Last night, Ques­tion Time: the BBC’s ‘polit­ical debate’ show, invited the leader of the BNP onto the panel. This caused a lot of furore in the papers and calls for the gov­ern­ment to refuse to appear or send in a ‘bug gun’ to shoot the BNP down. The res­ult was that vet­eran politi­cian Jack Straw was dis­patched to inform what the gov­ern­ment think of the BNP. They were not happy about being on such a panel with him.

How­ever, I say they should be.

The most import­ant thing for a demo­cracy to be is open. Open­ness is the armour and the sword that truly defeats racism, or indeed any sort of ‘ism. What open­ness says is that, “you may not skulk in the dark throw­ing angry lies or extreme opin­ions about without hav­ing the spot­light put on you.” This has led to a pecu­liar creature being born in the halls of power; politi­cians who are not allowed to have their own views. That is to say, they are not allowed to express them. They must toes a party-line, or stand as an inde­pend­ent. Keep­ing quiet and “on-message” is so import­ant that it is almost impossible to get a straight and dir­ect answer from any politi­cian and the attempt to do so is the format of many a new pro­gram and debate show.

Ques­tion Time is such a show and, for the pur­poses of pre­tend­ing to host real debates, it has a panel.  Pan­els are a format that pitches the polit­ical group dir­ectly towards the audi­ence. This is not the plat­form for debate between the people in the panel as they are not truly facing each other. Rather it is sup­posedly a way of answer­ing the audience’s ques­tions on a one to one basis. The entire panel are allowed to sound off on a sub­ject and they are sup­posed to answer only for them­selves. How­ever, often, and this is not dis­cour­aged, they actu­ally sound off on the people who have spoken before them. There­fore, a Labour MP may go first and a Tory then spends 3 minutes try­ing to blow the Labour argu­ment to pieces. There is very little time for coun­ter­ar­gu­ment, so basic­ally the exper­i­enced politi­cians have no choice but to be very ‘safe’ in what they say and even more ‘on mes­sage’ than normal.

Enter Mr Griffin.

Leader of the far-right party; the BNP

All coun­tries have a broad spec­trum of polit­ical opin­ions. In the aver­age European coun­try, the major­ity opin­ion will be Chris­tian Demo­crat. This means two things. Firstly, the Chris­tian part refers to the eth­ical frame­work of their moral and legal sys­tem being based on the Christian-religious mor­als of the pre­vi­ous ages. The demo­crat part is a state­ment of belief in the powers of a demo­cracy, some­thing most Europeans strongly sup­port and have fought for in the viol­ence of Europe’s past. How­ever, this is the major­ity. Amongst the rest of the people there will be a more frac­tured sub­set and inde­pend­ent groups of people who want to be dif­fer­ent. There are the Lib­er­als, the Com­mun­ists, the Anarch­ists (all very sim­ilar in nature) and many oth­ers, includ­ing the Mon­ster Rav­ing Loon­ies, the True Nat­ural Law party and even the ‘far right’. The BNP are a far right party that define them­selves by want­ing, what is at the very least, a “strong” change in Britain:

Non “nat­ural” Brit­ish out. As if being Brit­ish can be defined by mere genes.

They say that this change is to defend against the mod­ern gen­o­cide of the Brit­ish people, but the truth is this is not a Brit­ish ques­tion. In fact, it has been with us (and all nations) since the dawn of time.

It is the Ques­tion of “foreigners”.

The Magna Carta, England’s first doc­u­ment of rights and lauded at all levels as the first step towards demo­cracy, actu­ally con­tained dir­ectly racist views in it. In its case against the Jew­ish people, who it advised against bor­row­ing from. Such sen­ti­ments against so called “for­eign influ­ence” have always been debated and indeed inflamed by the racist policies con­tained within a minor­ity. How­ever, hav­ing such people in the demo­cracy is a vital part of the polit­ical process.

Why?

Because demo­cracy only works is it is totally rep­res­ent­at­ive of all the views in the coun­try rather than just the majority.

There comes a time when the pre­vail­ing winds and tribu­la­tions require a change in lead­er­ship in the Com­mons. This tends to drift between the two main Chris­tian Demo­cratic parties, but in the past has drif­ted the way of the Lib­er­als or fur­ther. This is in response to gen­eral feel­ing in the coun­try and the situ­ations and chal­lenges to be found in the world. Such change become mean­ing­less without free­dom to debate it. People like Griffin throw the oth­ers into 3d, his views provide the con­trast for the others.

For example, Churchill is often exposed as a Tory hero. How­ever, keep in mind that his actions dur­ing WWII (such as the bomb­ing of Dresden) would be illegal today. I am not sug­gest­ing that they were any­thing but neces­sary back then, rather that we could not real­ist­ic­ally judge where he would stand today. In fact, it is import­ant to remem­ber that Churchill was a mem­ber of a Lib­eral gov­ern­ment as well as a Tory Prime min­is­ter; he was able, as was more accept­able in MPs back then, to change his point of view as needed.

Churchill, con­sidered the greatest ever Brit­ish politi­cian.

Such chan­ging is not wel­comed today.

