Quote Of The Day

From Frank Skinner on being disinvited from Question Time:

It seems I was considered a bit too light-entertainment for a show set in Wootton Bassett. I wasn’t serious enough. Years of public flippancy, low-brow preoccupations and populist TV appearances had made me an inappropriate guest. I was replaced by Piers Morgan.

So,

Did anyone don a brown shirt and start smashing up Jewish owned businesses after Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time?

Personally I doubt that he won many converts but wasn't shown up either, the most interesting thing about it was the fact he is acknowledging that the BNP was a racist and antisemitic party in the past in order to defend the BNP of today. I don't how convincing voters will find that.

Giving Them Rope To Hang Themselves.

Man Widdecombe has a clip of a BNP interview on Radio 2 which demonstrates exactly why "no platforming" the BNP is a bad idea if you want to curtail their influence. They aren't evil geniuses who will convert people en masse to racism unless they are prevented from speaking, they aren't going to impress sceptical people with their honesty and plain speaking either. They are in fact evasive and blustering in a way in which spokesmen from normal minor parties aren't.

Which is why it is not the end of the world that Nick Griffin is going to appear on Question Time next week. If the programme goes ahead and isn't disrupted by protesters there aren't suddenly going to be hordes of brownshirts marching through Bradford. The other panellists which probe him on the BNPs views on race and Griffin will either have to answer it or avoid it, neither of which will show him in a good light.

The calls for boycotting or silencing the BNP carry the underlying assumption that the BNP are correct in their opinion that they represent a silent majority of the British people and it isn't a huge surprise that the most prominent supporters of the No Platform movement tend to be slippery figures like Denis Macshane and Peter Hain.

Quote Of The Day.

David Dimbleby to Margaret Beckett:

Margaret Beckett, you've been fingered a bit by the Telegraph.

(3 minutes and 25 seconds in)

Excusing Terrorism.

Also on Question Time, Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik referred to a claim by the Home Secretary that there are 2000 individuals involved in terrorist plots at any one time:

"If there are 2000 people trying to disrupt our lives, what is it that's wrong with government policy that makes so many people feel that disconnected in this country, that there's that level of terrorist threat. Getting 300 police officers is to completely ignore the lessons of Northern Ireland, in Northern Ireland we stopped terror by addressing... by dissolving the motives of terror, that doesn't mean you condone terrorism, you dissolve the motives, you go into communities and you make those communities feel part of the UK, you don't do that with 300 terror police"

First of all he is factually wrong, terrorism in Northern Ireland was curbed by extensive infiltration of the Sinn Fein IRA by the security forces. Personally I believe that successive UK and Irish governments had wanted to pander to republicans by pretending that they had legitimate political concerns, but until the IRA were defeated it was politically impossible to reward active mass murders.

Secondly the problem is only partly why so many people feel disconnected, after all many people feel dissconnected but very few use it as a justification to slaughter people en masse. So the question isn't why they feel disconnected but why they view that as an excuse to kill.

Thirdly despite his protests he is condoning terrorism, could you imagine him urging the government to respond to something he genuinely felt to be inexcusable, such as the BNP, by addressing the motives of those who support them? No me neither. The euphemism "trying to disrupt our lives" is a bit of a giveaway too.

Fourthly why does he assume that it is government policy that motivates the terrorists? Isn't it at least as likely that they are motivated by the intellectual climate created by people like himself dignifying the pathetic and self pitying rants of the terrorists as representing a serious point of view that needs to be addressed?

I recall that Opik was also on Question Time the week before the 7/7 bombings where he made a claim, which I'm recalling from memory, that the USA and UK invaded Iraq in order to steal their oil and that hundreds of thousands of muslims were being killed by us as a result. Does he not think that people in his position spreading conspiracy theories about the government murdering muslims in order to enrich themselves might just be a motive for terrorism?