Posts Tagged ‘BNP’

I spent a little of last night, as the festive season faded and a whole new year and the return to work hove into view, watching the latest iteration of Celebrity Big Brother wipe it’s arse across my TV screen. As the usual array of desperate people, half-arsed film heroes and one hit blips on the music radar began to settle into the Big Brother house, in much the same fashion as their predecessors had last year, I got to thinking – is 2010 going to be any different from 2009? Will we have ANYTHING new in the coming months, rather than just a retread of everything that’s gone before? As we seep into January, it seems not. Read the rest of this entry »

Bearing in mind my post from yesterday, I’m still a little unsure about how the appearance of Nick Griffin on Question Time last night will pan out in the long run. There was too much passion from the panellists, too much shouting down for my tastes. It all seemed too much of a witch-hunt. It doesn’t help that Nick Griffin, ever the opportunist, has plonked himself back at the top of today’s news agenda by claiming that the BBC organised a lynch mob and is demanding that he get one on one debates with Jack Straw, David Cameron and others as reparation.

Whilst Griffin’s repulsive views were made apparent in amongst the barrage of anger let loose by the audience and panellists, and whilst I am sure that his horrible vacillations will turn some people off, I am also certain that the sight of him slick with sweat and laughing nervously, at times like a small boy in the playground surrounded by bullies, will make him seem sympathetic, even credible, in some quarters. I am also certain that the oxygen of publicity will make Griffin seem all the more credible in the eyes of the dispossessed voters who helped him gain a European seat. All in all, I think last night’s Question Time was a no win situation for all.

Except for Bonnie Greer.

Politicians of all stripes could learn a thing or two from Bonnie Greer’s peerless decimation of Griffin. She treated him seriously enough to draw him in, dealt with him as if he was not a lunatic and used the comfort zone she created between them – she was sat right next to him, which helped – to carefully, dryly and, with a measure of irony that was glorious to behold, offer him a good, solid rope with which he promptly hung himself. She only came close to losing her temper once, when Griffin suggested that David Duke was all right because he was an “almost non-violent” member of the Ku Klux Klan. Even this she passed off with not much more than seriously raised eyebrows and some careful argument.

Without Bonnie Greer and, to a lesser extent Lady Warsi, this would have been a very different programme; one which could have created a great deal more sympathy for Griffin. Politicians take note!

A new poem by the Borkowski poet in residence, dedicated to Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, who will be making his first, controversial appearance on the BBC’s Question Time tonight. For the audio version, scroll to the bottom of the post…

I’m Anglo-Saxon, I’m of German extraction.
I’m a Celt. My blood’s from the East.
I’m Norman, I’m Viking and I came hiking
to the British ethnicity feast.

Yes, I’m British, British, born of the skittish
aftermaths of empires gone.
I’m mixed, multiracial and no PR facial
can take away from the truth of my song.

I’m Muslim, I’m Gurkah, I’m a social worker.
I’m Jewish, I’m royal, I’m black.
I’m a desperate immigrant, an urgent applicant
escaping from torture, attack.

I’m a Brit, I’m a Brit and anyone’s fit
to take that name with pride as a tag.
I live in a world where one cannot stay curled
hermetically up in a flag.

In the Britain I live in, no one should give in
to hate or abuse or despair.
Whatever my creed, orientation or breed
all that matters is to be kind and be fair.

Yes, I’m British, British, born of the skittish
aftermaths of empires gone.
I’m mixed, multiracial and no PR facial
can take away from the truth of my song.

The British Song by Adam Horovitz [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The BBC have, without doubt, handed Nick Griffin and the BNP a potential PR coup by allowing him to appear on Question Time. It is very likely that Griffin will be working desperately hard to avoid belching racist bile, especially as the programme surrounds him – in the interests of the BBC’s “central principle of impartiality” – with Jack Straw (Jewish ancestry and, appropriately, Labour’s Justice secretary), Lady Warsi (Muslim Conservative peer), the critic Bonnie Greer (African American) and token Lib Dem Chris Huhne.

