Another BNP membership list has been leaked, so you can check out your friends and neighbours. Amusingly, the BNP is trying to look bigger than its current 35,000 by adding 100,000 to all new membership numbers!
Their leader, Nick Griffin, is on Question Time this week, leading to much soul-searching about whether he should be on there and how to deal with him. I take an unfashionable line for the left on this: he's an elected MEP and there are a lot of fascists out there who've voted for a legal party. For government figures such as Peter Hain to threaten the BBC with legal action is shameful because it's an abdication of political responsibility. If the BNP are that dangerous (and I think they are), the party should be banned. If they're legal, the BBC has a duty to feature their elected representatives proportionately.
Further to that, exposure can only damage them. They aren't very bright, though they are getting the hang of dog-whistle politics. I hope the other guests pursue them by means of boring, important politics. I suspect that Griffin has no idea about the PSBR, or quantitative easing, or waste directives etc. etc. etc. He can't blame Islamists for obscure financial decisions, so let's show him up as a one-issue demagogue.
3 comments:
Wikileaks is overloaded at the moment, but I'll have a look a bit later.
Labour have got this one badly wrong, IMHO. Constantly hyping up the BNP, criticising them at every turn and having eminent members such as Hain and Johnson objecting to Griffin being on QT is doing more harm than good - it is perpetuating their myth.
Let Griffin go on there, talk his shit and then we can all have a jolly good laugh at him/them, and hopefully people who voted for them because they weren't too sure what they stood for (but the bits they did hear sounded good) might realise the error of their ways.
I think that's right. They aren't Nazi Supermen, they're small bitter men leading a mob of uneducated and uninformed people looking for clear targets to blame for things. Expose them as limited and they'll gradually fall apart.
Hurrah, hurrah (waves order papers)!
I just wrote a similar piece (but with much more noodling before I got to the point) then found I'd been trumped...
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