Wednesday 21st October 2009

Tomorrow night will be a landmark for political television when British National Party leader Nick Griffin appears as a panellist on BBC's Question Time.
This has been a red hot topic of discussion in the last month, but after all the build up we'll finally get to see if Griffin can hold his own against Jack Straw and Chris Huhne, front bench politicians from Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively.
The big controversy has been over whether the BNP should be allowed to be represented on one of the BBC's most watched political programmes, but the sad reality is that after winning two seats on the European Parliament earlier this year (see blog entry 8th June) the BNP are a legitimate party who have to have air time for the sake of the BBC's political impartiality ethos. As much as I disagree, the BNP are a legal party (surely their legitimacy calls for stricter rules on what a legal party can be) and despite the majority of their supporters being racists and extreme patriots, they still, worryingly, have a growing following.
The best we can hope for tomorrow night is that Nick Griffin is intellectually humiliated by competent political debaters in Jack Straw and Chris Huhne and as a result his supporters will start to see sense.
Surely it can't be too difficult to show up Nick Griffin. He is, after all, a man who thinks the Holocaust never happened, has said earlier this year that "there's no such thing as a black Welshman" and is perhaps fortunate not to be convicted of inciting racial hatred. To put it simply, Griffin is probably the most vile human being in Britain today. Straw and Huhne, along with the other panellists, have a responsibility to show him up as this on tomorrow night's Question Time. Please don't let us down.