I think there is a risk that the BNP’s support will not be dented following QT, mainly due to the perception (which is apparently more widespread than many on here would care to acknowledge) that Griffin was ‘victimised’.

While most of us would react to the ‘victimisation’ line with ‘poor diddums [muffled laughter'] (as I would), I think there is a danger that anything positive, such as Griffin appearing to be inconsistent, wrong and out of his depth, could be cancelled out by calls of ‘victimisation’.

Only time will tell – hopefully the forthcoming YouGov poll will find my worries unfounded.

griffin was clearly exposed as a k**b on question time. It was great for showing the racist and frankly incoherent basis of his views and his party.

However, once we got past the outrage at his very presence, we never really addressed the question of why a significant number of people feel that he represents them more than the rest of the political class. Until that is answered programmes like QT, no matter how badly he comes across, won’t destroy the BNP.

#1 But Griffin will always claim victimisation whenever he is attacked by the majority of people present, as he always will be in any room that’s representative of the general population.

And if, in fact, the evidence suggests that they have gained money, members or support after Question Time, what does that say about the strategy of giving them a platform and debating with them? What needs to be changed in the future to make this tactic more successful?

Well, QT has never exactly been a “debating” show, and last night’s show was clearly set up from the start as a personal attack-fest – whether for good or ill from the BNP’s POV who knows?

So I’m not sure the “debating with them” strategy has yet been tried.

And the Tories, Liberal Democrats, BNP and the audience queued up to denounce the government for being too soft on immigrants.

Including a very articulate black bloke.

Sorry, Don, but as the population is projected now to rise to 70m, this is a debate from which it will not be possible to hide.

#3 Granted, but the this time it seemed that Griffin was picking up on victimisation claims that people had already made on some of the online newspaper blogs during and just after the broadcast.

Now I’m not naive, who knows who these anonymous posters were, a lot began with ‘I would never vote for the BNP but….it’s disgusting how they victimised him’ (which could be reminiscent of ‘I’m not a racist, but….’), so for all I know these posts could have been made by ‘pro-active’ BNP sympathisers.

What matters is that the victimisation line has appeared in the media, so now it’s all about perception – will the average voter agree with this perception? Like you say, Griffin always makes the claim and so there is always the risk that he could persuade people to believe it.

I would not take much notice of the newspapers reaction to last nights debate. They would have said that Griffin was an idiot even if he had been very good.

All the major newspapers are pushing their own agenda which is they don’t want votes taken from their own parties of choice. Ie Labour or tory.

pointless question, unfortunately. One debate isn’t going to drastically change anything with out real footwork done by the other parties to follow it up. What you have now is publicly available evidence of what griffin is like. Use it, he can’t hide from that performance.

But without knowing every bit of information about what will happen before the next election how can anyone realistically answer your question?

mainly due to the perception (which is apparently more widespread than many on here would care to acknowledge) that Griffin was ‘victimised’.

Yeah because being nice to him is really going to get us a drop in BNP support?

Of course you could argue that Griffin is really nothing more than an honest Tory.

I bet their are a few in the shires who don’t have any problem with what he says about brown pwople. Of course it won’t make any change in their vote. They will always vote Tory whoever they put up.

I am inclined to agree with this article:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/5465393/griffin-to-complain-about-lynch-mob-question-time.thtml

” the panel missed the opportunity to demolish the BNP’s policies, by concentrating on illustrating that the BNP is ideologically racist. What a waste of time; we know it is…If last night marks the beginning of the formal inclusion of Griffin into mainstream debate, then it is vital that centrist politicians do some homework and demonstrate that Griffin is a political lightweight as well as objectionable.”

And this one:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/5465648/liberalism-is-good-beautiful-and-true.thtml

“I was uncomfortably reminded that the message of an extreme reactionary is always surprisingly seductive, tempting. The essential appeal is the promise that life can be radically simpler. This strikes a chord in the vast majority of us.”

Indeed the promise that life can be radically simpler is the appeal of almost all extremist groups.

Isn’t changing the rules (of the way QT is normally run in this case) a bit pathetic though?

And – just possibly, will you even admit the possibility, just the possibility, counterproductive?

Glad to see the anti-BBC crowd have now made it to this thread too…

From ITV “The leader of the British National Party is launching an official complaint about his treatment on the BBC’s Question Time programme, claiming he was “bullied”. ”

HA HA HA

I said Griffin is just an honest Tory. He is even sounding like the tories now….. complaining about BBC bias against him. Tebbit would be so proud.

@Sunny, so giving credence to this ‘we’re the underdogs unfairly treated by a traitorous Establishment’ line that he’s putting about today is going to really rid them of any new potential support?

Truth is that it’s quite difficult to changes people’s perceptions. If people do think the focus of the show was too much on bashing Griffin, then it could result in them being more open to his ideas. No amount of Twittering against Griffin can change that, chances are that the demographic we (i.e. us and the BNP) are fighting over have never been on Twitter.

I’m absolutely not saying that we should do nothing, all I am saying is that he could emerge with increased support.

Changing the programme’s format was just common sense. Given that all attention was focused on how Griffin would perform, and how he would react to a negative audience and a negative panel, sticking to the normal routine wouldn’t have worked. If Griffin is invited again, I guess they’ll use a slightly less modified format; the BNP is not a normal party and does not deserve normal manners. Personally, I’d prefer it if they invited Andrew Brons, who is far more likely to say something that is both bizarre and offensive.

The preface by David Dimbleby that attended each question was a neat trick. It provided the background information that may be familiar to political followers but not to those who rarely watch QT. Normally, I blank out Dimbleby’s comments; on this occasion it worked, though I would hesitate to suggest that they try the trick again.

How will BNP support be affected? I don’t spend much time with active BNP supporters because they always end up thumping me. I don’t spend time with potential BNP voters because the BNP is electorally inactive where I live. So I don’t have a subjective clue. And I don’t think any visitor here, including the Tory interlopers, has a clue either until we see some independent quantitative numbers. Forget opinion polls too; the sample is generally too small to spot changes in BNP popularity.

Oh dear> Sayeeda Warsi says no such thing as a bogus asylum seeker.
From TimMontgomerie’s twitter feed.

Whys this guy playing the bnps game.

Don:

Last night will have hurt, certainly, and it may go some way towards spiking Griffin’s efforts to attract middle-class support a la the ‘BNP ballerina’.

Whether it does any damage in the C2DE demographic, where the BNP have been picking up most of their votes is another matter. QT, itself, may not have hit that market, but getting roundly monstered by The Sun and The Daily Star this morning might well knock a bit of the gloss off him.

Jack fumbled the ball on the immigration question where he could and should have laid right into Griffin over the BNP’s long history of bullshit scaremongering. That might have put Warsi and Huhne a bit more on the back foot, but realistically that horse bolted after the last GE when Blair went straight down the Daily Mail line despite the kicking we gave Howard over his ‘are you thinking…’ posters.

With any luck last night created a chink in Griffin’s armour that can be exploited if only we’re willing to put the time, effort and resources into fighting the ground war.

There are a couple of things that need doing right from the off.

One of these, unfortunately, is either taking UAF out of the equation or taking the SWP out of UAF because they’re just a fucking liability. That’s a shame because some of the local UAF crews, especially Lancaster and Kirklees, are doing a damn good job at the coalface but as inevitably happens when the SWP get involved in anything, it just puts to many brainless cunts into the mix.

The other thing that needs sorting is a few of our own regional offices, where there are too many people without the stomach for taking the fight to the BNP.

Where I live we’ve had to completely bypass the party machine because RO have got in into their heads that negative campaigning is bad thing, even when, as has been the case locally, we’d got one BNP councillor who was a certifiable truther fucknet, not to mention an old school unreconstructed Jew-hating son of the Reich, while their former group leader, who ran on a Laura Norder platform, turned out to have a son who was a one teenager crime wave and a bad habit of no cooperating with the Old Bill when things kicked off in the pub he ran.

(That pub used to be the local BNP HQ – until he got his licence pulled and we had the shit-hole demolished and flogged the land off for housing.)

Every time we tried to go after these arseholes, all we got from RO was ‘but that’s negative campaigning’, so we ended up using the Ministry as a conduit to get things out into the local press and nailed them that way, instead, the upshot of which being that we’ve already cut their numbers and are looking for a big push to take out what’s left in the next two locals.

@14 Nick: “Truth is that it’s quite difficult to changes people’s perceptions.”

That’s a fair argument. It took Volkswagen eight or so years (guesstimate) to change perception of the Skoda brand.

