The BNP at the BBC: The Protestors are Just as Fascist

Yesterday's debacle over the BBC's invitation to the BNP (British National Party's) Nick Griffin was highly revealing ... on the shallow nature of student and public thinking on the issue of free speech.

Here's the bottom line: While the BNP and Griffin may well be fascists, so to, in a very real sense are those who protested on the streets demanding Griffin not have the right to express his views and speak freely.

I don't like the BNP and its outright rascism and revisionist historical approach any more than the next fair-minded man (though Griffin is right when he describes Islam as a "wicked and vicious faith" - just ask millions of women suffering under its yoke). But I defend their right to speak freely - and openly show us what a revolting bunch of immoral fascists they really are. But let them swing by their own words, not by banning them or denying them the same right to free speech the protestors themselves demand.

If speech is clearly more than offensive and is geared to propagating violence or criminality, that is something else. As foul as right-thinking people might deem BNP positions,those attached to it are fully entitled to speak and be openly and strongly debated.

Quite honestly, I find the protestors an equally repugnant, un-thinking, anti-intellectual bunch of fascists. And note how many students were at the forefront of demanding the BNP be denied the basic right to free speech. As the historian AJP Taylor said: "It's a sure sign of political backwardness when any movement is led by students." It seems last night's protestors and the Taliban (another student movement) have much in common, ideologically.

Comments

[Pops in Vienna]

Amen Peter, amen.

Good to see that you are blogging again.

[Peter Wilson-Fish]

Hello Peter, Have you noticed that whenever someone gets onto a council or gains some political position or even becomes a minor celeb they get a compulsory brain transplantt and are issued a frozen pea? Start at the last, remember when New Woman Magazine called Pamella Bordez a Bimbo and included the headline, She Laughed All The Way To The Bonk, and got sued for their pains? Surely no one immagines that I, currently an Old Man aged 76, read New Woman? However, because she was stupid enough to sue them the story appeared in every newspaper and everyone laughed. President Clinton was no better. A USAF General got drunk in the mess and called Clinton, A draft-dodging, womanising (I can't remember it all) gay-lover. Clinton was stupid enough to sack him, so , of course it hit the world press. If Clinton had any brain he would have known that officers get drunk in the mess regularly. Politicians never read history, so he didn't know his forerunner,General Grant was famous for it. If only Clinton had the gumption (Gumption: an increasingly scarce commodity now only found in remote Yorkshire Dales) to ignore it the story would have spread little further than that particular Air Force Base. Clinton's injured ego ensured we all had a chuckle. Now look at the idiot running the Tory Party. We used to laugh at the Upper-Class Twit, remember P.G Wodehouse and his character Bertie Wooster? Where does the BNP get its votes? The white working class and anyone else opposed to Mahomet's vile cult. So who does that clown put up to oppose them? A Baroness, one of the now discredited and openly reviled political elite. Not only that but she is a Mahometist. That alone must have been worth several thousand votes to the BNP, and votes lost to the Tories. This idiocy is nothing new, remember when he called himself "the Heir to Blair"? Does anyone outside a lunatic asylum think we need another Blair, isnt that called "change the name and do the same"? Neither has he learned from his mistakes, hasn't he just promised to pack his party with bimbos and creepy queers?