the BNP’s recognised remit does go some way to legitimising him and his party in the eyes of the public.
I mean, traditionally, Question Time has often included discussion on whimsical stories from the lighter side of the news, too; and I’m starting to wonder whether it actually is appropriate to see Nick Griffin exchanging witty banter with David Dimbleby about Mercedes the polar bear or some such nonsense.
Abbott closed her interview this morning by saying that people she meets often remind her of her own first appearance on Question Time, twenty-odd years ago. They remember her being on the show, telling her it was great to see a young, black, female politician appearing on the BBC, and that finally the demographics she represented were being taking seriously in British politics.
She went on to say how worried she was about Griffin and the politics he represents being offered a similar opportunity as she had. In future, people may not recall precisely what Griffin discussed on Question Time, but simply that he was taken a little more seroiusly as a politician afterwards..
i’ve changed my mind, with regards this, over the past few weeks.
At first i was, oh it’ll be ok, let them make fools of themselves……
But now, i’m more along the lines of ‘Fuck em then hang them by their racist fucking genitals’
Why should we grant the platform that they would so quickly take away from all minorities if they got anywhere near power. Yes i’m being quite ill-liberal.
Because there’s this little thing called free speech
“They’re” not going to make fools of themselvs, no.
There’s a chance that Nick Griffin will say some pretty fucking flawed, ludicrous Zionist remarks, however. Judging by your remarks you don’t want to hear. Which is fair enough. But grow-up a bit and let him make an arse of himself and lose support.
Perhaps you don’t have the integrity to listen to something you don’t agree with?
(Que abuse towards me)
I don’t know how much free speech comes into it, although those waters are somewhat muddied by it being a BBC programme, and that being government funded. They can invite and not invite whomever they choose, surely.
I think Dylan makes a good point, in that this is a current affairs talk show, not a grilling on political policy exactly (although it can be quite close sometimes) so there’s no particular need to invite some cunts on just because they are popular with wankers. Were it purely a forum for politcal debate I would say the issue would be more compelling.
I also think that getting them and their opinions out in the open serves another interesting service, and one which I hinted at when I mentioned Austria in the post. They are basically racist pricks, and that’s not too far from the surface in pretty much all of their philosophy. So making that explicit and publically known and seeing the amount of support they can garner will give us a very interesting and potentially quite important measure of just how racist and bigoted we are as a nation.
Basically, the Daily Mail and the right wing of the Tory party are pretty much BNP already in all but name, so add them to UKIP and actual BNP fans and we will see just how much of a problem this actually is. And hopefully that way, unlike Austria, we will have the chance to do something about before the cunts actually grab much more power than they already have.
actually i thought he pretty much did make a fool of himself…….
Cock off with your question about integrity!