I don’t think that argument applies to the BNP because it is a new brand for many voters. Potential supporters may be unaware of the BNP’s history and its connection with the National Front (a very negative brand). For many white disaffected people, the BNP is something new; they’ve never had the chance to vote for a BNP councillor or MEP before; the BNP has all of the right tick boxes and has no record of local failure.

So attacking the BNP for its history is the right thing to do. We’re not even trying to change perceptions; we are merely alerting people to the fact that the BNP is not a “clean slate” but a ragtag of miscreants and thugs who crept around the political fringe thirty years ago. New brands suffer more from criticism than established brands.

As I wrote earlier, we won’t know the stats on BNP popularity for months. And I’m an old liberal fart who believes in engagement and debate. So putting Griffin on QT was either an inspired rebranding exercise by liberal lefties or an act of idiocy.

I suggest you log on to the BBC Have Your Say page and look at the most recommended postings if you want to wake up to what people are really thinking as opposed to what they are being told to think.

Don,

I think you are an idiot.

You ask: “So would anyone like to venture a prediction about how we could measure the damage that this has done to the BNP?”

You surely know that he success odffascist parties is primarily dependent upon economic factors effecting the working class and the petty bourgeoisie, not upon the outcome of a TV “debate”.

There is a legitiomate debate to be had ab out allowing Grffin onto “Question Time”, but it’s nothing whatsoever to do with your irrelevant argumanet about debating the BNP (as any working class anti-fascist who’d had to confront the NF in a factory could tell you).

Get real, Don, and learn how fascism needs to be defeated in the working class and not (just) amongst the petty bourgeoise idiots and moralists around the SWP and UAF.

abc:

I suggest you don’t confuse BNP racists spamming the BBC Have Your Say page with what people are really thinking.

There are two questions here really: (a) did the mainstream parties successfully undermine Griffin’s arguments in front of millions of people; and (b) should Griffin have been allowed on the show even if he did win converts?

Most of us would agree with (a); that Griffin looked a total ballbag. Those of us who wanted him on in that expectation are generally satisfied with the result (even though the only speaker who genuinely shined was Greer) while those prophesying doom will be either relieved or else a bit peeved they didn’t get to say I told you so.

There’s still question (b) though. This was ultimately a matter of free speech, not about ‘giving the BNP a platform’ (those who elected him did that. If you want to remove that platform you have to take away his votes by democratic means). For some of us that principle is above temporary political expediency, and we’d stick by it whether it is Griffin or some equally abhorent loon who has managed to whip up enough of a constituency to get elected.

Dear DHG

Perhaps you are right and BNP supporters have organised themselves to hijack the BBC Have Your Say page – I have no evidence one way or the other. However I would have thought that the BNP’s opponents are equally or indeed more likely to adopt such a tactic.

Assuming that the comments are genuine (which I at least think is more likely than not) these comments do make interesting reading as they stand in stark contrast to media reporting of people’s reactions to yesterday’s QT programme.

Can anyone suggest another forum where it might be possible to read comments posted from a very wide group of ‘ordinary’ people?

Evidence is here http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/23/bbc-question-time-nick-griffin and also evidence is well noted by commenters here, as whenever a thread mentioning the BNP goes up it is usually spammed by BNP supporters whose comments swing from out and out bile to the more cleverly disguised bigotry that Griffin peddles.

As for BNP opponents adopting the tactic, not really as the idea of spamming a message board to somehow convince people that backward thinking policies and racist ignorance is right is not needed when you have common sense and decency on your side.

I have no doubt the comments are left by genuine racists but again, you seem to be confusing comments that are supported by around 700 people on a website with a large swath of public opinion.

As for your request of a place to find comments that represent ordinary people, I wouldn’t worry about that and just take the terrible voting results that the BNP always get in an election as a public consensus.

@23

‘Ordinary people’ have jobs and lives, ‘topsy turvy’, ‘rightyrightwing’ and their ilk seem to have nothing but time.

Some of us have been following HYS for years, that it happens to be over run by facist sympathisers is not a secret I’m afraid. Indeed somebody who once worked on it recently told around half of HTTP referrers come from the same website.

Dear DHG
Thanks for the link to the Guardian article – that is interesting and reports on what I observed but it isn’t evidence of organised hijacking. I remain undecided.

Please may I ask a question and I welcome all responses? Would you describe a regime with a policy of monoculturalism, very strict immigration control designed to maintain this monoculturalism, racial uniformity and “social harmony” a fascist regime?

abc, are you ignoring what is said at #25, I sense that you are one of those BNP trolls we spoke of.

As for your silly question, I sense yet another loaded motive in this, I care little for whether it is fascist or not, fascism is a complex doctrine so on those criteria alone it would not be fascist, it would be stupid, myopic and bigoted but not fascist per se.

Dear DHG
Sorry I didn’t see your comment 25 as I didn’t refresh the page before posting. But all the same I am undecided – I am not going to take your word for it.

I am surprised at how rude and unpleasant people are on these sorts of websites – “BNP troll” – you know nothing about me. Allow me to tell you something of myself – I used to work in Israel on a commune founded by holocaust survivors. I have spent most of my working life working in Asia. I have an Japanese wife.

I hope the debate can remain even tempted and rational.

Back to my “silly question” – have you ever been to Japan or South Korea? Both those countries have a policy of maintaining monoculturalism. Perhaps you and your UAF friends will want to attack the Japanese embassy tomorrow?

@ 18 Charlieman

I agree that many people may not know the BNP’s history regarding the NF – we definitely need to make people aware of this.

Regarding the BNP being a new brand, you are certainly right when you cite people not having had the chance to vote for the BNP before in their local areas. Personally, I can’t see how anyone can not be aware of the BNP’s history or what they stand for, but perhaps what you say is totally right.

As for alerting people to the BNP, as per the ‘interrogation’ Griffin received on QT, then I am all for it.

My initial comments in my earlier posts were more borne out of surprise at the title of this topic: ‘How much will the BNP vote drop by?’. I mean, it’s quite a complacent assumption, isn’t it? Because we know what he’s like, because we expect his inconsistencies to at least show (and perhaps a hint of his real racism, if we are lucky), there seem to be this automatic assumption that every single viewer will come away seeing it how we saw it. Well, I’m stating the obvious, but that’s not necessarily the case.

Online reaction – well, I have avoided HYS for years, it is one of the most unrepresentative internet forums for British politics. The comments I read elsewhere, well the majority were critical of Griffin’s performance, but others mentioned that they thought he had been unfairly treated. It’s natural to wonder how many other non-BNP supporting felt the same as those other comments – and I do hope that not many people did.

@ 22 Shatterface – while I have not struck the most optimistic note on what the impact of QT might be, I most definitely would not peeved should my fear turn out to be unfounded

Don Paskini,

I think we are moving into the real propganda war now. The BNP are claiming that, as a result of Griffins’ performance on QT they have been inundated with membership requests. Up to 9000 according to them.

There is nowt as queer as folks, but, frankly, that is verging on incredible.

We are also seeing Ministers claiming that Griffins’ performance will result in something called a ‘poll boost’ for the BNP in advance of next years election.

Really?

I watched it live, and watched it again today. Griffin was very poor.

Frankly the only thing I took from the whole performance was that Bonnie Greer is an excellent panelist and that the Question Time audience really do seem to me to be pretty representative. Although, as Sunny has said elsewhere, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

abc

Fine, remain undecided but it seems to be based on a refusal to acknowledge evidence or perhaps a lack of knowledge on the subject matter itself, ie: the BNP.

My assumption on you being a possibel BNP troll was that, these threads attract them and your words, whether intended or not, contain an air of pro-BNP sentiment.

It’s either that or you think that the BNP actually represents vast swathes of the UK, when it does not. You also do not acknowledge the points that have been made as rebuttals to your ideas.

As for your question, which I answered already, do Japan and South Korea actually have government policy to maintain a level of racial purity as the BNP would want? And by this I mean an actualy law or legislation.

Second question, do you think that is a good idea?

And, you wonder why I attach BNP status to you when you say things like:

“Perhaps you and your UAF friends will want to attack the Japanese embassy tomorrow?”

DHG
Ref HYS – I have only seen testimonial evidence? Why should I take your word? I will make my own enquiries if I find time.

I don’t know the extent of the support for the BNP hence my question about whether any other forums existed that might point to an answer. Isn’t this thread about this very question.

As for threads like these attracting “BNP trolls” – presumably you welcome this so you can have a debate and they can read your articles etc and see your perspective.

Back to my question – you say you have answered already? Sorry I missed this. Unless you mean by saying it was silly? I hope not.

