Nick Griffin…You Cunt
Northwest England MEP and BNP racist Nick Griffin on the aid effort for Haiti:
Mr Griffin, MEP for North West England, responded with another Twitter post, saying: “Individuals should give whatever they feel appropriate, but Britain is bankrupt. Fifty thousands pensioners will die… of cold this winter.
“Boys get blown to bits because we can’t afford to armour their Land Rovers…. Sending aid to rioting ingrates while our own people die is stinking elite hypocrisy.”
Asked about Mr Griffin’s comments, BNP deputy leader Simon Darby criticised the government’s £6m contribution to the aid effort in Haiti.
He said: “I’d rather see that £6m that we spent keeping our own people alive. You look after your own first.
“If they’ve got surplus money to give away to Haiti – how many people have died because we didn’t have the infrastructure to grit the roads?”
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Nick Griffin on Question Time
I’m not one of those people who felt Nick Griffin shouldn’t have been allowed on Question Time because his and the British National Party’s (BNP) views on race, religion, nationality and sexual orientation were perverse. They clearly are, but I acknowledge too that freedom of speech has to include those views you despise, as well as those you agree with – you can’t preemptively say even someone as hateful as Nick Griffin shouldn’t be allowed to speak. If he breaks laws then he has to pay a price, if he indulges in hate speech he needs to be prosecuted, if he says appalling things about the holocaust he needs to be condemned for it, but be stopped from speaking because he’s a homophobic racist? Absolutely not. So what was Question Time like after all the hype? In my view it was a mixed bag.
If Griffin wanted to continue his process of ‘cleaning up’ the BNP brand he did a pretty lousy job of it. He came across as blatantly homophobic (he wasn’t alone on the panel in that, you Tories), he was unapologetically anti-semitic and refused to be drawn into sensible discussion by Bonnie Greer about just what he meant by the ‘indigenous British people’. Anyone with any degree of common sense will have watched that and been thoroughly appalled when he tried to wriggle out of his penchant for holocaust denial, and when he tried to justify homophobia. He’s a disgusting man, with a disgusting message, but he will sadly have made significant political capital out of two aspects of the show. Firstly when Jack Straw was asked whether he thought New Labour’s authoritarian immigration policy had contributed to the rise of the BNP, Straw pointedly dodged the question. Typically lawyerly Straw simply answered another question, and it was tragically the key pitfall which lay in wait for him, and which he unceremoniously threw himself into. A government which demonises ‘failed’ asylum seekers, which makes legal aid next to impossible for people fleeing persecution, and expecting help under the Geneva Convention, and which locks up their children, is hardly in a position to preach tolerance to the BNP. Straw knew it, the panel knew it and a smirking Griffin knew it too; Blair and now Brown have given him part of a constituency previously unthinkable in modern times.
The other gain for Griffin was even more alarming. The entire show was debated on the BNP’s terms – their talking points were justified by concentrating only on them. Even Chris Huhne demeaned himself by trying to prove that, yes, the Lib Dems too could be tough on immigration. Every word uttered was a gain for the BNP; whilst it was a delight to see him hammered comprehensively (notably by David Dimbleby), the man who claimed to be a legitimate elected representative wasn’t ever called to express his position on education, the health service, energy policy or transport. By making the programme an attack on Griffin, however justifiably, the BBC played right into his hands, as did every guest on the panel other than Bonnie Greer.
The BBC has said it might invite him back onto the show – if it does I sincerely hope they hold a normal panel, and stop enabling him to play the martyr, particularly one who isn’t expected to live up to the standards expected of the office he now holds. We must remember Griffin’s rise is inextricably connected with the failure of the political system, which forces all three major parties to fight for marginal advantage over a tiny number of swing voters, and all are now entirely disinterested in concerns outside of that bubble. When they either bother to get round to addressing the issues affecting their former supporters, or are forced to by a more proportional voting system, Griffin and his scummy ilk will soon fall back into irrelevance. Until then, we have a problem on our hands, and need to start coming up with less sensationalistic ways of dealing with it.
Real danger of far-right terrorism
Nick Griffin
Johann Hari has a piece in today’s Independent warning of a real danger of right-right extremists planting bombs.
The campaign I am talking about is not being planned by jihadis or fringe Irish nationalists but by white “neo-Nazis” who want to murder Asians, black people, Jews and gays in the bizarre belief it will trigger a “race war”.
They have struck before. Exactly a decade ago, a 22-year-old member of the British National Party called David Copeland planted bombs in Brixton, Brick Lane (where I live), and a gay pub in Old Compton Street. He managed to lodge a nail deep in a baby’s skull, and to murder a pregnant woman, her gay best friend, and his partner. He bragged: “My aim was political. It was to cause a racial war in this country. There’d be a backlash from the ethnic minorities, then all the white people would go out and vote BNP.”
Hari says that the police have made a number of arrests recently but this have received virtually no media attention. Bombing methods and encouragement circulate on far-right websites.
What has received attention, of course, is jihardist plots. But those who have taken this attention as a reason to blame all Muslims for the actions of a tiny minority are reluctant to apply the same arguments to themselves.
If Martin Amis was consistent, he should now declare: “The white community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from Hampshire or from Surrey … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”
Saying that the BNP should be allowed into forums like BBC Question Time – so “sunlight” can be shone in their face – he suggests that people like Nick Griffin should be forensically challenged over far-right violence because it tolerates it within its ranks.
He claims he is “strongly” opposed to these freelance attacks – yet he has kept violent attackers in his senior team.
