I am sure that comrades Paul Richards and Bonnie Greer gcomments goes a long way see below:
Lots of people watched last night’s Question Time. Despite not wanting to boost their viewing figures, even by one, I was one of them. We saw Griffin’s unconvincing ‘hard-done-to’ act (‘I’ve been relentlessly attacked and demonised’); his eccentric description of white people as aborigines who’ve been here for ’17,000 years, since the ice melted’; his slur about Jack Straw’s father being imprisoned as a conscientious objector; his highly- selective view of Churchill’s statements on race and immigration; his constant complaining about being ‘misquoted’ and being the ‘most loathed man in Britain’; his justification for sharing a platform with David Duke from KKK, and visiting Libya; his nonsense about ‘genocide’, ‘homosexuality’ and the ‘ultra-leftist BBC’. He did not come across well.
The audience resembled a rowdy student union meeting at times: angry people shouting, peppered with small amounts of applause. At other times, the questioners had better lines than the politicians. The guy with the line about a one-way ticket to the South Pole deserved his applause. The young Jewish guy nailed him on Holocaust denial. Griffin squirmed, but failed to repudiate his underlying denial of the facts of the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews. The woman who said she was in a civil partnership, and told Griffin the feeling of ‘revulsion’ was mutual, spoke for millions.
Jack Straw did his best in the circumstances. Unfortunately his reference to Dr Strangelove (a 1950s Peter Sellers film) went over the heads of his mostly young audience. He messed up his answer on immigration, and Baroness Warsi got a clap for challenging him on the issue. She rightly called Griffin a ‘thoroughly deceptive man’. Bonnie Greer made a good point about the multi-cultural Romans’ legacy in the British gene-pool, and the BNP’s ‘wacky history’. Chris Huhne was typically underwhelming.
It was not good television. It was disjointed and ill-tempered. But it gave the BNP 72 hours of wall-to-wall coverage, and, I fear, hundreds of new members and donors. In short, the BBC’s invitation to Nick Griffin, the screening of the programme, and the Labour party’s willingness to take part last night, has set back, not advanced, the fight against fascism and racism.
I remember my dear late father (RAF, retd.) telling me about the first time he came across eastern Europeans coming to the UK, doing jobs that should have been done by Englishmen. They were flying Hurricanes and Spitfires, and in May 1940 we were rather glad of them; even more than when their grandchildren came back to fix our radiators.
It is of course crass and ahistorical for the BNP to expropriate images from the second world war in support of their cause. That was a war fought by men and women of many races, religions and nationalities, against the Nazis’ vision of a totalitarian state enslaving the non-Aryan peoples of Europe, and murdering all the Jews until there were none left.
As far as I recall, people with views like Nick Griffin’s were not asked to join in the allies’ fight. They were locked up under the defence of the realm act. As our knowledge of the Holocaust increases, as more and more documentary evidence is amassed, as the last voices from the war are recorded and archived, we gain a greater understanding of the politics and organisation of Nazi Germany and its allies.
That’s what the ‘no platform’ policy is all about. ‘No platform’ says there are people, views and organisations which are not part of the spectrum of opinion that exists within a democratic politics. They are beyond the pale. They should be treated differently, because they have the whiff of Belsen about them. ‘No platform’ says politics is not an extension of the Oxford Union; it is a matter of life and death. You can’t ‘debate’ with people who are not playing by the same rules.
I was schooled in the ‘no platform’ policy. At Salford University in the 1980s, we didn’t have a debating club. We had a Labour Club. We threw eggs at Margaret Thatcher, picketed Kenneth Baker and got charged by police horses, and the idea of sharing a platform with a fascist was impossible to contemplate. There was only one active Tory on campus (he’s currently standing to be the next Tory MP for Reading.).
The electoral success of the BNP, following its deliberate strategy of obfuscation and concealment of its true credo, makes ‘no platform’ more, not less, important. To treat the BNP like an opponent to be debated with totally vindicates Griffin’s strategy. He can say to his own internal hard-liners: look it’s working. Jack Straw is debating us on national television. I’m landing punches.
The Labour party should not have reversed its position on ‘no platform’. That was a stupid tactical error which strengthens the fascists’ hand. It creates a precedent that every other political programme editor will be able to cite. It undermines local Labour candidates fighting BNP candidates for the council or parliament. It creates the same mistakes that the French political class made when they thought they could out-argue Le Pen and the Front National, before they won millions of votes in the 1984 Euro-elections.
Or, dare I say, the mistakes made by the German political class when confronted by Hitler.
Bonnie Greer reveals what she really thought of Griffin
The Evening Standard has some fascinating snippets from Bonnie Greer, the playright and British Museum trustee who sat next to Nick Griffin on Question Time last night. She calls the experience "probably the weirdest and most creepy experience of my life":
"It was the strangest thing because as I came out of my dressing room prepared for combat, it was as if he'd been waiting for me in the corridor". "I was the last to emerge and when he saw me, he turned and smiled his greasy smile and clumsily half extended a hand. I ignored it and thought to myself: what are you about? Are you forgetting I'm black? Are you forgetting you called me a black history fabricator? Are you trying to show me you aren't racist?"
"We were seated next to each other and as we were having our microphones attached, he leaned towards me like I was his new best friend and tried to make small talk. "Bonnie, how many times have you been on?" he asked. "Bonnie, do you find it scary?" I looked him straight in the eye. "No," I replied sharply, "but you might."
"I spent the entire night with my back turned to him. At one point, I had to restrain myself from slapping him. But it was worth it because he was totally trounced. I had thought we'd face a formidable orator, somebody who knew his facts and had his ducks in a row but the guy was a mess! From the moment the audience began shooting questions, it was a case of the Emperor's new clothes. He was completely exposed as an evasive liar who couldn't even stand up his own quotes and looked like a buffoon."
Greer also talks about her background in Chicago, and her father's experience of coming to Britain as part of Patton's army during the Second World War.