Japan and S Korea have maintained a very strict immigration policy since the war to maintain cultural identity etc. Perhaps you will want to go away and read about this. Also many other regimes in east asia have racist agendas. Take for example the regime in Malaysia with their “sons of the soil” policy placing ethnic Malays in the front of the queue for government jobs in front of ethnic Indians and Chinese.

Or perhaps look at the Thai Rak Thai party in Thailand. Few people who go on holiday to Thailand have any idea that in Thailand ethnic Thais really do come first – foreigners are not allowed to own land, they have to carry ID at all times on pain of imprisonment, immigration is tightly controlled and the idea of a white european becoming a “Thai” in their eyes is absurd.

And my point – policies that you find disgusting and vile etc are in fact the norm in east asia. I would welcome comments – please keep it polite.

abc @ 32,

Jolly good, you have researched a couple of Far Eastern regiemes and you think, what?

That they are spiffing ideas and that the UK should adopt them?

And to answer your question about fuzzy logic racism in the UK. So far it has peaked at 6%.

I am not the brightest bear on the planet, but even I know that the KKK are not exactly the sort of folk you want around to a dinner party. If I know that, then Griffin has kind of shot himself in the foot with folk that didn’t know about his associations with them.

For he admitted them and failed to deny them in any meaningful way. His excuse seemed to be a sort of ‘grooming’. Where have we heard that word before?

His ‘Yes, their were lots of dead Jews in WW2 shtick’, and his silence on the Holocaust won’t have made him any more chums either. It is certainly the case that lots of Jews died fighting the Nazis. Griffin is attempting to put that down to a sort of ‘consequence of war’ line. Fair enough, if you fight fascim, and die then that’s it. But his complete failure to explain or apologise for his Holocaust denialism, was a different level of defence. Murdering folk, just ’cause you can, is never acceptable. And the likes of Griffin that can’t even find it within himself to admit that he was at error just makes him smarmy and sleazy.

He has his own triangulation to effect. He has to appeal to more people than he does right now, and that can only be achieved by becoming more mainstream, because the mainstream is really not going to embrace a holocaust denying KKK platforming lunatic. And neither are they going to buy a used car salesman.

I think that is a trick that has, historically, been impossible to pull off in the UK.

@abc

If you want to really get a grip on the breathtaking inanity of many HYS posters you’d do well to browse http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/ . HYS’ collection of bigots and Middle Englanders is nothing new.

As per previous posts, these were the sort of examples I was worried about:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/23/bnp-nick-griffin-burnley-reaction

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/23/bnp-poll-boost-question-time

Apparently the YouGov poll is showing 22% saying that they’d ‘seriously consider voting’ BNP.

The example of Burnley is a unique one, given who they voted for. Nevertheless, it’s something to bare in mind.

“I suggest you don’t confuse BNP racists spamming the BBC Have Your Say page with what people are really thinking.”

Indeed, although I’d go even further. Reading the comments thread on any website is never a reliable indicator of what “people are really thinking” (no disrespect this site intended)

Dear Douglas

Yes I do think the UK should adopt an immigration policy similar to that in Japan and South Korea. This is a perfectly valid position to take and not remotely “extreme”. How can this be “extreme” given that this is the policy of one of our G8 partners and one of the most advanced and largest democracies in the world.

What Japan and S Korea demonstrate is that mass immigration and multiculturalism is not inevitable nor is supporting the multiculture project a morally superior position as it seems many on the left believe it is.

Mass immigration and multiculturalism is simply an experiment in social engineering and it is perfectly valid to take a view as the Japanese have done that you don’t want it.

I await the angry attacks. Please try to keep it civil – the Japanese afterall are well known for extreme politeness.

abc,

Yes I do think the UK should adopt an immigration policy similar to that in Japan and South Korea.

Well, in the flavour that you want to discuss this, jolly good for you!

Mass immigration and multiculturalism is simply an experiment in social engineering and it is perfectly valid to take a view as the Japanese have done that you don’t want it.

I’d like to define terms here, if you don’t mind, ’cause I wouldn’t want to cut across your extreme politeness here.

Why, perhaps do you say ‘mass immigration’ when you mean nothing of the sort?

Do you think the Polish and other European workers that came here after accession were a ‘mass immigration’?

Say, three quarters of a million temporary economic folk that had, according to the agreements we had reached, the right to be here? Just as you, abc, had the right to be there?

For this is the crux of the issue, is it not?

abc fears foreigners coming here and does not see the corollary, that we can go there. As weaknesses go, I’d have thought abc hadn’t a clue about treaties, or agreements or life in general, frankly.

But that would be hurtful to the extremely sensitive racist that now shares our space.

@38

“abc fears foreigners coming here and does not see the corollary, that we can go there.” Actually, I think the point he’s making is that, in the examples he cites, we can’t “go there” in quite the sense that you appear to mean.

“But that would be hurtful to the extremely sensitive racist that now shares our space.” Yes, obviously he absolutely must be a racist. I mean, there’s no other possible explanation for him pointing out that Japan, Korea, Thailand etc etc have different policies on immigration and citizenship, is there?

You’re not the sharpest tool in the box, are you Douglas?

Douglas

Don’t put words into my mouth please – that’s a tired old tactic.

I have lived and worked in east asia most of my life and I have a Japanese wife. But of course I will never be Japanese – the idea is absurd. I had a visa that needed to be renewed annually. My experiences in asia have informed my views and I am firmly of the view that people in the UK should wake up to the reality of how extreme and extraordinary the mass (I stress mass) immigration into the UK has been over recent decades and how in fact it is perfectly legitimate to question this and ask is it beneficial and how so?

Many other advanced nations have decided not to pursue this policy – there is an alternative eg Japan and S Korea. And DO NOT tell me that the people of Japan are vile and disgusting racists and all the other nonsense that usually gets thrown at people who say mass immigration should stop.

It seems to me that the “left” seeks to portray those that question mass immigration as inhuman nazis and fascist thugs etc – when in fact this simply does not stand up to strutiny – are the people and political leaders in Japan nazi thugs?? Of course they are not. They simply have a taken a different view on the merits of multiculturalism and mass immigration to the european left wing elite.

All the hysteria and ignorance that surrounds the debate re mass immigration has to stop. All those violent “anti – fascist” activists – I have no doubt that you think your cause is urgent and righteous, the fact is your cause is quixotic.

abc,

Which words did I place in your mouth?

And I thought I was playing nice!

Do you mean this perhaps?

abc fears foreigners coming here and does not see the corollary, that we can go there. As weaknesses go, I’d have thought abc hadn’t a clue about treaties, or agreements or life in general, frankly.

That is as near to not playing by your earlier rules, which seem to have slipped a bit by your post at 40, where your say this:

And DO NOT tell me that the people of Japan are vile and disgusting racists and all the other nonsense that usually gets thrown at people who say mass immigration should stop.

Well, why not? I have no idea whether it is true or not, but it is you that seems to feel a need to defend it.

Not me.

Anyway:

All the hysteria and ignorance that surrounds the debate re mass immigration has to stop. All those violent “anti – fascist” activists – I have no doubt that you think your cause is urgent and righteous, the fact is your cause is quixotic.

Jolly good. I’ll tilt at any windmills you care to present.

Here’s a quote from Bonnie Greer in the Times:

But the Question Time audience had to speak, and it was they who said what had to be said. They were made up of people who had applied to come. They were a typical London audience, too, people representative of the range and diversity in that great city.

So there you have it. An audience of Londoners, a town in south east England which is wholly unrepresentative of Britain. And of course the audience was wholly unrepresentative of the population as a whole insofar as well over 35 per cent of British adults are over 50. These were overwhelmingly youngsters in their 20′s and 30′s. Certainly, not a third even was over 50. And guess what, they were people who had applied to come, rather than be dragged into the studio by strong arm men. Well, well, who would have believed it.
It was highly reminiscent of that Panorama programme after 9/11 when the BBC organised an audience of young people from London to scream at a couple of Americans. It reminded a lot of people of a show trial.
But, it was generally favourable for Nick Griffin. Anyone who can walk into a room full of organised hatred directed at him will attract some sympathy and even admiration.
That’s the BBC for you. A metropolitan organisation which sacks Newsreaders when they reach the advanced age of 50. They really sincerely believe that Britain is simply an extrapolation of London, or if it isn’t, then it should be.
By the way, isn’t it interesting how left-wing publications photoshop pictures of Nick Griffin to highlight his blind eye, and enhance his repulsiveness. If I did that to Gordon Brown, I’d be accused of disablism.

abc, shall we not try and compare a country that has only really allowed tourism to flourish in the last half a century, let alone migration, to the uk who have been a hub of population movement ever since the romans?

Binky,

Ah! abc and you have broken this barrier of Japaneseness, due no doubt to your amazing charms and intellects.