The parties in a demo­cracy are an indic­a­tion of the dis­tri­bu­tion of the views held by the col­lect­ive. There­fore, there will always be a ‘nation­al­ist’ view­point and in fact that is import­ant. Without a rep­res­ent­a­tion of such views, groups of people, per­haps large groups, would be feel­ing sig­ni­fic­antly mar­gin­al­ised and pos­sibly become more viol­ent. Bring them into the lime­light and such beha­viour will not stand the scru­tiny. This worked with the Irish Ter­ror­ist parties far bet­ter than ignor­ing or ban­ning them did. To me, the real danger in a demo­cracy is that the sys­tem will degen­er­ate into a two-part state. An issue found cur­rently in the US, where the two parties are essen­tially identical and all non-mainstreamed voices are silenced. What silen­cing them does is dis­en­fran­chise minor­ity opin­ion and lead to a sys­tem where the major­ity party has no checks and bal­ances what­so­ever. This leads to agen­das being for­war­ded, without chal­lenge, and that can be mon­strous. Con­sider the US inva­sion of Iraq, all dis­sent­ing voice, all of it, was viciously attacked in the press. The fact that the major­ity had whipped itself up into frenzy and stopped listen­ing to any other voices meant that the dis­astrous inva­sion went ahead with enorm­ous backing.

This lead to over 500,000 people being killed.

Half a million.

Minor­ity opin­ion is vital to a healthy run­ning demo­cracy. It is a way of tak­ing the pulse of a nation. It does not need to be feared or encour­aged; it just needs to be heard.

So, if that is enshrined in the demo­cratic sys­tem, what is the problem?

The prob­lem is over-exposure. The parties that appeared on the Ques­tion  Time panel know all too well that it is not a debate show. None of them treated it as such and all of them attacked Griffin. By allow­ing the BNP onto the show, they feared that it will expose the racist minor­ity view to more people than it nat­ur­ally appeals to. What Mr Griffin said on the show was illu­min­at­ing: he said very little. He stayed away from the cent­ral mes­sage of his party, a mes­sage that car­ries the expli­cit notion of the “nat­ural superi­or­ity” of the “whites” and instead focussed on a view that is only the tip of that ice­berg: immig­ra­tion.
Not sur­pris­ing really.

The panel attacked Griffin relent­lessly for what they claimed he said in other formats and at other times, while at the same time cri­ti­cising him for defend­ing him­self using the same meth­ods. He did not rise to it at all and that was a wor­ry­ing sign for it shows that he isn’t just a racist idiot; he is also a politician.

The BNP knows that merely being invited onto Ques­tion Time was a suc­cess. The other parties know it too and unfor­tu­nately turned the pro­gram into an attempt to dis­credit the view­point of the BNP and not debate them. Per­haps the BBC really knows that any proper debate comes from the people watch­ing the show at home. In my house­hold, the pro­gram lead to a ser­i­ous debate that went on for hours and con­tin­ued this morn­ing. Debate that turned angry and upset. Debate that was per­sonal and like the draw­ing of a wound. In other words: debate that was vital. I sus­pect that this was a pat­tern repeated all up and down the country.

That is good for the whole demo­cratic pro­cess itself.

At the moment, the gov­ern­ment does not want debate on any­thing. They sign up to things like the European Treaty without ask­ing the people or any­one else.  They never asked if we should go to war with Afgh­anistan. They are not inter­ested in actu­ally enga­ging with any dis­sent­ing voices and do everything they can to silence them. They never engage in debate at all when not in par­lia­ment, they instead focus only on “message.”

By put­ting Griffin on this pop­u­lar show and hav­ing MPs attack him, the BBC has allowed the real debate to open.

So what is my opin­ion on all this?

I am a philo­sopher and my polit­ical opin­ion is quite close to anarcho-syndicalism or per­haps social liber­tarian. My polit­ical hero’s are Voltaire, Ghandi and Lao Tzu. What I believe in is egalitarianism:

a polit­ical doc­trine that holds that all people should be treated as equals and have the same polit­ical, eco­nomic, social, and civil rights

As a moral philo­sopher and hav­ing trav­elled around the world, I find myself becom­ing more lib­eral. I find myself dis­lik­ing the cor­por­ate ruled world we are in, ser­i­ously dis­lik­ing wars in other coun­tries for reli­gion and oil, not afraid of any­one what­so­ever and against the aggress­ive over poli­cing of the people in the UK.

I remain pro choice, pro gays, pro Europe, but anti news­pa­pers, anti celebrit­ies and anti globalisation.

I have many friends (about 40% of my chums) from eth­nic back­grounds, but to me they are all Brit­ish. Not black, not “them and I”, but British.

I do not care for Mr Griffins views, and I will not argue them here nor link to them (rais­ing his pro­file on the web — try goggle for the worst of it). I do not believe in the hate filled mani­festo he has writ­ten, but on the other hand; I feel that such voices are not only to be heard, but also to a cer­tain extent pro­tec­ted. Griffin may have abhor­rent views, but I would rather he has the chance to spout them in pub­lic, where he can be chal­lenged, than in a private room where all debate is lost and with it: our cul­tural love of democracy.

As Voltaire him­self said, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”

Regards,

Basho

Related Posts

• No Related Posts