Following Thursdays appearance of the extreme right wing British National Party on Question Time, the results are in and it seems that Nick Griffin's Party has got the bounce it was after.
The YouGov poll for today's Daily Telegraph puts them up to 3% support from 2% previously, with 22% of Britons prepared to consider voting for them in local and European elections.
Nobody with half a mind should be feeling great about that so where did it all go wrong. He was a sitting duck, waiting to be exposed and ridiculed in front of a national audience, and yet he seems to have emerged stronger for it.
Firstly the whole hour was dedicated to asking the BNP leaders his thoughts, and then shouting him down and kicking him around before he had chance to answer. We didn't need Jack Straw shouting out that Griffin was a bigot or a racist ten seconds after he opened his mouth, we could hear that ourselves or at least we could if they give him chance to speak his piece. At the end of the hour, Griffin came out of it looking like the bullied rather than the bully.
Secondly, i would suggest that although the vast majority of the BNP views are abhorrent, three big ones that chime with a large number of voters are his views on Iraq, Afghanistan and immigration.
Iraq was an illegal war and those who initiated it should be charged with crimes against humanity, we should pull out of Afghanistan and there are too many people coming to Britain. I would estimate that at least two of these three strike a chord with an overwhelming majority of Brits and the very reason why the BNP may see a lift in its recruitment numbers.
None of the big three parties want to stick their head above the parapet with any of these three issues despite them consistently cropping up as areas of concern for voters. The BNP poll boost simply reflects British contempt for mainstream politics.
This Government has been all about the sleaze, the wars, the expenses scandals, the disregard for voters, the economy, the bankers, the bailouts and rising crime. The Conservatives before them imploded on much the same issues and it is expected that the next Government will be much the same.
Until the Government, or the other big two, are willing to tackle immigration or foreign policy, the only party that are saying what most people want to hear is the British National Party and no amount of the Lib Dems, Tories or Labour party shouting at the BNP leader will help when his accusers are also held in such low esteem by the electorate.
3 comments:
It did seem to me as though the BNP folks are suffering from a whole lot of persecution. Their platform is generally awful, but firing someone for a political affiliation...
I would suspect that spending so much time and effort on a relatively small nationalist party will give them more honor than they deserve and legitimize them. To then go around making all sorts of rules where you get fired if you're a BNP member might just make them look like victims and give them a sort of underdog advantage.
The best way of getting rid of nationalist cooks is just to ignore them.
And on another note, what the hell are openly nationalist parties doing with any sort of respectability in any Western nation? We may have a lot of rednecks and generally ignorant fools (I know a lot of the worst of them) in the States, but nobody (well maybe less than 1%) would ever openly support anything like France's Front National, Germany's NDP, or y'all's BNP. How the hell did the BNP poll 6% in the EU elections?
Funny to think of it... anyone concerned with the national honor and dignity of Britain should be humiliated that the BNP is able to poll over 1%. It makes the whole UK look backwards.
-Nog
I thought, let them on there, let him say his stuff in front of millions and then let everyone see what a utter disgrace he is. What happened was he went on there and for the complete hour he was shouted down before he had chance to. The 3 main parties were so keen to show they hated everything he stood for, that it was almost a competition between them to see who could drown him out first so the result was we didn't get to hear a fraction of his most extreme views.
It is shameful that an extreme right wing group can gain any votes at all, let alone to have 2 of its members elected to the Euro parliament but as i mentioned, they have struck a chord with a number of voters who want to see our immigration policy overhauled which is ducked by the 3 main parties. The BNP are filling that gap.
"It makes the whole UK look backwards."
Only to someone who thinks that the vast sensible majority in any nation state are somehow represented by the small-minded views of the extremist, but small, minority. I wouldn't have thought Americans (of all people) would take easily to that particular concept.
This '6%' thing could be misleading some people. That's 6% of the people who vote in Euro elections in this country, which is only about 34% of the whole population... Factor that in, and that takes the BNP's support down to about 2% of eligible voters. Add in the rest of the population - among whom many more undoubtedly hate the BNP than like them - and their 'electoral coup' shrinks down to 1.5%... and remember: this is during a sharp recession... and a time when the expenses scandal has seen support for the two main parties dip to historic lows...
I've spoken on this at length elsewhere, but the guts of what I'm saying is this: The (comparative) rise of the BNP and race-based politics in this country isn't a good thing, but if it ever looked like they'd get anywhere near meaningful political power, they'd be utterly swamped by the ANTI-fascist vote - hundreds to one. Same as they would be in most countries around the world, including the USA.
Anyway, I'm super-glad the Beeb had Griffin on. Aside from being cringingly entertaining telly, the media shouldn't be trying to 'mediate' the message of any legal political party for the electorate, we should be able to hear all the bollocks they talk direct from their fat stupid mouths.
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