So, the two folk that you are married to didn’t worry their heads about miscegenation, did they? Statistically, 100% of Japanese that have met someone that comments on Liberal Conspiracy ended up married to them.

Bloody hell!

I’d have thought that, for all it’s obvious faults, the US is probably an alternate example of how to go about organising a society. Perhaps trashing the Chinese and the Iranians is just a tad racist. And your, and their, lack of sympathy for asylum seekers isn’t actually a positive in my book. Why do you hate asylum seekers so? Jewish folk in the 1930′s were asylum seekers from Germany, were they not?

Chinese people here seem to be quite successful and don’t cause a lot of bother do they? Don’t think I’ve ever met an Iranian, face to face, right enough.

trofim, i’d not be surprised if only 3 percent of the audience supported the bnp, so politically would have been extremely representative.

Trofim,

Thank you for posting that rant @ 44. It gives me the opportunity to point out just how narrow minded Diane Abbott was on ‘This Week’. As a sort of casual aside, she saw the world in a similar way to you. If you went North she said, the audience would have been less accomodating. (That is not a direct quote, because I can’t be arsed).

I was quite upset at that. If you went just a little further North, you’d come to Scotland and we have never elected a BNP candidate to anything whatsoever. No Richard Barnbrook, no Griffin, nada.

The next time the latter is on Question Time. I’d quite like it to be in Glasgow.

Trofim,

By the way, isn’t it interesting how left-wing publications photoshop pictures of Nick Griffin to highlight his blind eye, and enhance his repulsiveness. If I did that to Gordon Brown, I’d be accused of disablism.

You have never noticed the cartoons of Gordon Brown, nor the libertarian acronyms for him? You really don’t get out much do you?

let’s also talk about this poll ‘boost’ that yougov are reporting.

Interesting to see no real boost or drop to the bnp’s share when they get publicity on bbc. It feels kind of safe to assume that 3% support is stable. Interesting more is the sensational claims on the news about those considering support.

Pure opinion, however i would welcome this if i were an activist, especially for labour. Eyes should be open now about the margins, and the potential for losing votes to the bnp if they don’t engage with these communities more.

No more excuses, no more no platform, start being sensible about how to deal with this problem while respecting the general intelligence of the population.

Nick @35 – Nick Griffin is shown up to be a shifty, lying, creepy Nazi & the people of Burnley therefore want to vote for him! Well, there’s nowt queerer than folk.

I’d expect in any representative gathering of British people that someone like him, with his “never been convicted for Holocaust denial” or his idiocies that the native population has been here for 17000 years or his hanging out with the Ku Klux Klan would get him a rough ride, or at least people saying afterwards, Who was that weird bloke?

However, I take it that the trigger word was “immigration”. I’ll guess that the main parties are going to make a lot more noises about this in the future.

Douglas @ 48

Yeah, I’m glad to say that Scotland is pretty much a BNP free zone. I’ve heard a story that some of them turned up at one of the tough housing estates in Edinburgh and were seen off with baseball bats.

Is baseball popular in Scotland?

The BNP’s press spokesman Simon Walker was on radio 5 last night, complaining about Griffin’s treatment on Question Time. It wasn’t fair he says and that they all ganged up on him and it wasn’t a normal programme (which is true, but so what?)
Personally I prefer the approach of the BBC radio guy Stephen Nolan, who will take on someone like that, but still allow them to speak and say what they’ve got to say.
You can listen to it (in the next seven days) by clicking on Stephen Nolan’s show on this link.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/5live/programmes/schedules/2009/10/23
It does make it easier that Griffin has these dreadful things like holocaust denial and hanging out with the KKK in his past, as it’s so much easier to demonise him. If they could get away from their ”Nazi” past (and get rid of Griffin to and find some leader who was less gaffe prone), I think they could do quite well.

The message that ”that audience in London was not typical of Britain” and that London is no longer a recognisably English city, might chime well with some northeners (who had a bit of a chip on their shoulder about London anyway).
I said on here a few weeks ago about driving through Harlesden near Wembley one sunday evening after a rugby league match had just been played there, and there were hundreds of fans from Warrington all stood outside some Harlesden pubs after the match, and I wondered what they thought of seeing this hugely multi cultural neighbourhood close up.
Harlesden and Wembley are in the London Borough of Brent, and I just looked up some facts and figures about the borough and came up with this report from the council.
http://www.brent.gov.uk/evidencebase.nsf/Files/LBBA-49/$FILE/0908%20-Borough%20Profile%20Part%201.doc
It’s things like that that I’d imagine Nick Griffin would have liked to have talked about if he could have.
And I guess that’s why he has to be prevented from talking about it. Because of the horrible BNP spin that would be put on figures such as: Brent having a population that was 71% non white British, and that 48% of the population were born outside of the UK.
In the table about deprivation it says ”…. the majority of our neighbourhoods have become more deprived”.
Immigration from poor countries leads to deprivation in British cities??
That’s something that the BNP could say, so best to just shout them down as being Nazi’s. Though I do wonder if the ‘Anti-nazi’ tactic might be loosing its effect, as those studenty UAF demonstrations, and metropolitain revulsion at ‘fascim’ don’t have a universal appeal.
I’m sure that Griffin would have loved to have been given the time to put his spin on this story about a turf war in north London between rival Turkish heroin gangs.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23755260-armed-met-checkpoints-to-tackle-turk-turf-war.do
He could say that that part of London ”was no longer recognisably British” …. and I think that many people who knew the area might know what he was talking about and agree with him.
The comments section under that article are typical of regular people, and some of them sound just like the BNP.
So I guess that’s why you have to try to get between them and the BNP, otherwise they might end up voting for them.

damon@53

No, baseball is not popular in Scotland, but in some housing estates keeping a baseball bat handy is. I knew a bloke who lived in such an estate and kept a baseball bat handy by the door. He and I did go to a baseball match once and I had to explain the rules.

(Much cursing ensues – apologies in advance, but it’s necessary)

I’ve been saying this for a while, but I strongly doubt that event (x) will have any effect on support for the BNP.

The sooner we just grasp the obvious fact that Britain has had roughly one million fucking cretin fascist voters for the last fifty years, and that no anti-immigrant state policy is going to be vicious enough to budge them from their fucking cretin views or their fucking cretin voting habits, the quicker we’ll evolve away from this silly, sorry bullshit debate.

The tools who are currently voting BNP are the same tools who loved Enoch Powell in the sixties; they’re the same tools who loved the National Front in the seventies; they miraculously disappeared for much of Thatcher’s reign, presumably because she was addressing their Very Real Concerns by tossing them all out of work and sending in the riot police to break their heads when they had the temerity to complain… Now they’re back voting fascist, just as fucking thick and belligerent as ever, ready to flood internet message boards and pimp their idiocy on radio phone-ins for the betterment of their Nazi representatives.

Britain has a small but vocal fascist base of roughly one million, and we need to address their Very Real Concerns directly by giving them the finger and telling them all to fuck off, and take their concern-troll horseshit with them.

My attitude to them is very simple – let them say and think whatever they like, because when it comes right down to it, anyone stupid enough to vote for idiotic Nazis deserves to have their interests represented by idiotic Nazis. We’ve seen what happens when Nazis get elected to councils time and again – they discover that providing public services is far, far more difficult than shoving shit through a Pakistani shopkeeper’s letterbox or beating up teenagers, and make complete arses of themselves. They publicly discredit themselves and their ideology through example.

I’m not worried about some sudden upsurge in support for fascist politics. By and large, the British people are decent and smart individuals. They can see with their own eyes what some flatulent BNP arse bellowing OMG, people these days – God help us if there’s ever another race war is. They don’t need our help to spot a Nazi, and the idea that they are going to vote en masse for racist lunacy is just a jerkoff wet dream for internet masturbators with too much time on their hands.

douglas clarke @ 48

But libertarians, and all other “right wing” type humans are innately imperfect and one has to forgive them their little human lapses. Those on the left, however, are, by self-definition, creatures who live on the moral high ground, they are a nobler kind of human being and they therefore have an obligation to demonstrate their innate nobility to the ordinary hoi polloi.

damon@53
congratulations damon, you’ve reached stage 2 in the Londoners’ Perception Hierarchy. Stage 1: a Londoner perceives Britain as consisting of London. At Stage 2, a Londoner perceives that Britain consists of London and the North. Where in your topology would you place Worcestershire? The North or London? Chips on shoulders? I think I detect a little London arrogance there.

