Leader column: The BNP – true blue bloods

Oh, the hilarity. The frappuccino-drinking classes have whipped themselves up into a froth over the appearance of a fool on the BBC’s Question Time programme.

Perhaps the best moment of the debate was BNP-leader Nick Griffin’s inadvertently pointing out that Britain’s ‘heroic’ wartime leader had some pretty odious views about foreigners. Whoops!

The pudgy, poppy-wearing prince of the partisan foreigner-hating party made numerous ill received attempts to defend his absurd views in front of a relentlessly hostile audience. Great television, no doubt, but not particularly sophisticated debate. Still, what else could be expected of the appearance of a fringe character like Griffin on television?

Despite the fact that Griffin’s performance has manifestly not transformed viewers into drooling fascists the litany of complaints about giving this ‘Nazi’ the ‘oxygen of publicity’ continue. Whatever about the bizarre idea that simply hearing this man speak will turn people into beasts as though they were part of some kind of weird Pavlovian experiment (a theme forth will return to), let’s take a quick look at the politics of the BNP and what they mean.

Applying the Nazi tag to the BNP is thunderingly stupid – and has racist undertones itself. It is possible to have a meaningful discussion as to whether the BNP is a fascist party but it is self-evidently not a Nazi party. Splitting hairs? Not quite.

The BNP’s economic policies are essentially corporatist, the kind of middle class protectionism favoured by Mussolini and Franco and, amusingly, the Catholic Church and many Irish politicians and bureaucrats. Tick one for fascist.

Then there’s the BNP’s racism. Despite their recent ‘hug-a-Jew’ pretensions the BNP is a self-evidently racist and anti-Semitic political party. Tick two for fascist.

But there is one big reason why the BNP might be considered something other than fascist.

The party is simply an expression of British ‘union-jackery’ that was not only acceptable at one point, it was de rigeur. Whether or not this amounts to fascism is worthy of discussion, but it is not Nazism.

Over here in Ireland, one branch of loyalism within the UDA dabbled in fascism and Fine Gael is famously part descended from the Blueshirts, Ireland’s Keystone Kops-like impersonation of falangism.

The Nazi tag is singularly unhelpful when it comes to understanding how and why the BNP has been able to gain the support it has. Racism is not a foreign phenomenon, imported by Hitler-worshipping skinheads. In fact, it has at various times been part an parcel of British identity – after all, the Empire was built on the backs of supposedly ‘inferior races’ such as Indians and the Irish. Even the shallowest dive into nineteenth and early twentieth century sociology and social anthropology will throw-up some amazingly repugnant views. More recently, post-imperial Britain has shown it has no problem at all with slapping down brown people, whether most receently in Iraq and Afghanistan, or those they presumably see as a pseudo-brown ‘rum lot’ in Argentina, Serbia and indeed Ireland. Not ‘one of us’, indeed.

Ancient history? Maybe so. But there is worse to come:

The BNP’s ‘eject the foreigners’ platform is encouraged by mainstream political prejudice. The party’s policies are merely an echo of those proposed by Labour and the Conservatives: keep the foreigners at bay. Indeed, the BNP has been able to capitalise on the popular environmental rhetoric about ‘overpopulation’ pushed by all of the major British parties despite the fact that a single look at Google Earth shows that even the most densely-populated part of Britain, the South-East, is mostly rural.

Moreover, why is a party with a handful of council seats and two seats in a European Parliament that no-one likes, no-one cares about and almost no-one votes for, considered such a threat to the Establishment? Could it be that the mainstream parties are using the BNP as a straw man to divert attention from the fact that they have nothing resembling a vision for the future?

Suggesting that the repugnant views of fringe nutters like the BNP simply cannot be tolerated does damage to our rapidly shrinking social sphere. Let’s have the debate – surely sane, pro-human voices can win out against the idiots of the BNP as well as those of Labour, the Tories, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the rest.

So, last night there was an idiot on the box? Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose as Jeannie Foreigner might say.