talkmagic.co.uk

kartoffelngeist wrote:The other thing he does which surprised me, was making Jack Straw look good

There's another reason to hate Griffin - he made me agree with Jack Straw!

dat8962 wrote:From what I've heard this morning there was very little real political debate on the programme which is a shame. This is where I think that the Griffin and the BNP would have really shot themselves in the foot but unfortunately the programme appears to have been one big rant about opposing views on what the people rightly or wrongly perceive the BNP to be about. To a degree, this plays right into their hands.

Agreed 100%. Talk about a missed opportunity for the sake of riding a wave of controversy.

Tomo wrote:

kartoffelngeist wrote:The other thing he does which surprised me, was making Jack Straw look good

There's another reason to hate Griffin - he made me agree with Jack Straw!

Don't get me started on Jackboot Straw...

Not that Im political in anyway, as most politics goes right over my head and I dont get any of it but...dont you think the point of him going on the tele was to provoke the reaction its got?

If no one did anything or reacted surely that would kinda annoy the guy more than him getting the press and media that he craves to spread his hate mongering?

I understand people are extemeley upset and angry about all this, but isnt it like super nanny says, "ignore them and stick them in the naughty corner & soon theyll learn"

After the programme i went on Faceache and posted this;

The whole programme was a pathetic example of previously unpopular people trying to gain public adulation by having a go at an easy target.

And i stand by that. ANYONE who claps Jack Straw wants their hands lopping off as far as im concerned. When someone did direct a question at him, he stuttered and stumbled his way through it like a guilty schoolboy. The ' man ' is pathetic.

My opinion, for what its worth, is exactly that which someone in the audience tried to bring up last night. It's Labour's running of the country that has made the gullible believe right wing parties like the BNP are the way forward. Papers like the Daily Express are scaring people into believing all arabs are suicide bombers and all Turks want to take their daugher away for prositution. This is how the BNP have gained so much momentum recently. Instead of asking why he's allowed on such a programme, they should be asking how the hell he's become so popular that they got him on the damn thing.

Thing is, people cant see past their own outrage. They're like walking front pages of the Daily Mail. Give Griffin enough rope and he'll do the job for you, and instead of shivering outside the BBC centre waving a placard, you can be inside with a nice cup of tea watching him make a prat out of himself.

kartoffelngeist wrote:They (at least used to) want to deport 'non-Brits', even those who were born here...Which has always amused me. Not sure where they want to deport them to.

They don't shout about that one so much now but it's still there. Under their rules I'd be out of the country because my Grand Parents were Algerian, doesn't matter to them that my Mum was born here or that my Dad's family is 100% British.

It's all ok to say that perhaps they should be allowed their say, but someone, somewhere let Hitler have 'his say'. Personally I think that they've got no place is a democratic, multi-cultural society and shouldn't even be allowed to exist. I'd put them all on trial for provoking racial hatered.

While I'm all in favour of giving Griffin enough rope to swing himself by, there is one worry about the whole process with regard to Question Time...

I always come away from the programme annoyed - and it's always for the same reason:

Rehearsed, 'on-message' politicians without the guts or imaginations to express a real opinion (or actually answer questions).

It's most obvious from the party in power (Labour now, but the Tories were exactly the same pre-97). The one mainstream party that seems to show a lack of 'strings' is the Lib Dems, but that's because they know they'll never be in a position of having to put their words into action.

So, what if Nick Griffin proved that he could talk and debate. His party doesn't actually have a line on anything other than social intolerance, so far as I can see, so it's not like he has a boat to rock. At least by making it the 'we all hate the BNP show', the usual politicians could take a break from being seen as insincere hacks...

Lady of Mystery wrote:...doesn't matter to them that my Mum was born here or that my Dad's family is 100% British.

The fun irony, though, is that there's no such thing as '100% British'.

It's one of the perks of being a small but perfectly placed island.

Lady of Mystery wrote:It's all ok to say that perhaps they should be allowed their say, but someone, somewhere let Hitler have 'his say'. Personally I think that they've got no place is a democratic, multi-cultural society and shouldn't even be allowed to exist. I'd put them all on trial for provoking racial hatered.

The real problem with comparing Griffin to Hitler is that we're not living in Weimar Germany. At that point in time, there were significant factors which allowed Hitler to rise to power, which do not exist today.