I’m glad others here are taking on the babble of abc, who has at least come out the closet as a racist. Seems he has been joined by other bigots, as is the way with threads about how rubbish the BNP are.

abc:

No one ever welcomes BNP trolls because racism isn’t a logical process of thought, where a mind can be changed and open to new information to make a new idea or alter a previously held one. Arguing with racists is like arguing with the religious, pretty pointless.

You still have provided no evidence of legislation that is passed in these nations, the kind that the BNP would pass, only circumstancial evidence. Even if you do provide the evidence that the government have a clear policy on racial purity, you will only convince me that they are myopic, bigoted idiots.

“Japan and S Korea have maintained a very strict immigration policy since the war to maintain cultural identity etc.”

Evidence please of legislation passed.

You provide some for Malaysia, which proves they are a racist bunch and also not one of the best regimes for Human Rights in the world but I am curious as to if Japan and S. Korea have actually legislation.

And again, Thailand is not a beacon of democracy either, hence their backward and silly policies re: “foreigners are not allowed to own land” so if you love such backward, myopic, hateful and bigoted regimes please fuck off there!

East Asia is not a beacon of democracy abc but if you love it so much, buy yourself a home there if they let you. But any nation adotping such divisive and ignorant methods will not be welcomed.

Binky:

You are a thick and very daft racist aren’t you? Always spitting out your hateful bile. Silly boy.

Trofim:

Nice to see you’ve joined the rest of the racists by following Herr Griffin and making out that London just isn’t British enough for you, you big racist tit.

“But, it was generally favourable for Nick Griffin.”

Only if you’re a racist Trofim and a BNP supporter which you clearly are.

Flying Rodent:

Spot on as always!

“anyone stupid enough to vote for idiotic Nazis deserves to have their interests represented by idiotic Nazis”

@Flying Rodent

Excellent, as usual.

@17 Unity: “One of these, unfortunately, is either taking UAF out of the equation or taking the SWP out of UAF because they’re just a fucking liability.”

That’s a perpetual grouch for me too. There’s a very serious question about how the liberal left organises at “street level” without being hijacked by Trots. When the big marches were conducted against the Iraq invasion, they were inclusive and involved ordinary people. Unfortunately, the legacy of those marches (and the moral argument) has been taken over by the Stop the War Coalition (StWC). StWC is an unpleasant organisation that is unable to differentiate between war opposition and comforting despots. StWC is unrepresentative of those who protested against the Iraq invasion, but the next time there is an anti-war protest, StWC will be in an artificially dominant position.

UAF is a reinvention of the Anti Nazi League, so we should not be surprised that the SWP predominates. As mentioned by Unity, a couple of groups have risen above acting as a recruitment centre for the SWP, providing research and independent leadership. There is something to be learned from them.

Rodent – that was very funny and my instincts go your way. To me someone thinking that they might just go and vote for the BNP is like someone who thinks that it would be a nice change to have dog shit in their hamburgers. Why talk ‘em out of it? Let them eat it and see how they like, but don’t come and breathe in my face afterwards.

But are you saying that some of the people here are wasting their time and efforts in trying to counteract the BNP?

@55 FlyingRodent: “Britain has a small but vocal fascist base of roughly one million…”

An eloquent argument, FlyingRodent, but lousy statistics.

The BNP is an English/Welsh party, in spite of its name. In England and Wales, membership of fascist parties is (guesstimate) 15,000. A further 985,000 (whatever) people voted for the BNP and other fascist/Nazi parties at the 2009 European parliament elections. And I would quite like it if those 985,000 people did something different with their ballot paper; eat it, for example. But I’m not going to label them as extremists or fascist nutters, because I believe that the majority can be persuaded to vote for other parties. At the same time, I acknowledge that their racism may remain unreformed. Not voting Nazi is merely a good starting point.

Outside of England and Wales, fascist activity is less organised. I’m not denying the existence of religious sectarianism or race hatred or homophobia in Scotland and Northern Ireland. It’s just different from England and Wales. Parties like the BNP have no foothold, so fascism operates within conventional political parties and “sports clubs”. In that informal network, there are probably more fascists than in England and Wales.

The British Nazis have never been able to agree on the Northern Ireland question. Thus, thankfully, they remain an England/Wales problem.

As a member of what I believe to be a minority of individuals who thought that giving Griffin a platform on national television was a pretty serious mistake, I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that I don’t feel able to say “I told you so”. He was a bit shite, wasn’t he?

I doubt that the BNP will gain much support as a result of his sub – standard performance, but I think this has more to do with the truth of Flying Rodent’s hypothesis that “Britain has had roughly one million fucking cretin fascist voters for the last fifty years” than with Griffin’s poor showing. I think the Rodent is pretty near the mark with his analysis of voting patterns for extreme right parties and I think the (roughly) one million barrier is one that they’ll find tough (hopefully impossible) to break through.

This is probably just as well because, even though Flying Rodent’s take on voting patterns seems plausible, he expresses himself like a total dickhead. I say “dickhead” because it’s a word I think he, and many other contributors to this thread, will readily understand (I originally used a word beginning with “c” but changed it because I thought it would be edited out, but you know what I mean, don’t you). Let’s not bother engaging in a debate with anyone who has a slightly different view, eh, let’s just scream hysterically at them.

Among the intellectual giants who have contributed, douglas clark and DHG are surely in the first rank:

DHG @57 “abc ……. You still have provided no evidence of legislation that is passed in these nations,” Yes he has you moron, try reading the actual words in his posts. Not that he should need to, since Japan’s policies on immigration and citizenship are pretty well known and easily accessible via the internet. Do some research yourself, you tit, and you’ll see that what he says about Japan, Korea etc is accurate.

DHG @57 “East Asia is not a beacon of democracy abc but if you love it so much, buy yourself a home there if they let you.” Ok, mate, now try reading what you have actually written. Think very, very hard. Ever heard that kind of statement made before, by anyone? Sounds a bit like the kind of thing a BNP member might say. You cretin.

douglas clark @46 “So, the two folk that you are married to didn’t worry their heads about miscegenation, did they? Statistically, 100% of Japanese that have met someone that comments on Liberal Conspiracy ended up married to them.” If you’re going to attempt sarcasm, make sure that what you’re saying isn’t mind numbingly stupid as that kinda dampens the effect. I lived in Japan for 2 years. I still keep in touch with some of the Japanese I knew when I was there and I have a number of ex – patriate Japanese acquaintances in London. I am not married to any of them. That would reduce the percentage considerably, for a start.

douglas clark @46 “I’d have thought that, for all it’s obvious faults, the US is probably an alternate example of how to go about organising a society.” Would you? Would you, really? Would you really use the US as an example of how to organise a society? Well then, you must be a total fucking twat, mustn’t you?

I ‘m all for simple, outright, unequivocal opposition to racists and racist organisations, but screaming “racist” every time someone mentions they have a view on immigration controls which is different from yours, or accusing them of being “BNP trolls” whenever they disagree with you on a thread on this site is really not a good way to win over people who actually aren’t part of Flying Rodent’s army of one million cretins. The DHG/douglas approach is probably a pretty effective way of increasing your self – esteem, if you happen to be a total idiot as it means that, eventually, the people you pick on will probably give up and go away because they can’t be arsed pointing out repeatedly that you misunderstood what they said or maybe they just don’t feel like taking abuse from someone who is so self – evidently stupid. That may give you the illusion of having wone the debate but it’s not a good way to attract people to a “liberal – left” political stance, is it?

@ Rosie …are you saying that some of the people here are wasting their time and efforts in trying to counteract the BNP?

No, more power to them, although their chances of pulling BNP voters back to sanity are basically zero. On the other hand, I think it’s important that we realise there’s no point in Addressing Their Very Real Concerns – Their Very Real Concern is that there are too many blacks and Asians in the country for their liking, and there is simply no way to Address that particular Concern without all of us adopting BNP-lite policy.

It’s worth noting that Labour actually has tilted at this in the past, to squarely no effect beyond sending some poor sods back to godawful hellholes and selling out every principle a Labour government should’ve held dear. Yet the same people are still bitching about the awful socialissess’ plan to replace Ordinary Hardworking White Britons with furrin blacks who will vote Labour – they want the BNP’s programme of sendemallbackwheretheycamefrom, and nothing short of that will do.

The lesson here is that their bullshit should not be entertained for a second. They’re not decent ordinary Britons – they’re fascist-voting morons, and anyone who believes that there’s some way to engage with their fucknut opinions is part of the problem. Once a person has voted for Nazis, they’ve crossed a very important line that changes the rules of polite public debate.*

Polite debate with BNP voters should go like this…

BNP Voter: I voted BNP because I’m Concerned that -

Reasonable Human Being: You voted BNP because you’re as thick as shitty jam and you want fascists to crack down on the blacks. Enjoy your Nazi council, dipshit.

