Frankly, I was a little bored. Griffin occasionally let his tightly-controlled facade slip with some very silly comments (indigenous 'British' = those descended from the ice age inhabitants! I'm not sure when the Celts turned up, but the Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans, Dutch etc. all fit Griffin's preferred racial characteristics and arrived a lot more recently than that) and defended his meetings with David Duke of the KKK with the words 'almost entirely non-violent'.
The other guests were pretty weak. They'd all looked up Griffin's past comments and turned every single question towards the BNP's racial policy - to which Griffin had similarly well-planned responses. If the BNP want to be a serious party, they need to have policies on everything, from water metering to agricultural run-off levels - an opportunity was lost to expose how narrow and limited the BNP is. Because they all went over the same ground repeatedly, it became a sterile debate.
I was a bit annoyed about the Churchill debate though - surely someone could have pointed out that he wouldn't have joined the BNP, Tories OR Labour, because he fully supported a United States of Europe (his words), founded the European Movement and received the Charlemagne Prize for his efforts in that direction.
The only person on the show to come out of it well was the playwright and British Museum director Bonnie Greer, somewhat predictably: she was calm, witty, authoritative and didn't hector. Churchill was half-American and got to be PM: let's get Bonnie Greer into Parliament!
I watched the programme while eating a curry, which seemed appropriate. Then this morning I went to the pool and shared the water with immigrants! To whom I then chatted! What a race traitor I am…
After that, I had the immense satisfaction of shouting 'scab' at some postmen. Griffin and his jackbooted fantasists belong in the lowest circle of hell, but scabs will be sitting close by. I should have stuck a stick through the spokes of the one on a bike. I've very few principles (obviously), but one is to never cross a picket line, and it's served me well.
4 comments:
I thought Bonnie Greer was splendid, and it was so nice to see someone who knows about history sitting next to a moron who makes up history as he goes along.
I do agree with you that instead of Question Time, it did become Question BNP. There was absolutely no mention of the postal strike, which is surely the biggest news story out there currently!
As for the man himself: a vile, loathsome, slimy, pathetic, misinformed cretinous douche bag, and I enjoyed the moments where he looked completely out of his depth.
The man is pathetic, his party is pathetic, and if you vote for his party, you are pathetic.
I got annoyed at the audience for applauding cheap shots ('slimy arms'?), because cheap shots play into the, um, slimy arms of the person under siege.
It did raise an interesting point in my mind, though: the UK's default standard-bearing of Churchill. I didn't realise the points you make in your comment, but I did think: this was (I gather) a deeply flawed politician with a world-winning victory under his belt.
My world political knowledge is blunt enough to ask: didn't the post-war carving up of the Middle East cause a little bit of a grumble in the area? Isn't there some amount of disagreement in that area these days?
I'm only asking.
I'm not at all sure anyone should be claiming Churchill as their own, although now I feel I've spent ages working out my stance on a natty bit of PR shorthand.
James - how's the caravan?
Churchill is utterly loathed in many areas of the world - the Yalta agreement means that a lot of Poles and other further east felt that he sold them to the Russians, and the Kurds hate him because it was his idea to use poison gas against them in the 1920s (just a tiny glimpse of the damage he did in the mid-east, mostly designed to produce BP/Shell friendly anti-comunnist regimes). He was a terrible imperialist monster who had the right skills for a short period - the British have never been brighter or braver than when they said 'thanks but no thanks' in 1945 (proved right when they elected him again later - he was useless in peacetime).
Don’t get me started on the inhabitants of Ice Age Europe…
The BNP were likened to Neaderthals by someone I know today and I’m exhausted by being indignant. As you may know Neanderthals are my favourite hominin species.
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