His chief lieutenant for years was a man called Tony Lecomber, who was jailed for three years in the 1980s for plotting to blow up the offices of a left-wing political party. After he was released, he and a gang then beat a Jewish teacher unconscious. When he was freed after another three years inside, he was swiftly promoted through the BNP ranks. He was only ditched after he approached a Liverpool hitman to discuss how they could “take out” a cabinet minister.
One of the leading figures in the BNP’s online operation, Lambertus Nieuwhof, tried to blow up a mixed-race school in South Africa in 1992. The BNP is happy to have him nonetheless. Nieuwhof says: “Everybody should be allowed to make a mistake.”
The BNP is not directly organising violence, but it has tolerated violent madmen in its midst, and its arguments have encouraged violence. Griffin has demanded “rights for whites with well-directed boots and fists”. He reacted to the Soho nail-bomb by one of his own party’s members by attacking the victims, saying they were “flaunting their perversion in front of the world’s journalists, [and had] showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures disgusting”.
Let Griffin speak his filth to the nation, and sweat under David Dimbleby’s forensic questioning. He will only discredit himself.
Calling for far more attention on this very real threat, Hari says “the next person to bomb Britain might not look like Mohammed Sidiq Khan – he might look like me.”
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BBC and BNP: It’s About Ratings?
James Macintyre argues the BBC’s decision to invite the BNP’s Nick Griffin onto Question Time had nothing to do with impartiality or freedom of speech:
The BBC is not being completely honest when it says it is inviting Nick Griffin on to Question Time because the BNP leader was elected as an MEP in June. “By winning representation in the European Parliament, the BNP has demonstrated evidence of electoral support at a national level,” a spokesman has said. “This is not a policy about the BNP. It’s a policy about impartiality.” In fact, the proposal was doing the rounds when I was a producer there more than two years ago. This was long before the BNP’s “breakthrough”, which suggests that the move is, in reality, “about the BNP”.
It was always a ridiculous argument to suggest that they should be allowed air time merely because they’d achieved representative office – would the BBC allow them a party political broadcast advocating the drowning of African immigrants? I saw an excellent suggestion on Twitter the other day, that the other parties taking place in the broadcast should all field non-white participants, but it remains to be seen whether or not the BBC has the editorial savvy needed to prevent the BNP using its prime-time appearance as either a bully pulpit or excuse for martyrdom. Even David Dimbleby has found it hard to lay a glove on him on election night broadcasts in recent months, which should give cause for concern. Macintyre might well be right – having him on Question Time might be the problem, when programmes like Newsnight would be much better suited to provide the hard edged questioning he and his party so richly deserve.
Let the BNP Speak
It’s almost sacreligious in some circles to say it, but the BBC was right to invite BNP leader Nick Griffin onto Question Time:
Nick Griffin, the BNP leader who was elected to the European parliament in June, is expected to be on the show in October. The corporation has decided that the far-right party deserves more airtime because it has demonstrated “electoral support at a national level”.
The move has caused consternation among politicians, with some Labour MPs and at least one cabinet minister pledging to boycott Question Time. They fear the BNP will use the publicity to promote a racist agenda.
I can understand why, but freedom of speech surely has to apply to people you don’t like as much as people you do, otherwise it’s pretty meaningless. It’s not as if Nick Griffin doesn’t have a constituency – he does – and part of the reason why has been the refusal of mainstream politics to address that fact. In an age where people see their needs being increasingly met by non-traditional political parties, he’s used his isolation to paint himself as an outsider who knows how to speak for a significant number of people who consider themselves left behind by mainstream politics; to pretend that isn’t the case is to court disaster. But of course just blithely inviting him onto the show and hoping that his arguments get soundly thrashed also courts disaster – those who complain that his presence on the show will legitimise the racists’ agenda do have a point, and why tolerate intolerance anyway? Bart Cammaerts suggests:
that extreme right parties should not be ignored altogether and the societal tensions and conflicts they are the symptom of, even less so. But the media should expose extreme right parties for what they really are and lay barren internal conflicts (just as with other parties) rather then give such parties and their representatives a platform to repeat their discourses of hate and exclusion.
Journalists should furthermore be very aware of the dangers of legitimizing extreme right discourses when reporting on the extreme right and when interviewing their representatives.
Pluralism should be radical in a democracy, but for vibrant multi-cultural and ethnical democracies to be able to survive, a common ground relating to basic values such as equality, respect, solidarity, difference, etc. is crucial as well. Popper’s paradox of tolerance sums it up pretty neatly, up until what point can intolerance be tolerated before it destroys tolerance all together?
(via Charlie Beckett)
I think he has a point – if the BBC are determined to go down this route, then very difficult and contrasting issues will quickly be in tension and need to be kept in check. The BNP should be as free to speak its mind as UKIP, Respect and the Greens, but only on condition that it agrees to use its freedom responsibly – there’s no freedom to incite racial hatred after all, and nor should there be. David Dimbleby and the show’s editors must also be prepared to examine the legitimate social issues which have in part accounted for the nationalists’ rise to greater prominence – doing so will undoubtedly provide an important journalistic insight into forces at play within the BNP (and amongst its constituents), and hopefully begin to expose and explain the gaps in their own support which the parliamentary parties have not yet fully understood. Philip Hensher is right when he says the BBC isn’t obliged, in the way it claims, to represent every political opinion, but I don’t think that’s the issue in play. Not prominently challenging the BNP as it continues to build its mystique as the party of outsiders, while the gap between rich and poor is larger than ever, causing ever more Britons to feel left out and left behind, would be the height of journalistic irresponsibility.
