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

So we now have the BBC being warned that if there is blood on the streets after Question Time it is their responsibility - and obviously nothing to do with the anti-fascist protesters invading Television Centre and mounting a picket outside.

The BNP crave publicity and respectability and all the protests have not only made Question Time a ratings winner but made Nick Griffin a victim of oppression and for good measure have handed him freedom of speech as a trump card.

What's next? Everyone stick their fingers in their ears and sing la-la-la whenever Nick Griffin speaks?

You don't have to agree with Griffin, you don't even have to listen but if freedom means anything it applies to him just as much as to anyone else.

Whatever you may think of Nick Griffin he is a smooth operator. His has turned a party of rag bag thugs and neo Nazi skinheads into something, which on the face of it at least, appears, at first glance, to be a respectable party.

I have no doubt that the skinheads with swastika tattoos and love and hate knuckles - which hang a touch lower than in the rest of the population - are still there, kept in some dark cellar or other stuffing envelopes but the face of the party presented to the public seems little different to the parties we are more accustomed to seeing.

That is all down to Griffin and his considerable political nouse and leadership. Now, thanks largely to New Labour, with a little help from the Tories, his party has become electable if for no other reason that the mainstream parties, particularly New Labour, are so out of touch with the public that they might as well be on another planet. The masses are tired of empty rhetoric with no action, old cash dressed up as new spending and new legislation being rolled out twice a day. Chucking money at bankers and filling their expense account boots to the brim with spurious exes while the real workers were losing their jobs was perhaps the last straw.

So the likes of the BNP become worth a punt. Once elected that should be the end of the matter. A spell in Europe should provide a rope long enough to hang both MEPs.

But people just cannot accept the result. The one thing Griffin and his BNP crave is publicity and if he can also be seen as a victim at the same time then that is a bonus so chucking eggs at him turned his bottom of page seven Press conference into front page and national TV and radio news. He could not have organised it better himself.

He will even now be reorganising the Press conference which will be assured of even more Press and cameras in attendance, live on Sky and with a police guard to boot. The protesters have made a minor side show nationally important. Chucking eggs has never been the most persuasive of political arguments but it has done old Nick proud.