You know what, I’m going to quote myself. I wrote this whilst watching Question Time with Nick Griffin of the BNP as one of the panellists.
The BNP are the most right-wing, racist political party in the UK nowadays, and there has been a huge amount of fuss about the fact that a representative is being allowed to voice his views on one of the most important political programmes of the week.
I genuinely, genuinely believe that the BNP should be given a platform to voice their policies. Believe it or not, but the BNP has two democratically elected Members of the European Parliament, which means that part of the British population voted for them. Hell, 6% of the turnout voted for them.
That is a significant number, whether we like it or not. 6% is not a statistical anomaly. 943,598 actually made a conscious decision to cast their vote for the BNP.
Nearly a million people.
Try to imagine a million people, physically. That is how many people believe the racist, uninformed and grossly false views that the BNP put across. You simply cannot deny those people the voice, nor the vote.
It is one very small step from denying a political party the ability to stand for election to outlawing their existence outright. I simply cannot fathom why people wish to deny any political party the opportunity to exist, or to have their voice heard, particularly when 6% of the voting turnout support them.
If we were to deny the Greens a platform, or the Scottish Nationalist Party the chance to appear on Question Time, there would be ridiculous amounts of outcry and hand-wringing. But it’s not hugely fanciful to imagine a right-leaning government to ban left-wing parties like the Communists. This the same, but with left-right reversed.
The BNP is just another political party, like any other. To most of the politically informed public, they are wrong, and this is shown at the ballot. But to many, they are correct, and have policies worth voting for.
If we were to ban the BNP, there would be a huge movement saying that they are being censored, which could lead to a lot worse than what the BNP actively promotes. To censor is to encourage the movement, to give volume to the voice that says they are being downtrodden by the establishment.
To defeat the BNP, we need to listen to them, and show them to be wrong. Censorship does not do that.
Yes, it is abhorrent to hear their policies being voiced on a BBC programme, but that same programme makes it very clear just how out of step with society those policies really are.
