Question Time - Nick Griffin

Who’s afraid of Nick Griffin? Lots of people, it seems. After Thursday night’s performance on Question Time, maybe they shouldn’t be. No-one comes out well from the BNP/Question Time debacle – not Nick Griffin, not the BBC, the audience, panellists or protestors.


I missed the show but caught it on BBC iPlayer later. Griffin’s mission was simple: appear respectable, be moderate, seem reasonable. Trouble is, when you’ve spent your adult life hobnobbing with the Ku Klux Klan and saying that Auschwitz is a fairy story, your mission is pretty much impossible. Sure enough, he squirmed like a maggot on a hook when his outrageous beliefs were quoted back at him. Griffin is also a coward – he stubbornly refused to admit what everyone in the studio, and sitting at home watching on the sofa, knew: that his agenda was driven by skin colour and race; nothing to do with culture.


Should he even have been on there?


Yes, he should. Yes, of course. You get 900,000 votes and you can’t be censored. If we don’t have freedom of speech, we have nothing. Otherwise who will decide who can and cannot speak? It won’t be you, that’s for sure. The BBC were right to say that as a public sector broadcaster they couldn’t censor a politician with votes.


Freedom of speech doesn’t open the door to murder and pillage – we quite rightly have laws in the UK that forbid inciting racial hatred, or incitement to murder, or advocating violence, threats to kill etc. So people like Nick Griffin have to be very careful what they say now. It wasn’t always like this: Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech was allowed to pass in 1968, whereas today I suspect he would get his collar felt by the long arm of the law. There’s no need to be terrified of someone whose views are so comical even people who hold them are embarrassed to express them.When intolerant people come into view, it always brings out the intolerance in others. It's instructive to watch.


For a start the adolescent loonies ‘protesting’ against his appearance seemed oblivious to the plank in their own eye. They complain about ‘fascism’ but by deciding for themselves who should and should not appear on television they are have a little sideline in fascism going themselves. It seems that plenty of violence is dished out by the anti-Nazi league/Socialist Workers party who spend their lives in pursuit of a cause or a bandwagon to jump on.


Of course we have plenty of ‘fascists’ in this country. Fascist has become one of those derogatory terms that is nowadays applied to absolutely anyone you disagree with. Like foxhunting? You’re a fascist. Want to ban foxhunting? Fascist. Want to cap immigration? Ban anything? Or do anything unpopular? Then you’re a fascist. Fascism is about the worship of the state, combined with a mercantilist economic policy that has little to do with free market policies and an aggressive, nationalistic foreign policy that is opposed to the free movement of peoples and other aspects of globalisation.


By most of these standards the BNP don’t score highly on the fascist scale. To call them ‘Nazi’ is just absurd, and denigrates the victims of Hitler. They have a policy on immigration that in some ways is very left-wing: to stop it, even reverse it. They don’t believe in the free market, free movement of people


We have racist, sectarian, violent groups in the UK but you never hear the anti-fascist protestors or the Socialist Workers Party or the anti-Nazi League complaining about them. Sinn Fein, an organisation that’s murdered thousands of people, now sits in Government; Islamic extremist movements that advocate violence and preach beliefs incompatible with Western values are never picketed by the Anti Nazi League when they appear at mosques or campuses or schools. Funny, that.


Jack Straw came across as a man of straw - refusing resolutely to concede that Labour's misguided immigration policy had fuelled the rise of the BNP when even his own supporters could see that was the case. He was so righteous in his indignation he refused to acknowledge what everyone could see. His refusal to budge or even admit there was room for improvement in immigration policy rebounded on him and he suddenly seemed evasive, shifty, myopic and even arrogant.


Bonnie Greer, no doubt a woman of considerable talents and qualities, ended up looking arrogant, petulant and foolish. It would have been quite easy to deconstruct Griffin’s absurdities around the topic of genetic purity, but Greer chose to try and appear superior and again refused to acknowledge anything. Perhaps that’s how panellists are coached before appearing on screen, or maybe that’s the done thing.


One minute she harked back to the Ice Age to demonstrate there were no such thing as 'indigenous' Britons, the next patronising Griffin by alluding to his "two two" and suggesting he do more reading. She was stumped, however, when Griffin craftily suggested that no-one would deny there was such a thing as an indigenous Maori or Aboriginal.


