Despite the hype, we won't ever know the real impact of Nick Griffin’s appearance on BBC’s Question Time. Like any other small party, the BNP’s vote is contingent on how people feel about the major parties. We know very little more about the British National Party, or its future, than we did before. We may, however, have learned some valuable lessons about how to argue with them—or more precisely, how not to.
Back in 2007, when I was interning on a national broadsheet, I went to the party’s local election press launch at a pub in Dagenham. It turned out I was the only journalist to attend. The experience bordered somewhere between the terrifying and the absurd. At Dagenham East tube, I was ceremoniously greeted by seven or eight big men in black suits, shaved heads and black sunglasses and taken to a pub swathed in the flags of St George. The function room inside had been transformed into something resembling a medieval court; when Nick Griffin was led in by a procession of flag bearers to a robust fanfare, we all rose. At one point during the proceedings Griffin asked me to stand up and take a bow for being the only journalist “brave enough” to show up.
Now that the BBC has been “brave enough” to entertain Griffin too, he has finally found a national platform to say—almost verbatim—the farcical things he said in that pub back in 2007, that “Islam is a wicked and vicious faith,” that the sight of “two men kissing is creepy,” that Britain should be home only to its own “indigenous peoples” (something he utterly failed to define). No surprises there, then: Nick Griffin is still not a mainstream politician, and his policies don’t make sense.
What was striking, however, were the similarities between the BBC studio audience and that pub audience back in 2007: the liberal outrage voiced by the panel and audience was so homogeneous that it quite chillingly reminded me of the same, unquestioning accord held by those who turned up to see Griffin in Dagenham. The only difference is that I happen to side with the liberals. To someone who doesn't, the show must have looked like a stitch-up.
After the launch in 2007, I interviewed Griffin on a picnic bench in the pub’s garden. He was very much like how he appeared on television last night; a man, seemingly a little uncomfortable with his weight and diminutive stature, prone to nervous laughter and fond of splitting semantic hairs. (The only big change was the backdrop; instead of black-suited minders hovering nearby, there was Bonnie Greer, leaning disdainfully into her chair with her back to him, dropping in the occasional history lesson.) As we sat in the garden, Griffin told me how the launch the previous year had been packed full of cameras, microphones and journalists taking notes. “Why has no one apart from you showed up this time?” he asked. “It’s a conspiracy.”
It may have been a conspiracy, of sorts. In the days preceding my date with Griffin there had been a feeling across the media, and certainly in the newsroom where I was interning, that the BNP should not be given "oxygen": that the publicity they had had the previous year had helped them win seats, and that they should not get the same assistance again. Which is why, presumably, the paper only sent an intern, hedging their bets that they weren’t going to cover it. And this theory seemed to bear out: my interview with Griffin was never published, relatively little coverage of the BNP appeared elsewhere and in that election, despite high expectations, the party made no significant gains.
Given this precedent, did allowing Griffin onto a platform as large as Question Time risk boosting the BNP’s support? Yes, undoubtedly. The reason, however, may not be the fact of his appearance, but rather the manner in which it was handled. No matter how repellent one finds Griffin and everything he stands for, the show did degenerate, as one BNP spokesperson put it, into “have a go at Nick Griffin time"—and this is both lazy and dangerous. Instead of being pressed on issues, a series of questions were shouted at him in a manner less resembling political debate, and more, as Andrew Neill later put it, karaoke. What made it worse was that other members of the panel dodged and evaded questions when it suited them as much as Griffin did; when asked if the rise of the BNP was due in part to new Labour’s misguided immigration policies, Jack Straw fudged his response almost as shamelessly as Griffin did when challenged about his Holocaust denial.
Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi claimed that the event had been a success because Griffin had not been able to put forward “the PR version of what he says.” Sadly, having seen him roll out exactly the same argument to his party faithful in Dagenham, I’d have to disagree. He kept to the routine he has practised for many years and, in the process, managed to look like a victim. Of sorts.
To be fair, it’s not easy interviewing Nick Griffin. I found it difficult to get him to say anything that was explicitly racist, though most of it was casually vile. At the end of our chat, I asked him if he ever became prime minister, he would let me stay in the country. “But you’re British,” he said. “Of course you could.” When I told him I was American and probably of mixed racial ancestry, he seemed flustered and replied that it was obvious that I had “culturally assimilated,” so my staying wouldn’t be a problem. I had to laugh. And when I laughed, that was the only minute that he seemed genuinely thrown.
So, should he have been asked on to appear on TV? Yes; his party has enough votes to justify it. But what was needed was an audience and interviewers willing to do more than throw abuse at him, who would come up with things that he didn’t expect and, above all, would make him look ridiculous. Which is why the star of the show should have been the young British Asian man who offered to start a whip-round for a plane ticket—to send Nick Griffin to the South Pole, a "colourless landscape" that he'd presumably enjoy.