There.

@Euler: (FlyingRodent) expresses himself like a total dickhead…

Well, yes. There’s an obvious reason for that.

Let’s not bother engaging in a debate with anyone who has a slightly different view, eh, let’s just scream hysterically at them.

No need to scream – it’s far more effective to call someone an ignorant twat in a level, reasonable tone.

*Note to angry Tories etc. offended by this analysis – yes, it is a bit less Nazi to complain about multiculturalism and political correctness than it is to whine about how all the blacks and Asians should sod off back to Wherethefuckistan. On the other hand, you know that you’re just riding on the BNP’s coattails so you can put the boot into Labour, the BBC and God knows who else, and we can see you doing it.

Either go full-Nazi-retard, or have the common decency not to insult our intelligence with this transparent, opportunistic cockwaffle.

“No need to scream – it’s far more effective to call someone an ignorant twat in a level, reasonable tone.”

That has been tried without conspicuous success:

“Government figures show only 15% of white working class boys in England got five good GCSEs including maths and English last year. . . Poorer pupils from Indian and Chinese backgrounds fared much better – with 36% and 52% making that grade respectively.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7220683.stm

“Though white children in general do better than most minorities at school, poor ones come bottom of the league (see chart). Even black Caribbean boys, the subject of any number of initiatives, do better at GCSEs”
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14700670

Local education authorities (LEAs) at the bottom of the league table in England for GCSE results tend to remain there year after year. Incidentally, by the 2001 Census results, those same LEAs usually had 90+% of their populations reported as “white”. London has the great cosmopolitan mix with getting on for half the ethnic minorities resident in Britain.

Euler @ 62,

It is a bit late to be advocating a policy of Japaneseness on a society like ours. We have to work with what we have, which is frankly not analogous to Japan, and to suggest that it is in any way a useful comparator is not very helpful. I’d go as far as to say that anyone that thought that it was, (what was the phrase again, ah yes):

a total fucking twat

And to revel in it’s position on asylum seekers, which I have not researched, trusting the people on here to be telling the truth, is pretty warped too.

Spell out for us what you see a Liberal-Left stance as being on the subjects of immigration and asylum seeking, as you seem to care so much.

Trofim, I know where Worcestershire is. It’s off the M40 isn’t it?

Euler
Ref your comment in 62 – I agree. Many of the posts are less than thoughtful and Flying Rodent is an embarrassment I am sorry to say.

Douglas
Ref your comment in 65. Japan is a good comparable or at least it would have been before the multiculture project commenced. Over populated island nation, long history of technology and invention, mild mannered courteous people (yes the British are by international comparisons).

Also thank you for sharing with us that you think I am a “total fucking twat”, I don’t think that is helpful to the debate in the least. Perhaps you would care to define this for me (and don’t say “its what you are” or something equally childish).

My point which seems to have been lost of most of you (or more likely you have ignored it because you don’t like it) is that Japan and South Korea as advanced democracies with policies since the war on immigration that have maintained a monocultural society with virtual ethnic uniformity demonstrates that such a policy is not the policy of “trolls” and those “as thick as shitty jam”. It is the policy of intelligent, rational and polite democrats. This point at least in my mind and possibly in the minds of other free thinking readers (I have no idea if anyone will read this however!) does rather take the wind out of the sails of the “anti fascist” activists. I am still waiting to hear if they are planning to attack the Japanese embassy??

As people travel more in a globalised world they will begin to wake up to how the multiculture project in the UK is in fact out of the ordinary in a global context and quite an extremist position.

Please allow me to contine to another point. I have been acused of being a racist, I should respond to this. It is almost as if my words are being scrutinised for evidence of a thought crime, you pick through my comments and pick up on something not within the boundaries of permitted beliefs – and J’ACCUSE !!

I am not an academic, I am a surveyor, but I think it was Robespierre who believed that all good reasonable men should have the same beliefs and therefore anyone who disagreed with his project was executed.

Well I disagree with your project – perhaps you will want to send me to re-education camp where I can have my wrong beliefs corrected.

Japan and South Korea as advanced democracies with policies since the war on immigration that have maintained a monocultural society with virtual ethnic uniformity demonstrates that such a policy is not the policy of “trolls” and those “as thick as shitty jam”.

Up until August this year, Japan had been ruled by only one party since 1955. Japan’s national media debate on politics has been more or less non-existent for half a century. It would be perfectly fair to suggest that the 2009 election represented the actual birth of democracy in Japan, which has been essentially a softly authoritarian one-party state for more than fifty years.

South Korea was a military dictatorship until the late eighties, and has been repeatedly criticised for anti-democratic backsliding during the 2000s. Thanks to their mental neighbours, it’s still a very militarised society and they were still jailing pro-democracy protestors as late as this year.

All of which is rather tangential to the point that Hey, Japan and Korea don’t allow immigration, ergo there’s no problem discussing a policy of kicking out the blacks and Asians is the definition of a bullshit argument.

perhaps you will want to send me to re-education camp where I can have my wrong beliefs corrected.

I suspect that a brief spell studying critical thinking and elementary logic would be sufficient.

abc, there is a credibility issue with your argument. You claim that there countries like japan have had on problems with mono-cultural policies and claim a great comparison to britain. In reality geography and economy, the comparisons you use, play very little in how these policies would work in two seperate nations. The reality is that for japan it’s been barely a century, only a few generations, since foreign visitors were ever allowed on their shores.

It is incredibly easy to keep mono-cultural policies when your policy has always been to keep the foreigners out . Then we have a completely different country in britain who’s very society has been built based on not being able to stop foreign conquests, visits and settlers. Trying to suggest because japan does it that we can do it here is like saying cheese is yellow like canaries so should also be able to maintain flight!

And, more obviously, you don’t provide any reason as to why the japanese way of policy is actually any better, and ignore (or at least try to play down) more modern moves to globalise and embrace other cultures.

I won’t call you names, but i will say you really need to go away and understand the weaknesses in your own arguments.

For the record, Japan is not a mono-cultural society. After years of legal discrimination, the Ainu people have achieved legal recognition as an indigenous minority. The overt abuse that they have suffered and still endure would be unthinkable in a European democracy.

71. Kind of still fits with the monocultural policy claims though, if they were discriminated against.

Only reinforces my query though, how does this supposedly monoculturalist policy making country offer a better solution to the (still not apparant, from abc’s view) problem we have.

Flying Rodent – ref your comment in 68
As I said in the Spot The Difference thread – it is wrong to say that the Japanese have not had an active democracy since the war. The Japanese people are masters of their own destiny. I could if I had time come up with a list of scores of nations where multiculturalism in the western liberal elite sense has been rejected as an experiment worth pursuing.

Lee – ref 69
You make some valid points about the isolationist position Japan adopted through much of its history and the British being more open. However simply because they have a history of rejecting multiculturalism doesn’t mean that we cannot still today look to Japan and say to ourselves “they have a different approach to immigration, in fact so different that if anyone suggests the same policy in the UK they are violently attacked as a vile racist – the Japanese are an intelligent and educated advanced nation so something is not quite right ??”. It is valid to say this regardless of the historical context in which the Japanese position developed.

You say I don’t provide a reason why the Japanese system is “better”, I think the Japanese system ie a stop to mass immigration would be better for the UK now because I think mass immigration has gone too far, the multiculture project has run out of control and is starting to be injurious to social cohesion.

Charlieman – ref your comment in 71.
Have you by any chance been on the internet today researching the ethnic make up of Japan etc???

Thank you for putting the record straight. Perhap technically they are not a monocultural nation as they do have minority groups on the southern islands but this is comparable to the celts of cornwall. They are certainly not a multicultural nation in the western liberal elite sense where they are a minority in their own cities.

it is wrong to say that the Japanese have not had an active democracy since the war.

In what way? Sure, they’ve had elections, but the outcome has been a one-party state and a pliant media, all of it based on a general consensus within the ruling class that stability plus quiet authoritarianism is better than oppositional politics. That is not “democracy” in any sense that would be recognised by westerners, nor is post-war South Korea.

abc should jump the sinking ship of his terrible bloody ideas before he drowns.

@73 abc: “Have you by any chance been on the internet today researching the ethnic make up of Japan etc???”

No, it was just a fact that I remembered from a guide book twenty years when I worked in Japan. I think the chapter was about hidden racism in Japan. Northern folks, aren’t they, the Ainu? Hokkaido and the Kuril Islands?

Charlieman
Sorry my comment at 73 that you refer to in 76 was poor and a little sarcastic

DHG
Ref your comment in 75 – over on the spot the difference thread my point that many other advanced nations have rejected multiculturalism was described as a plane crash. Is it a sinking ship or a crashing plane? Presumably left wing posters on this site like to use odd analogies when trying to undermine valid observations and points.

