Pig sticking politics

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.