Griffin, the BNP, and the BBC Redux
By I, and several others, suggested that in the wake of Nick Griffin’s appearance on the BBC, support for his non-racist British National Party would not appreciably increase. Indeed, Andrew Rawnsley writes a scathing, at times hilarious, piece in “Comment is Free” in today’s Observer, in which he admits surprise that Griffin turned out to be “a big, blubbery wuss . . . a nervous, sweaty, shifty, amateurish and confused man, manically grinning when confronted with his back catalogue of repulsive quotes and occasionally venting bursts of incoherent nastiness.”
In fact, his own party is critical of his appearance on Question Time for not going far enough, for attempting to portray the Party as modern and moderate, and, worst, for not being prepared: “Maybe some coaching could of been done so that Mr Griffin could of answered any questions articulately.”
The more people see of the BNP, the more poisonous they will see them to be. I take that view even though they claim – not a boast to take at face value anyway – that they got 3,000 new recruits from a programme watched by an audience of 8 million. So the BNP’s “breakthrough moment” won over, on his own figures, less than half of a thousandth of those exposed to its leader.
The BNP has two main sources of support. At the core are extreme racists. The greater and softer section comes from disaffected voters who feel ignored and disenfranchised by the conventional parties and to whom the BNP presents itself as a stick with which to beat the political establishment.