Griffin’s PR nous comes hard earned – the BNP’s Director of Publicity, Mark Collett, has had his share of run-ins with the television, having been caught on camera during Channel 4’s Young, Nazi, and Proud documentary in 2002 declaring his admiration for Adolf Hitler and calling homosexuals “AIDS monkeys” on Russell Brand’s Re:Brand show in the same year. Collett is highly unlikely to want Griffin to fall into the same trap, despite the strong likelihood that he will be mercilessly provoked.

So should we allow a thug in a well-cut suit on the TV to attempt to seduce the masses? Is Griffin likely to raise his status to that of statesman in the circumstances? Prohibition would, I suspect, be more likely to fan the flames of disaffection among voters – who have much to be disaffected about at the moment, hence the 6% who voted BNP in the European elections – and the last thing most people, let alone most politicians, want is to allow them more chances to snare votes.

The hope, then, is that Griffin will succumb to anger and show his dark side, which has been slathered in nice suits and careful spin for the last few years. Gordon Brown has gone on record this morning to say that: “it will be a good opportunity to expose what [the BNP] are about”. Russell Brand has said it with more style in The Sun. According to Brand it will help to let the BNP “gurgle up their chuckle-brained hate-broth” on Question Time. “The right thinking people of the Earth are on relatively safe ground when it comes to the ‘war of words’ with televised bigots,” he adds.

A few years ago Griffin told a meeting of the American Friends of the BNP (which included the then leader of the Ku Klux Klan) that: “Once we’re in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, then perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say, ‘yes, every last [immigrant] must go’. But if you hold that out as your sole aim to start with, you’re not going to get anywhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity.”

With this in mind, I think that Michael Corleone’s advice in The Godfather Part 2 – “Keep you friends close, but your enemies closer” – is the best bet. Let’s keep Griffin and his hateful, hate-full party close and hope that they deliver a horse’s head to their own bed, making it clear just how appalling their views, which they keep simmering under the veneer of careful PR, really are.

What do ex-pop star Dane Bowers and the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, have in common? They’re both publicity predators, prowling at the fringes of big news and ready to leap in and attach their teeth into the rump of a story that will get them attention.

Griffin is all over the news at the moment, attaching himself to the coat tails of the BNP’s London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook, who was invited to Buckingham Palace for a garden party and sought to bring Griffin as his significant other to the party. But Griffin, in true publicity predator style, has now consumed the story entirely.

According to the Daily Mail: “The leader of the British National Party yesterday pulled out of the Royal garden party following a public outcry over his invitation. Nick Griffin said he had ‘no wish to embarrass the Queen’ by attending Buckingham Palace on July 21.”

The far right have always been good at propaganda and at getting ink – Goebbels was an astonishing propagandist who turned the swastika into the world’s most recognisable brand logos. Griffin’s trick, learned from pop stars and the 24/7 news cycle, has been to insert himself into the soap opera of the news cycle. Soap, as we know, demands a rich mix of people and always rewards the most Machiavellian characters with big story lines.

You just have to look at Dane Bowers for proof. Bowers is back in the life of his ex, Katie Price aka Jordan, determinedly reinserting himself into the ongoing soap opera that is the Pete’n’Jordan bust up, calling her as his alibi after being arrested for drink driving outside her house. It’s a guaranteed method of reclaiming fame – this fresh injection of notoriety should last him a good fifteen months, even if he and Jordan are not an item again after all.

Griffin’s predatory ambitions are – at the moment, anyway – much more short term. He’s hoping to turn his ‘noble’ gesture to the Queen into votes at next week’s local and European elections. If that works, then the long game begins and Griffin the publicity predator will be red in tooth and claw.

In the meantime, both Griffin and Bowers are successfully writing themselves into the news-soap. For proof, all you need to look at is the reaction of Middle England. Right now, Griffin and Bowers are the names on a huge number of people’s lips.