Politics isn’t the same as celebrity gossip in heat magazine, it is not just about ‘drawing power’. There are positive and negative feelings reinforced with each political appearance, and a bad appearance by the bnp won’t be good for them unless people felt it was because of those like straw being bullies. In which case the problem won’t be the bnp’s appearance, it’ll be the way the other parties handled it.

But I suppose only serious “activists” such as yourself are remotely qualified to hold an opinion.

‘The new divide in British politics: Us and Him’

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7611/

Highly recommended.

If we’re going to focus on effectiveness then yes the effectiveness of demonstrations can be a moot point. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that giving the BNP a platform has been effective in giving them massive publicity and any publicity for the BNP is good publicity. The demonstrators didn’t cause this problem and to target them for insult is to miss the point.

no no! cjcjcjcjcjc is right. Nick Griffin is just a normal politician. And frankly, because we don’t want to piss off any sympathetic voters we should all be extra nice to him. How else do you deal with a Holocaust denier on a panel next to you?

Querying whether the way in which the QT format was changed was effective in discrediting Griffin or whether it might have been slightly counter-productive is not being nice to him. You really aren’t the only person who finds the BNP objectionable Sunny, and people who disagree with the best method of combating them aren’t therefore sympathetic to them.

Waving placards saying ‘Smash the BNP’ might be an excellent way of relieving people’s feelings, and giving them a nice warm glow that they are ‘doing something’ to stop the rise of the BNP. But it doesn’t seem to be very effective.

I don’t know.
How did Livingstone deal with Qaradawi?

But seriously, how the panellists behave is obviously up to them.

But it was quite funny when 45 minutes in Dimbleby said “we don’t want the whole show to be about the BNP” when that was precisely what it had been set up to be!

Of course, for you and the UAF – I know…you think they’re idiots too but in this respect you are alike – it’s all about feeling good about yourself.

Maybe the format helped the anti-BNP cause, maybe it didn’t.
I don’t know.
But it is a legit question, surely?

no no! cjcjcjcjcjc is right. Nick Griffin is just a normal politician. And frankly, because we don’t want to piss off any sympathetic voters we should all be extra nice to him. How else do you deal with a Holocaust denier on a panel next to you?

I mean, we don’t want to piss of the army of arm-chair activists who are really “pained” by the growth of the BNP and find them “abhorrent” but “understand” why people are drawn to them and support them, and why its not good to be “nasty” towards Griffin.

The trouble is that if they’d have food a normal format then the bnp would have looked more, not less, legitimate. They wanted to talk about labour failing the sortiers, and hijacking the lib dem line on the war, that is their latest strategy. Maybe they should have been allowed to.

But seriously, if they can’t sit there and explain core basics of their own essence such as ethnicity, repatriation, and the truth of what they’ve said in the part them how have they earned to be treated like a respectable party?

On that programme perhaps…though that was one of the questions and Warsi (and Dimbleby) rather destroyed Straw…

I didn’t say that.

I understand the criticism of ‘pantomime politics’, but I also think that – given the invitation – there was no real alternative.

I also think it would have been a catastrophic mistake to attempt an in-depth discussion of the underlying reasons as to why people vote BNP, such as intense feelings of disenfranchisement, economic dislocation, etc..

I have referred to the show several times as farcical, as presenting ‘pantomime’ politics and as a disaster for the integrity (supposed impartiality) of the BBC.

As cjcjc and Tim J have pointed out, the corruption of the “usual format” of the show – saying nothing about the content – may well prove counter-productive.

Of course I don’t remotely object to a fierce interrogation of Griffin’s obnoxious views on race; I do, however, object to the format. And yes, indeed – I would have liked to have seen a more in-depth discussion of the underlying reasons as to why people vote BNP, such as intense feelings of disenfranchisement, economic dislocation, etc.

Clearly this makes me some kind of right-wing lunatic myself, though nothing could be further from the truth.

67 – “… that ‘right wingers’ (presumably like Jay? which is an odd description to say the least) were criticising the BBC…”

Tim J, are you standing up for the integrity of my left-wing views?
How very noble. Ta!

(I wonder what you think of the BNP’s hi-jacking of Churchill… )

Honestly, does the ‘more concerned than thou’ / ‘bash the beeb at every opportunity’ act never get tiring?

That’s my position too.

But I think the “twisting of the normal format” thing is being somewhat overplayed. It’s been a while since I watched QT, but a) when something exceptional happens, it’s usual to dedicate a good chunk of the program to it; b) the questions are usually geared around the panel anyway – if there’s a Green on, they’ll concentrate more on the environment, etc. So when they’ve got a nazi on, it seems appropriate to spend some time talking about the holocaust…

Given the invitation, I think the Beeb and the other panellists did exactly the right thing. It would have seemed a bit silly to have been asking questions about the Post Office with a chap in a brown uniform to your right. It was therefore both inevitable and right that the show went as it did.

But the point I was making was whether this was the right format at all. If the argument is being made that, as leader of a party that has two MEPs, Griffin has a right to representation on Question Time, it strikes me as a bit contradictory then to change the nature of the show specifically to accommodate him. Either he is a party leader like any other, and should participate on the same basis as the others, or he isn’t and he shouldn’t.

I’m not sure.

I would if I were on Ready Steady Cook

To put it another way: the BNP’s major selling point is that there are an anti-establishment party – ‘no-one likes us, we don’t care’. Having him on a panel show where the representatives of the three establishment parties, plus the chairman, devote the entire programme to saying what a horrible, nasty, unacceptable party the BNP is doesn’t seem to me to be a good way of combating this.

Quite possibly not. I’m not saying we should expect one TV show to achieve much. All told it’ll probably make little difference.

All I am saying is that if the BBC had to have him on, I reckon that last night’s was about the best outcome we could expect. And I’m taking issue with Jay, who seems to object to the way everyone was so mean to him, and like kept pointing out what horrible nazi he is.

There may be a time and a place for enganging with the very realk concerns of the white working classes, but when you’re sat next to a fascist who’s desperately trying to use this as his big moment to convince everyone that just he’s just an ordinary decent bloke, then that isn’t it.

So damn straight it turned into the ‘Get Griffin Show’. If you were on a TV show with a holocaust denier, what would you do, ignore it, and witter on about the post office instead? No – there was a strong moral imperative on the other panellists to confront and expose him, and they pretty much stepped up.