Nick Griffin has won an important victory just by being invited to appear on Question Time. To secure such a slot on prime-time television represents the greatest single accomplishment in the history of the fascist and neo-fascist movements in Britain. Oswald Mosley may have once filled the Albert Hall, but that granted him an audience of 5,000 and all were converts. The BBC delivers an audience of millions. For every 50 people who conclude that Griffin is a buffoon, one may decide he just might have a point. And that is all the BNP needs.
Instead of complaining to the BBC, as several ministers have done, we should instead ask why almost a million British voters supported Griffin’s party at the latest local and European elections. It’s not because they share its racist agenda. As Samir Shah powerfully argued in this magazine two weeks ago, Britain is arguably one of the least racist countries on earth. All surveys show the same results: the concept of racial prejudice is viewed by nearly everyone as repellant, and by the young as plain bizarre. We are the original multi-ethnic state.
It is instructive that nine out of the ten constituencies with the most BNP supporters are held by Labour MPs. The white working class — and the working classes of most other ethnic groups — are abandoning a party which long ago lost its purpose and direction. The more thoughtful Labour MPs, such as Jon Cruddas, are acutely aware of the problem and deplore the way that Westminster politics has been reduced to a battle for swing voters in swing seats. In some ways, BNP supporters can be seen as an abandoned fragment of what was once the New Labour coalition.
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