Your observations have been taken apart and are not valid abc, your desperate efforts to try and make them relevent is hard to watch but it is a nice cover to your racism and love of the BNP.

abc, i’m hoping to do an article on immigration arguments room so i’ll largely leave further disagreements til then.

However it’s interesting you think japan works, yet the population density of tokyo is some 1000 more people per square km than london, anyone that’s seen or been there will realise this. Population level doesn’t seem to be a huge problem there (from your view?), so it would seem to be purely a cultural and/or infrastructure issue here. surely then shutting off the immigration tap to the uk is premature and a false solution compared to better resourcing and community outreach?

abc, you’re fighting a losing battle here as your point was buried under bile and rudeness some time ago.

You have to remember that calling someone a racist, on this site at least, gives the name-caller a nice dose of self-appreciation.

So whatnext, you don’t think that abc is a racist, as he expounds racist ideas?

What are his racist ideas?

@Whatnext – yes I give up for now as many readers will be pleased to read. You should go to Hagley Road to Ladywood site – many posters there are beyond belief.

@Lee – thank you for your comments, very interesting and I look forward to reading your article. Your point in second para 79 is a good one but the fact remains the UK is densely populated.

@DHG – I will ask my Japanese wife if she thinks I am a racist. I might also ask the holocaust survivors I worked with and became friends with in the commune in Beer Yakov in Israel back in the 80′s.

Whatnext:

Well, the fact you don’t see any problem with his bizarre controlled immigration policy and ideas about racial purity no doubt outs you in the same group as him.

abc:

If you think that racism is so simple that certain factors can exclude you from being it, when clearly you hold racist views, then that speaks volumes.

abc @ 65,

The degeneration of this debate to the standards of a school playground is down to someone called Euler.

I was quoting him verbatim.

Try reading his magnum opus @ 60 again. You’ll find the words in there. Directed at me.

He is obviously too busy to apologise himself as he will be away polishing up his latest opinions on a liberal perspective on immigration and asylum, which we are all, obviously, awaiting with bated breath…..

Anyway, I would like to press you on this:

Japan is a good comparable or at least it would have been before the multiculture project commenced. Over populated island nation, long history of technology and invention, mild mannered courteous people (yes the British are by international comparisons).

You cannot turn a clock back abc. You have to deal with the society and, indeed the world, you find yourself in. This harking back to an early 1950′s would be to deny any of the progress that we have seen in the interim.

(As an aside, BNP policy probably could best be defined as a denial of any of the social progress that has been made since then. at least when their views are clear enough to be understood.)

So, as it stands now, in 2009, Japan is not a good comparator.

DHG – I was going to shut down but I have just seen your post 84 and I have to respond.

“I clearly hold racist views” – you are precisely the person I want to communicate with. You think that because I seek an end to mass immigration that I “clearly hold racist views”? Is it not possible to identify problems with mass immigration and not be a racist? Actually I can’t be bothered….

@84

abc started by pointing out that many “ordinary” people appeared to agree or semi-agree that immigration policy was wrong in this country.

He then made the point that both Japan and South Korea were both, a) advanced democracies, and, b) that both had rejected mono-cultralism. He asked if that made them fascist.

This apparently makes him a racist (though I suspect this is buffing of certain people’s self-image).

For the record, I believe that our immigration policy is shockingly disorganised, and is causing severe stress to our infrastructure. I’m not saying that we have too many immigrants – I have no idea what the right number is – I just believe that we are not remotely set up to deal with the numbers currently involved.

The BNP will not be defeated by calling them names. They clearly don’t care, and nothing is to be gained. The problem is that the BNP are able to make headway on certain issues because these issues are not being addressed.

Abc: you are racist. Fuck off.

Way to go Denim Justice. Abc will now see the error of his ways, and come round to the Approved Way Of Thinking.

No one can resist when trapped in the vice of your superior reasoning, just no one.

I imagine the level of debate is the same on the BNP website, just with a different attitude to coloured people.

WhatNext!

abc did not, in fact, say that Japan and South Korea had rejected mono-culturalism. He has argued @ 67 that:

My point which seems to have been lost of most of you (or more likely you have ignored it because you don’t like it) is that Japan and South Korea as advanced democracies with policies since the war on immigration that have maintained a monocultural society with virtual ethnic uniformity demonstrates that such a policy is not the policy of “trolls” and those “as thick as shitty jam”. It is the policy of intelligent, rational and polite democrats.

Which, it transpired, in the case of Japan at least, seems to have included repressing their own minority Ainu peoples?

@87 WhatNextQueryBang: “For the record, I believe that our immigration policy is shockingly disorganised, and is causing severe stress to our infrastructure”

Point 1: Do you mean that the political debate is incoherent (an argument with which I would agree) or that politicians are mismanaging a coherent policy?

Point 2: Immigration requires that the provision of education and social services needs to be improved when there is demand. That is no different from improving provision if the “indigenous” white population become more fecund in a district.

@ 91

Point 1: Both that the debate is incoherent, and that the policy is mismanaged.

Point 2: Quite right, there’s no point in having immigrants and then treating them differently.

Charlieman,

On your second point:

Or migrated internally to the South East, which I seem to recall has been a long term trend.

@ 90

I suppose it hinges on whether you think non-Europeans are up to snuff. Abc thinks yes, you perhaps think no, at least in relation to the Japanese.

Personally, I think most people would accept that the Japanese are as civilised as we are (or more so), regardless of WW2 and regardless of the Ainu situation (of which I know almost nothing). All nations have skeletons in the cupboard.

By the way, abc DID say that Japan and South Korea have rejected multiculturalism.

Last month on my blog “abc” descended (anonymously, what else) to leave a swirl of comments on posts that were critical of the BNP.
He repeatedly stood by the BNP’s very own “white-only” policy.
If that isn’t racist…then what is?

Incidentally, “abc” goes on about his wife. If it’s true that she is Japanese, a society that hypothetically functions a-la BNP, that is full of white-only this and white-only that, would prevent “abc” and his good lady wife from enjoying a number of things.

She wouldn’t be allowed to join the BNP to start with. How’s that from depriving a person of personal enrichment!!!!
And then what. White-only clubs? Restaurants? Clubs? Cinemas? Benches?
But I guess “abc” thinks that’s not racist. Nooooooo.

…the BNP are able to make headway on certain issues because these issues are not being addressed.

And how true that is. Why, you never hear about immigration in this country, especially not in the tabloid and broadsheet press, nor on talk radio, on TV documentaries or on the internet.

Oh no, that’s bollocks, isn’t it? You can’t open a paper in this country without hearing about immigration, usually in the form of fist-pounding right wing outrage. So if we do in fact talk constantly about immigration, perhaps the BNP are making headway on issues like Sending All The Foreigners Back Where They Came From and encouraging white people not to fuck people with a different skin tone. I throw it out there as a possibility, since it’s what the BNP actually talk about.

And BTW, abc’s point about Japan and South Korea has been entertained and refuted, which is why people are not playing along when he tries to pretend that it hasn’t.

WhatNext!

Yes, abc did say that Japan and South Korea had rejected multi-culturalism. What you said @ 87 was that abc, inter alia:

….that both had rejected mono-cultralism.

Which is clearly not what he says or believes.

For, if one was to reject mono-culturalism, one would be a multi-culturalist, and that is clearly not what abc is saying.

@94 WhatNextQueryBang: “Personally, I think most people would accept that the Japanese are as civilised as we are (or more so)…”

I should not be suckered into a debate about cultural relativism. But. Japanese history books deny war crimes and portray WW2 as a heroic endeavour. Japan presents itself as a mono-culture, but there are many aboriginal people on the islands. abc was fair to compare them with Celts in the UK; we don’t discriminate against Celts.

@ Denin Justice ref 88 – I would like to hear more from you.

@ Claude ref 95 – I go back to my point I made on your blog last month (that you deleted because you censor and delete points you don’t like) that I am against MASS immigration. To suggest that I would like to see white only clubs etc is offensive. I never promoted a white only policy – this is you wilfully distorting my position. Comments are descending into the offensive and just total garbage to be frank, also you are now suggesting that I am a liar…

Come back Lee Griffin – an intelligent opponent to argue with. Claude go back to Hagley Road.

As for being anon – my name is Peter, I am a 40 something surveyor working for an international property development company.. who cares – aren’t we all effectively anon what does it matter.

Dear Penthouse …….

