BNP 1, BBC nil: How the BBC botched it against the BNP

After October 2009’s ‘Question Time’ episode – better known as the Nick Griffin show – and the roundhouse level of disapproval laid on the feet of the BNP, I still sit here in wonder at how the BBC got it so wrong. I was blogging on Twitter during the program and was singularly unimpressed with Griffin (as it seems most people with either of the 2 key senses for engaging a teleprogram apparently felt), and this was due in no small factor to Griffin’s own performance (nervous, unwillingly to stand behind his comments, and apparently wasn’t even prepared enough to do so even with legal support to help evade subsequent prosecution).

And I’ll admit: I winced when I saw all the personal vitriol being hurled at Griffin, and not because I’m sympathetic to his views (as a black American woman living in London, it’d be a bit of an own goal), but because I could see the simmering heat of victimhood being stoked in the far reaches of Griffin’s party. And also, I’m not ashamed to admit it was difficult as a sentient human being to watch someone shaking like a rehabbing alcoholic during the first days of detox reduced to begging for cough syrup, and who clearly did not possess enough internal mettle to stand behind his own statements, and therefore certainly not having the integrity to lead his constituency in any meaningful way…And if Bonnie Greer’s comments regarding Griffin’s off-camera solicitations are to be believed, then we get a sense of a guy who just wasn’t ready for Prime Time.

So while the BBC was right to allow him on the program, the show’s production just devolved into a ‘Pin the Tail on the Racist’ – and it’s this point that leads me to feel the Question Time episode was a massive entry into the Fail column for British politics and its viewing public.

Here’s why: the post-game coverage was predictably boo-hiss against the BNP (fair enough), yet not thoughtful or contemplative. In so many ways, most folks don’t seem get the long game the BNP are potentially capable of. All this personal abuse being hurled at Griffin is just histrionics taking away from observing the bigger picture. From the blanket indictments and demonisation I see on Twitter and elsewhere in social media being directed towards Griffin, the average person would be forgiven in forgetting that this man isn’t just one guy with a whacked out and reprehensible viewpoint: he represents a national constituency of disenfranchised, working-class, non-immigrant white people.

And let’s face it: these people aren’t following Griffin because of his stellar command of language, persuasion, or possession of a sternly erect spine. What that should tell us is that the BNP have a pretty hard-core group of grass-roots sympathisers who find themselves clustering independently towards a set of values on their own, without someone with the rhetorical skills of a Hitler or even a President Obama leading them there (and no, the irony re Obama is not lost on me). And all they’d need to do to further legitimise themselves would be to get their own Aryan version of Obama: handsome, articulate, persuasive, intelligent, and with just a whiff of Vision.

If the BNP do find this person to head their party without the Government addressing the immigration issue and other legitimate points alluded to in the BNP’s rhetoric which are not race-specific, then watch out: everybody will be wishing for the leaf-shaking, knuckle-dragging, and otherwise hapless Griffster.