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: Read the rest of this entry »