Results tagged “BNP” from Birmingham Mail - Is It Just Me

Anyone see Question Time? Apparently more people watched the infamous BNP episode than Strictly Come Dancing and just as the BBC shot themselves in one foot by sacking Arlene Phillips they have blown the other leg off completely with their new sport of BNP baiting.

Having invited the odious Nick Griffin to appear the BBC could not leave it at that and run a normal Question Time when no doubt his more extreme views would have been revealed and people might have really seen what he represented. Oh no that is far too civilised and sophisticated for the chattering classes who seem to run the BBC.

Instead they installed what appeared to be a hand-picked audience who would not have been out of place cheering Madame Guillotine - it just needed a couple of old crones smoking pipes and knitting on the front row.

The questions were all loaded against Griffin and had little to do with current affairs, with many along the when did you stop beating your wife? line of interrogation, Griffin was hardly allowed to complete a sentence without interruption and everyone seemed to have been given a stick to poke the BNP leader. It was all a bit like a scene from a grown up Lord of the Flies.

Now apart from seriously damaging the standing of the programme and calling into question its impartiality in the future, the programme must have done wonders for the standing of the BNP who can now add the sympathy vote to the protest vote.

Has no one at the BBC got the wit to realise that bear baiting went out of fashion years ago. These days people tend to have sympathy with the bear, in this case Griffin, and if there is a boost in the BNP's standing in opinion polls that can be put down fairly and squarely to the BBC's crude attempts to give Griffin a good kicking on national TV.

They turned him into an underdog and even people who hate what he stands for ended up with sympathy for the man - generating floods of complaints to the BBC about his unfair treatment which must be a PR disaster of Biblical proportions.

While the mainstream parties on Question Time were all patting themselves on the back about the wonderful multicultural society we live in, by the way, and how everything in the garden is rosy, that same night Panorama was showing an item about appalling racism on a Bristol estate.

MPs and others demanding that the BBC withdraw their invitation to the BNP to take part in Question Time really should grow up. I hate to defend the BNP but democracy and freedom of speech means that people you really do disagree with have the same right to their point of view as you do.

If you are not prepared to defend their rights then everyone else's rights are eroded. Once freedom of speech applies to just people we can tolerate or agree with then it becomes meaningless.

As for Peter Hain's claim it is an illegal organisation? Why should the BBC fire the arrows handed to it by the Government? If it is illegal - fine. The Government have the means to ban it - if they want to risk months in court of course.

It should be remembered though that enough people prefer the BNP to Labour, Tory or Lib Dem to have given them two MEPs and numerous councillors. The BBC, quite rightly, want all shades of the political spectrum on Question Time, not just those approved by New Labour.

It would be foolish to underestimate Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, but to ban him makes it look as if the mainstream parties have no answer to his arguments or are frightened of him and if that is the case we are all in trouble.

There seems to be a fair bit of hypocrisy around about the possibility that BNP leader Nick Griffin could turn up at a Palace garden party.

I hold no truck with the BNP but you can't have it both ways. You cannot say they are a legal political organisation on one hand and try to ban them from everything afforded to every other party on the other.

We have already had feathers ruffled because Richard Barnbrook turned up at the World Cup bid launch. He happens to be a BNP Greater London Assembly member and as all members were invited to the launch he was entitled to be there. He convinced enough people to vote for him in Barking to win last May's election which made him a GLA member - that is what democracy is supposed to be about.

He was there as an assembly member not as a representative of the BNP and if everyone had accepted that then the BNP would not have had any publicity whatsoever - does anyone even know if any other GLA members were there?

Now Barnbrook, plus guest, is expected to be invited, along with all other GLA members, to a Palace Garden Party and he has said he will take his leader, Nick Griffin.

I suspect neither would be within several thousand pages of the top of the Buckingham Palace list of people the Queen would like to see pinkies raised sipping Jackson's of Piccadilly fair trade blend by the shrubbery - even I am probably in there above them - but the Palace are not inviting Barnbrook, they are inviting the member for Barking.

But once again the BNP are afforded front page headlines they hardly merit and the Palace is placed in an impossible position. Now if they carry on with the invite to the GLA the Queen will be accused of inviting or even endorsing the BNP which is hardly fair.

It is not as if this is like the Queen holding a barbie in the back garden with half a dozen mates who arrive in flip flops with a six pack - we are talking 8,000 guests a time here and it is not beyond the wit of man, or at least the security services, to ensure Griffin and Barnbrook don't get within a mile of photo op range of the Queen.

Barnbrook turned up at the World Cup bid and announced he was taking Griffin to the Palace because he knew the media would lap it all up and, less than a month before local and European elections, the BNP would be all over the news for free and with no scandal attached. And the media duly obliged.

I don't want to go into the rights, not that I can think of any, or wrongs of the British National Party but it is a recognised political party and it is not illegal to be a member which makes the witch hunt of some of those who found themselves declared as BNPites on the internet all a bit scary.

The whole point of freedom of speech, of religion, of association, assembly, beliefs, Press and thought is that the same freedom we expect for our beliefs should extend to those who beliefs we find abhorrent, offensive or even just plain loopy. That is what freedom is all about, the only thing that gives it credence.

Whether a member of the teaching profession, police, armed forces or any job for that matter is a member of the flat earth society, Labour, Tory or Tupperware party . . . or the BNP . . . should matter not a jot. If membership is legal then so be it. Once the state or authority starts to decide what organisations or religions we can or cannot belong to then the road becomes downhill and slippery very quickly.

I hate to say it but the right of someone to belong to the BNP has to be defended with the same vigour as every other right and freedom otherwise they are all devalued.