I mention this partly because it will be interesting to see if Nick Griffin manages not to mention it when he faces Straw. Griffin, of course, is the author of the 1995 pamphlet Who Are The Mindbenders, which catalogues in some detail how Jewish (and in many cases “Jew-ish”) people control the media.

While the BNP is now more noted for its anti-Muslim outpourings, it retains a root in classic far-right conspiracy theories on pernicious Judaism.

Anti-fascist website Hope Not Hate just last week claimed to uncover an audio file of Griffin and party comrade Simon Darby alleging that “anti-Islamisation” group the English Defence League is in fact a “Zionist false flag operation”.

But does any of this count in the matter of whether the party should be represented on Question Time? Only in the sense that it would be nice if others on the panel mentioned it. Apart from that, one would have to say no.

I have argued previously that the right to free speech is not the same as the right to a platform: and I stand by this assertion. However, the BBC’s status as a publicly-funded, public service broadcaster complicates this point. The BBC is not in a position now to grant the BNP legitimacy in the political process: it is the people who voted for them who have done this.

As long as we operate as a representative democracy, then voters must be represented in the public sphere, whether in the council chamber, parliament or on the state broadcaster.

And of course, the BNP has already been represented on the BBC many times. It is sufficiently “legitimate” already to be allowed party political broadcasts: Griffin has appeared on Newsnight, albeit on his own after others interviewees refused to speak with him, and BNP member Lee Barnes has appeared on BBC Radio 4 ethics programme the Moral Maze (alongside Index on Censorship editor Jo Glanville).

The argument about whether the BNP should appear on Question Time, then, is moot. The issue now is arguing with the BNP on Question Time.

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Also posted at Index on Censorship Free Speech Blog

He says:

The decision by the BBC Trust to censure the BBC’s Middle East editor for breaching the corporation’s guidelines on accuracy and impartiality deserve closer scrutiny than it has yet been given. Jeremy Bowen is justly regarded as one of the BBC’s most courageous, authoritative and thoughtful broadcasters; his hundreds of despatches and commentaries from various frontlines in the Middle East have been noted for their acuity and balance. Now, thanks to the Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee (ESC) — a body with the absolute and final authority of a latter-day Star Chamber — not only has Bowen’s hard-won reputation been sullied, but the BBC’s international status as the best source of trustworthy news in the world has been gratuitously — if unintentionally — undermined.

And he concludes by saying:

Of course the Bowens of broadcasting can look after themselves; they may feel aggrieved or frustrated, but they will shake off such verdicts; nor will they allow their editorial perspective and judgement to be constrained by them. But younger and less experienced correspondents will not find it so easy. At best the risk is that it becomes routine to hedge their coverage with so many cautionary “ifs” and “buts” that their journalism is denuded of genuine clarity and insight. At worst, they will simply start to regurgitate edited versions of competing press releases with an invitation to viewers and listeners to draw their own conclusions. Were that to happen, the BBC would have entirely lost its way, and we will be left a great deal poorer.

Apparently, the entire adjournment debate on Tuesday concerning libel (I assume this is what he’s talking about) was about ZaNuLiarbore (or whatever it is this week) finding “a way of dealing with government irritants such as Guido and to a lesser extent Iain Dale.”

Sorry Iain and Guido, but you didn’t come up. Denis MacShane did, yes, float the idea of registration on sites as a means of cutting down on anonymous slanderous comments (slander, not libel, being the legal status of defamatory comments), but qualified this suggestion heavily with “except where for good reason, as in a newspaper letters column, a name and address is withheld.” The whole notion was pretty much dropped when Evan Harris pointed out the ease of setting up a pseudonymous identity on the web.

Smithson seems gravely worried about the idea of a “libel small claims court”, though he doesn’t quite seem to know why. The fact of a libel small claims court would not, in and of itself, affect any judgement on whether content was defamatory or not. What it would do is limit the cost of both bringing and defending a libel claim: essentially putting bloggers on safer ground than the current system, where they could easily find themselves either spending their lives’ savings on lengthy legal battles against individuals who can far easier afford it, or being forced in to humiliating apologies (incidentally, the Justice Minister didn’t seem keen on this, saying a small claims court may not be an appropriate place for “complex” libel cases).

The majority of the debate concerning defamation and the internet was around the idea of imposing a statute of limitation, and limits on libel tourism.

It was in this context, in response to issues that have concerned bloggers for a while now, that Bridget Prentice said a consultation paper would be published next year. I’m not one for political predictions, but I can’t imagine any green paper emerging next year with the sole aim of making life harder for Paul Staines et al.

Today saw an adjournment debate at the House of Commons on the subject of libel laws, featuring contributions from Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and UKIP MPs.

The debate was initiated by Labour MP Denis MacShane, with support from Lib Dem Norman Lamb and Tory Michael Gove, (Gove is, of course, still a working journalist for the Times, and Denis MacShane is a former officer of the National Union of Journalists who regularly writes in the national media.