It was obvious Griffin had a point, even though it was used to mask a sinister and dangerous eugenics theme. There is no such thing as pure-bred British – we’re all hybrids after all, out of Africa. But it’s also true that the British have been a fairly insular bunch prior to mass immigration in the 1950s, and everyone knows that’s what Griffin was getting at.


Before 1066 of course it wasn’t anything like that – Angles, Saxons, Danes, Vikings, Celts, Romans with their black and Mediterranean heritage; they all settled here. The DNA in Great Britain is an indecipherable mix, a hotch-potch. But notwithstanding the Hugeunots, Jews, Irish, scattering of black slaves brought in through the seaports and a few others, white British people had indeed developed a settled culture they identified as ‘British’ prior to the 1950s. It’s undeniable.


The killer point though, the one that everyone in this country understands, is that Britishness is now defined by nationality, character, language and values – not by skin colour or ethnicity. It’s something I’m proud of. I like that about this country. One only has to look at the furore in insular China, where there is uproar over a half-black, half-Chinese girl appearing on a talent show. Many Chinese simply can’t accept that someone with black parentage can be ‘Chinese’ (or Han Chinese). Nationality is defined by ethnicity, which we know is a fallacy as all races are mixed. But in the UK nationality and ethnicity are separate. People who combine and try to pretend they are the same them look stupid and are actually embarrassed about their own views.


I also believe that people who settle in a country, at any point in history, have an obligation to respect the laws, traditions and customs of the society they find themselves in, and attempt to integrate as best they can. Not easy if you experience racism and discrimination, but you must try. Some groups seem to have managed this better than others.


Multiculturalism has not served the UK well. It’s lead to insular sub-societies cut off from the mainstream, sometimes embittered and feeling disenfranchised and searching for an outlet for their identity, sometimes in the most extreme ways, as in the suicide bombings of 2005. Having a society where everyone feels they have a stake is more constructive. Unfortunately the BNP want to promote a cultural apartheid in this country, which would only do harm.


No-one believes that people with dark skin should be ‘sent back’, as the NF used to say. Sent back to where? The British hospital they were born in? It’s a non-starter and everyone knows it. Britain has absorbed immigrants very well, by and large. So it wasn’t necessary for Bonnie Greer to talk about Ice Age Neanderthals.


The BBC themselves also emerged with little credibility. They wanted to have their cake and eat it; one moment saying that Griffin could not be denied a platform because of the BNP's electoral success, the next trying to rig the audience and panel against him with hostile questions and a partisan audience. Why stick a black woman next to Griffin? Bonnie Greer was chosen because she was black, make no mistake about it. It was the BBC’s attempt to embarrass Griffin. But the audience could see through it.


It wasn't necessary to ban Griffin, censor him or rig the audience and panel. He was given enough rope to hang himself, and by the end he had done so by attempting to defend the indefensible. Politics based on skin colour is so absurd even racists are embarrassed to admit to their views, and the audience sniggered when he was cornered about the Holocaust.


One of the few good points Bonnie Greer made was that without freedom of speech we have nothing. I enjoyed watching Griffin talking rubbish about indigenous race, he looked foolish. Not surprisingly, his own party is far from happy with his performance. I look forward to seeing more of him, and then watch his party implode, despite the opinion polls showing imaginary 'swings' and 'surges' for him.


What of the BNP themselves? Groups founded purely to attack others always end in schisms and fratricide - they cannot contain their desire to destroy and so always turn on themselves. That's why the BNP is an offshoot of the old National Front, why Irish Republican Groups splinter and why racists always fight civil wars with each other.


I don’t think there’s any need to fear the BNP. They have nothing to offer because the UK is ethnically mixed now, and it’s irreversible. Everyone knows that. Once we have a controlled immigration policy and the economic climate improves, they will fade away. Even by the standards of fringe parties they are small. It’s seems clear to me that a lot of people who vote for them do so as a protest because they’re scared, worried or angry about immigration and ‘foreigners’. Some are racist, I will bet most aren’t – they’re just ignorant and fearful. My guess is that prolonged media coverage will (a) expose the BNP to more ridicule and (b) force the Government to have a sensible immigration policy.


People who spread fear always do so because they are fearful themselves. Fear is what drives them: fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of ‘the other’. Nick Griffin and his supporters have lived, and will continue to live their whole lives in fear. That is their greatest punishment.