“my name is Peter, I am a 40 something surveyor working for an international property development company…………….. I will ask my Japanese wife if she thinks I am a racist. I might also ask the holocaust survivors I worked with and became friends with in the commune in Beer Yakov in Israel back in the 80’s.”

Yours in Bullshit

ABC

Troll “Why do you come on to these sites if you are only going to post stupid nonsense?”

HA HA HA HA

But you are on a liberal site spouting your brownshit rubbish and then you complain about me? Nobody is interested in reading about your sad, boring little life.

Classic troll tactic. go on site , shit everywhere ,and then moan when someone calls you on your shit.

Go back to conservative home or other swamps. You will be more at home there.

I actually feel the need to stick up for abc here. The views he’s holding aren’t racist. In a way it’s ironic as i see his views as almost being more socially engineering than any claim currently leveled at labour.

Try engaging more, accusing less, we are better than some of the comments here.

Lee “I actually feel the need to stick up for abc here.”

Well there’s a surprise ………NOT!

As if on Q , our little troll defender arrives to stick up for his troll mates.

Lee, you have manners which is so significant in debate.

Lee,

All I have said to abc is that he doesn’t possess a time machine. If he wants to see a comment I left for the somewhat aggressive Mr Euler as directed at him, then that is him fitting into the clothes laid out for our aforesaid friend.

So.

I’d also challenge abc to lay out a comprehensive liberal immigration and asylum policy. He’s here, he’s just a normal bloke like me, lets have it. If it’s any good, perhaps you could get it made into a guest article. Mr Euler is probably beavering away on that right now.

I’d hope it would address some of the issues that I have around this subject, such as mutual movement in the EU, what ‘mass’ actually means, whether Polish people coming here temporarily in a boom is actually immigration at all, whether I have the right to marry anyone that would be daft enough to have me and bring them into this country to settle here. You could probably add to that list.

105. I agree, it might be interesting to see that side of the argument, there may well be a meaningful one in there.

As for your comments, know i’m disappointed with the sally types that want to turn this site in to a commune with such aggressive and pointless comments rather than heated arguments like yours. We know those on this site trully trolling have their comments deleted, to foster debate, yet those like sally don’t have them deleted and it effectively shuts it down.

104. I’m going to take that positively, i think!

@97
Come on Douglas, it’s clear from the context that I muddled mono and multi.

At least it’s good to hear criticism of the offensive Sally (who makes quite a mockery of the Comments Policy).

Anyway, in the style of Claude at 95:

Abc has been consistently defending the right of certain Asian nations to persue mono-culturalism. Meanwhile, those such as DHG, Douglas and Claude are insisting that we know best. They should not assume that Asians are all racist and intellectually inferior, but what else can we expect from BNP lovers?

WhatNext!

Absolutely.

You fuck up sometimes, I fuck up sometimes. Of course we do.

I’d like you to take the challenge that neither Euler nor abc seem capable of debating on a liberal web site.

What is your idea of a liberal view of immigration or asylum?

Don’t hold back, tell me how wrong I am if you like, but don’t be a wimp like Euler, whose time to answer is running out.

abc:

“I was going to shut down but I have just seen your post 84 and I have to respond.”

I bet, good grief, are you still here? In answer to your question, your confused ideas on immigration, the fact that you use the term ‘mass imigration’, the fact that immigration is clearly such an issue for you and that in turn, you then utilise ideas about cultural and racial purity, not have the old gene pool muddied, with talk of jobs for local people only and some bizarre idea of how the UK should only be for Brits (all of which which reads like the racist BNP) and then expect no one to call you out for what you are: a daft racist.

Of course you can hold these backward veiws all you want but don’t expect the majority of people here to be uneasy with your gloriously unworkable and retrograde immigration policy.

I feel bad to break it to you but the problems in this country would not all end if you and the BNP’s racist immigration policy would be enacted, it would actually be the end of the UK as a nation and no doubt the rest of the world will shun us.

The trouble is you can’t have a policy like the one you suggest without it impacting on all aspects of policy making and crippling the entire country.

And you still haven’t shown me legislation in Japan and Soyth Korea so I am going to try and find it myself but as I said, even if they do have laws like this a) that makes them a bunch of daft bigots and b) just because they do it, doesn’t mean we should or that it would work.

WhatNext?!

“abc started by pointing out that many “ordinary” people appeared to agree or semi-agree that immigration policy was wrong in this country.”

You see this is not even fucking true is it? As in, the imaginary raft of ordinary people, then the fact that they agree that the immigration policy in this country is wrong. First of all I doubt many people actually know what it is.

It’s this kind of sweeping, generalised bollocks that our politics have become.

“He then made the point that both Japan and South Korea were both, a) advanced democracies, and, b) that both had rejected mono-cultralism. He asked if that made them fascist.”

I’ve already unpicked this bullshit along with others but for your benefit, a) asvanced democracies in some sense, not all so just as the US is an advanced democracy in some sense, in others it is verging on the medieval. b) No evidence for this on a legislative side, yet and even if there was, that would only mean that they are a bunch of xenophobic twats.

And regarding fascist, we dealth with that, ie: no because fascism is a wide doctrine with many features but to even ask that makes you look a bit of a tit.

You also presume that a racist is able to have his ideas challanged and then reform them, not so, hence Denim Justice being right. And you do know ‘coloured people’ is a racist term you great big biogt? No wonder you are into cultural relatism. Oh and before you go, show me where any of us said that Japan and S Korea are racially inferior you cunt? By all means we may not agree with any alleged policy on the matter but disagreeing with the policy doesn’t mean we hate the country or people, we just disagree with the policy you fucking ballbag troll.

Denim Justice:

“Abc: you are racist. Fuck off.”

*STANDING OVATION*

Claude:

Good info, speaks volumes about the character and as always with these bigots they moan about they racist views being deleted.

Lee Griffin:

Feel free to stick up for him but the fact you can’t see that abc is a racist is a little worrying. And we have engaged, repeatedly and refuted the nonsense spouted but as with all racists, it is falling on deaf ears.

And as none of the fans of Japan’s and South Korea’s immigration policies actually post any info on them, I did some brief research.

Regarding South Korea, the BBC have an interesting story up at the mo about how the nation is becoming Christian and that one of the impacts is the amount of outreach work to migrant workers and immigrants because they are not covered for healthcare and other basic services in South Korea, so it may be that Jesus will help the South Koreans stop discriminating against non-South Koreans.

One thing is clear is that South Koreans have a unique attitude to racial diversity, in that they don’t believe in it and thus, South Korea is pretty much racially homogenous but here lies the rub because that attitude is not shared in every other nation, so horses for courses.

But dig deeper and you see that South Koreans have replaced nations with regions and there is a great deal of disparity between the regions of South Korea with very little inter-regional marraige, the nation’s leaders coming from one region and people even travelling to different regions being rare. So they may be monocultural but they draw lines in the sand amongst themselves based on the part of the country you come from.

Also, it is one of the most over populated nations in the world, which clearly impacts upon people’s attitudes towards immigration.

The largest group of immigrants in South Korea seems to be Chinese, which number anywhere from 300,000 to 1 million and with regards to that, “most immigrants are not eligible for citizenship or even permanent residency, unless they are married to a South Korean citizen or have invested more than 5 million US dollars in the local economy.”

Hence, this has led to an increase in marraiges as immigrants try and gain full status, although it is no surprise in a country so mono-cultural that discrimination exists against non-Koreans and even mixed race Koreans.

Ironic really considering that some 700,000 Koreans live in Japan, whose own ideas of cultural purity mean that Koreans standed of living in Japan is markedly lower than that of native Japanese, with discrimination common so much so that the Korean government finds resources for Koreans living in Japan!

With regards to Japan, a similar picture is present, with rights denied to immigrants and refugees, even though there are some 2 million immigrants in Japan at the moment, immigration is a kind of cultural taboo that goes hand in hand with a fervent sense of nationalism. But…

“The Japanese are grudgingly acknowledging that their long-cherished sense of ethnic homogeneity may be untenable under the forces of globalization and changing domestic needs, including an aging population and growing labor shortages.”

Legally, Japan has constructed laws that discourage anyone from outside coming in and they didn’t receive foreigners for resettlement until the late 1970s, peridoic crack downs, spurred on by Japanese concerns that crime and social fraying is the result of immigrants alone, a problamatic attitude we share in the UK at times but the fact is the population is dropping off at an alarming rate with a large portion of the population too old to work, hence a recent influx of 1000 Filipino nurses to fill a gap in hospitals.

The fact is, Japan cannot continue down its narrow path on immigration, with children per parent at 1.2, deaths at 9 and births at 8, a drive to get Japanese to have more sex won’t be enough to halt the labour shortage.