MacShane expressed his concern over libel tourism, which he described as ‘an international scandal which shames Britain’. He also proposed a ‘small claims court’ system for libel which would limit the amounts of fees totted up by lawyers in defamation cases, saying ‘the object [of defamation proceedings] is to gain correction and an apology, not to create a racket for lawyers’.

Norman Lamb expressed his concern over the extension of defamation laws to the Internet, where it seems possible that even a blogger providing a link to a story could find himself open to accusations of defamation.

Lib Dem Evan Harris sought to expand the debate to broader free expression issues, including the fact that England still has sedition laws — which he saw as providing a background whereby other states could justify their own sedition laws.

Tory MP (and barrister) Edward Garnier sought to defend his legal colleagues, particularly those in certain legal firms he felt had been ‘defamed’ in the session, saying: ‘We [MPs] ought to be big enough to admit that it is our fault the we do nothing [on press issues].

‘[E]ither we should get on with it, or we should stop whingeing and let judges and lawyers do their job.’

Finishing up the meeting, Bridget Prentice from the Ministry of Justice agreed to consider whether reform of the civil law is necessary, and promised a consultation paper on defamation and the Internet in the New Year, and to seek views at the same time on criminal defamation.

So it looks like the wheels may be in motion. The key now must be to a) keep the pressure on, and b) come up with positive suggestions for change. Any thoughts?

This will be Toben’s fourth appearance at court, and the court will be, as it has been previously, packed with a mixture of frantically scribbling hacks and a smattering of Toben’s supporters, among whom Michelle Renouf and David Irving are the most notable.

Toben has been subjected to a European Arrest Warrant issued by German authorities. One’s initial reaction to the EAW is to baulk at just how wide ranging they can be. But as Chris Huhne points out on Index on Censorship this morning, they are a valuable tool:

“The arrest warrant is extradition for the Ryanair age. If criminals can re-emerge hundreds of miles away in a different jurisdiction within hours of a crime, the state must be able to pursue offenders without the interminable bureaucracy that is such a feature of traditional extradition. But countries must be able to trust each other’s legal systems and the responsible use of the warrant, or the political support for the warrant will wither.”

As with so many legal tools, sensible, sensitive application seems the key. The EAW is not, in and of itself, a bad mechanism. But in this case, the UK authorities have been far too keen to comply with their German counterparts, and ended up stepping in to a legal minefield. We can only hope that this afternoon, we return to a sensible position.

Later, in my smart-arsed adolescence, came the Mary Whitehouse Experience, the apotheosis of smart-arsed comedy. I don’t think I really knew where the name came from, save from the notion of some batty old woman.

That batty old woman turned up again last night, in the BBC’s Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story.

Whitehouse herself was played by Julie Walters, which, to me at least, immediately makes her a sympathetic character: everyone likes Julie Walters, not least because she generally plays likeable people. The casting directors might claim they merely picked a great actor (and Walters is a great actor) but I can’t help being reminded of the casting of Brad Pitt as an IRA volunteer in The Devil’s Own: back then, the producers furiously rebuffed notions that they were “glamorising” the IRA, but, being honest, the very fact of casting Pitt had to imply glamour. Pitt is intrinsically glamorous, and Walters is intrinsically likeable.

There does seem, at the BBC, to be a collective Gene Hunt Syndrome infecting all commissions dealing with the 60s and early 70s. DI Gene Hunt was, of course, the bad copper of the first series of Life on Mars, a bitter, thin-lipped bigot: by the time spin-off Ashes to Ashes came round, Hunt had become a lovable, rough round the edges but essentially decent bloke. ‘Gloriously un-PC’ as many had it.

More worrying was the near-rehabilitation of Enoch Powell during the recent, disastrously arrogantly titled ‘White Season’ (the entire thrust of which seemed to be to prove that white working class people are racists whose only concerns are immigration and Islam; the highlight of which was seeing the curious alliance of Bob Crow and John Gaunt berating the BBC on Newsnight).

The BBC’s documentary on Powell and his ‘rivers of blood’ speech (not a phrase he used, by the way) could not stop reminding us of what a brilliant man he was, implying that he had in fact, been prescient on future racial tensions (though what Powell was talking about was not ‘racial tensions’, it was proper, full-on race war of the kind now only normally discussed on the Stormfront message board).

And so with Whitehouse, who, we now discover, was not a censorious, evangelical bigot (cut, as Nancy Banks Smith points out in today’s Guardian, from the same cloth as Margaret Thatcher) but a decent woman lost and confused in the licentious 60s. Balderdash and, indeed, piffle. Whitehouse was a shrill provocateur on a relentless crusade (or jihad, if you prefer) to stifle, oppress and scare: witness her furious pursual of Gay News’s Denis Lemon, who became the last man to be found guilty of blasphemous libel in this country after he published James Kirkup’s The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name: witness her outrage at Howard Brenton’s Romans In Britain. These campaigns were not the work of a woman merely behind the times, or at odds with the more decadent aspects of the age, as the BBC’s drama had it: rather, they were the work of an unrepentant bigot. We should not imagine Whitehouse as any different, and we should guard against the re-emergence of her spirit.

Related:
Anticant’s arena: Whitewashing Whitehouse