Now that's out of the way, what to make of the furore surrounding Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time tonight?
Well, first I have been absolutely baffled by the people who say he shouldn't be given the platform. Really? Don't they understand what democracy's about? It isn't a spectator sport. It's something everyone can have a go at; otherwise it's not democracy at all. Mrs Thatcher made a similar mistake when she banned the IRA from the airwaves. So hats off to the BBC for giving Griffin an appearance - a refreshing display of moral courage from Mark Thompson.
I believe Griffin will be condemned out of his own mouth. I once heard him interviewed on Radio 5, and for a Cambridge graduate he was woefully ineffectual. I find his assertion that you can't be black and British repellent, but also perplexing. I really don't understand how you can say that someone born and raised here can't be British just because they have a brown skin. I am a bit old school on this - for me Kevin Pietersen shouldn't be playing cricket for England: living here for a few years doesn't count. On the other hand Monty Panesar is as English as buttered toast, and it's irrelevant that he's a Sikh. He's a Luton boy through and through.
The Guardian has been full of hand-wringing nonsense about Griffin in recent weeks. Its leader writers settled for opposition to his Question Time appearance, illustrating that one of the seductive tendencies of extremism is to make otherwise reasonable people into idiots. Gary Younge, writing in today's paper, urges that the solution to racism might be, er, anti-racism. I'm afraid I have no idea at all what this means.
The reality is that the BNP is thriving because it is the only political party which opposes immigration. Its leadership and supporters may well be racist, but I suspect most of the people who vote for it aren't. There is a case to be made against immigration on grounds of economics, the environment and cultural cohesion, and yet public discussion of the issue has been as thoroughly vetoed by today's polite society as discussion of prostitution was vetoed in the Victorian drawing room. There's an interesting article here (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/6400553/Cowardice-on-immigration-has-allowed-the-BNP-to-flourish.html) by Frank Field and Nicholas Soames of the Parliamentary cross-party Balanced Migration group which makes exactly this point.
Incidentally the BBC reported the Office for National Statistics' quite extraordinary prediction yesterday of a population increase to 70 million in the near future as largely attributable to "migration". I suppose we should be grateful the prediction was reported at all, but it's precisely because of this kind of mealy-mouthed attempt to avoid drawing attention to the consequences of unrestricted immigration that the BNP are on Question Time tonight.