Sure we have our economic difficulties, but it's not like we're seeing people taking wheel barrows on money to the shops to buy a loaf of bread.

Certainly there are horrific whafts of racism coming from the BNP, but in post First World War Europe, whether we like it or not, anti-semistism was quite popular amongst most European countries, in fact there was talk within our own government of shippping all the Jews out to 'make Great Britain great again'. It was only towards the end of WW2 when allied soldiers stumbled upon the concentration camps in Eastern Europe that everyone found out that the Nazis weren't just locking up 'undesirables' but had moved on to deliberatly and systematically wiping an entire race of the face of the planet.

Hitler didn't get into power using the line of 'genocide's a great idea'. His party offered economic stability in a very unstable time, they promised to restore Germany to it's pre-WW1 position as a world power, and the Jews and other minority groups were happily accepted as scapegoats for all the worlds problems, not just in Grmany, but in large parts of Europe too. I could go on but I really only have a basic understanding of the circumstances around the Nazis rise to power and I'm sure that there are those who understand the subject in greater depth than me who could fill in the details if needs be.

I really don't think at this point in time, allowing the BNP onto late night TV is going to somehow leave us with a Hitler running the country. As voters, we have a responsibility to watch these people, take on board what they're saying, and then using our votes ensure that they never even get close to positions of power.

Censoring someone won't stop them having those views. Exposing them and then demolishing them in debate and using our powers as voters to prevent them from achieving their goals is really the only way to stop them without resorting to the very tactics they would wish to use that we find so abhorrent.

Perhaps my opinions on this are quite irrational and they probabaly are but I just see racism as a horrible thing that shouldn't be tolerated on any level and the same goes for those people who promote racism.

True, but I'd much rather know where the bigots are, who they are and how they're arguing their point, than have them go 'underground', where they can't be held to account.

To return to the Hitler analogy, let's not forget that Hitler's rise to power came, in part, from his underhanded way of piggybacking himself with other popular political movements, regardless of whether or not he agreed with their views.

If I remember my history correctly, he tagged on to the Communist party at one point, gaining votes from their ideology - then promptly outlawed communism and had all his former political allies arrested once he got what he wanted...

Pete

Lady of Mystery wrote:Perhaps my opinions on this are quite irrational and they probabaly are but I just see racism as a horrible thing that shouldn't be tolerated on any level and the same goes for those people who promote racism.

I definitly wouldn't describe your opinions as irrational, in fact I'm very much in agreement with you. I just think we can better understand racism by confronting it head on in a debate situation rather than trying to forcefully sweep it under the carpet. By censoring the BNP and not forcing them to stand up and say what they really mean, they can hide behind carefully worded manifestos and leaflets containing no real information.

As nice as it is to demonize Griffin and his ilk, he still is a human being who has somehow come to the conclusions that he has and, more importantly, has struck a chord with enough people for him to be legally voted into office. As long as there are people out there who feel a closer affinity to the BNP rather than any other political party, then society has some serious issues that really need to be addressed.

We need to know our enemies.

Cassette Boy Vs Nick Griffin
http://bit.ly/p5EM

(via Andy Nyman's Twitter feed)

A J Irving wrote:I definitly wouldn't describe your opinions as irrational, in fact I'm very much in agreement with you. I just think we can better understand racism by confronting it head on in a debate situation rather than trying to forcefully sweep it under the carpet. By censoring the BNP and not forcing them to stand up and say what they really mean, they can hide behind carefully worded manifestos and leaflets containing no real information.

Agreed, and they could say "we're being censored because they don't agree with us, woe be us". At least if they're allowed on QT we can point at them and say "See, we told you they're racist, homophobic bigots"

And I'm in the camp of those who think that BBC should be impartial, so as long as the BNP are legitimately voted into power (as they are), unfortunately they have their right to have their say, even if 95% of people (myself included) don't agree with them. We'd expect the same treatment of those parties who aren't racially motivated, such as the green party

What worries me most about the whole thing are the comments here about debating with a baseball bat, lynching, burning and early graves.

The BNP's views may be abhorrent to most, but can't you see that comments you made about physical violence against someone because they believe something different to yourself is just as bad as deporting someone because of race?

I'm all in favour of letting them show their own colours, exercise their right to free speech and use the platform they've earned by popularity to show the moderate majority that a vote for them is not a vote for political sense.