The more I watch the recordings of last week’s BBC TV Question Time featuring Nick Griffin the more I wonder why such a fuss had been made about his invitation to take part.
The BBC was right to ask him to be a panellist as predictably (please see two parts I’ve posted above) he betrayed himself with every shuffle, lopsided grin and inane excuse he made for his vile brand of racist politics. Indeed, to extend the televisual image, it was like watching a fantasy clip of Attenborough’s Life, wherein a flabby beached killer whale is savaged and then eviscerated by a family of Komodo dragons.
But that’s enough irony. The BBC may have been correct to invite him on the show, but in turn Griffin was entitled to complain how he was then treated. If the BBC had not given him air time, the corporation would have begun its own march towards totalitarianism. But the show was more like a “show trial” and audience members were allowed to behave like a Greek chorus.
The entire debate was focussed on Griffin and the BNP rather than a full range of topical issues as is the normal format. Further, I take issue with The Times’s columnist, Minette Marrin, and must argue that David Dimbleby was an exceedingly poor chairman as he acted as a highly partial moderator. If it had been another, less senior presenter, I am sure he would have been severely reprimanded for his conduct.
Griffin and I could not be further apart in lifestyle and values but I have almost started to understand this unhappy, unlovely mini-thug. His views are not only the politics of envy but those of a man born out of his time. They are simply deeply unfashionable.
Less than 50 years ago, the average ‘decent-minded’ person in Britain would cheerfully espouse a distaste for homosexuality; refer contemptuously to blacks and Jews while the Holocaust was a subject rarely mentioned, even in Jewish circles.
Unfortunately, it is now considered deeply offensive to remind people what I was taught as a young (Jewish) child in the 50s:
The U.K., as Griffin remarked, is 'a fundamentally British and Christian country'. The Jewish view has always been that wherever we settle “the law of the land is the law”. To state otherwise is nothing short of sedition and those mouthing it should be chucked in a nice deep dungeon – perhaps with a mythical ‘griffin’ for company!
msniw
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