Griffin began badly and only came into his stride when most of the other panelists began to outbid each other on being tough on immigration. He was still a fairly poor, pedestrian, speaker. In this he was a big contrast with Le Pen (whose telly appearance in France is said to have marked his serious entrance into politics). Le Pen (I saw this broadcast in the early 1980s) is a true demagogue: he mixes very classical French with moments of extremely brutal vulgarity (and still does). Griffin was only capable of a few coherent bursts of populism when others came out on the theme of controlling immigration. He came across as utterly confusing in his explanations about the BNP’s turn to the model of the European electoralist far-right. That he had ‘changed’ about sums it up, with little more explanation.
It was obvious that 1) Everyone used up their ammunition about Griffin’s Nazi background far too early, and then echoed it far too often. 2) Same for the references to the zig-zags of the BNP. 3) The BNP acts as a force to draw politics further to the right on the issue of hostility to foreigners. It achieved this aim last night.
The UAF Demo was confused. If it was to protest against the BNP’s politics, then this became submerged in the issue of Banning the BNP from the BBC, or indeed any platform. Instead of attacking the issue of the BNP’s racialism, or its wider politics, this turned into a debate (or rather, a call for a non-debate) about letting them speak.
Bonnie Greer, who has British nationality, was terrible, smug and unable to relate to the debate. I say this with some sadness since I really admire the woman and thought she would deal a mortal blow to Griffin. Frankly telling everyone that we all originally come from Africa and stuff about the Neanderthals was irrelevant
Thanks for this. Agree totally wrt the difference between Le Pen and Griffin. Not all fascists are as clumsy as Griffin, obv.
The whole Churchill thing that went on for 15 minutes was fist-in-mouth stuff, now I come to remember it. If our arguments centre around deifying that man, we are well and truly screwed. Thatcher was a good war leader too, y'know.
UAF demo - agree about the confusion of the message. We were hoping for one clear message, which was against the BBC decision (so I disagree with Coates on that point). The Einstein quote that everyone knows was totalyl on point - "The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything", but the slogans shouted did not always reflect this.
Re Bonnie Greer - she did stray into irrelevance, but as said upthread, you could see she was fuming (being sat next to Griffin), and that sometimes makes it difficult to rein passion in to reasonsed argument, and understandably so.