The laughter will have hurt Griffin

Bob Frost

'Churchill, are you fed up with your image being used by the BNP?'

'Oh yes'

Maggie

We'll never know because although all televisions channels, radio stations and newspapers have devoted an enormous amount of time and space interviewing black people, Jewish people, Asian people, trades unionists and members of the Labour government NO-ONE has spoken to or asked the opinion of a single white British member of the working class. They have been written out of the story and presumably that is why they vote for the BNP in the first place.

Alexandrovich

Score draw.

Kavka

It was hard to watch when none of the other panalists gave him a chance to finish what he was saying. The audience members didn't help either. Although, as you say, it was more restrained than was maybe anticipated by some, the heckling and the booing were at some points cringeworthy.

Dennis Churchill

The panel make-up came over as all against the “Brit” but the Trendies would not understand. The audience was also too heavily against him and should have been more of a cross section of the country than a cross section of London.
Overall, worth a good few percentage points on the BNP vote after it gets discussed in canteens and in the pub by people who will not have watched it.
It is the top slicing of the Labour vote that will be the most influential aspect of the rise of the BNP and British/English nationalism over the next couple of elections.

John Barrett

Jack Straw was the real loser on Question Time, he blustered and dissembled when asked about Labour's immigration policies. The points that he made about Imperial troops in the Great War were utterly facile.
I thought Griffin did alright, considering the hostility of the audience and the panel, although the BNP planted questions were pretty cringeworthy if not downright funny.
What was distinctly disconcerting was how much sense the Tory lady spoke, whch means that she will probably not go any further in Cameron's Government of None of the Talents.

Noa Zrk

When he was allowed to make his points Nick Griffin did well and will have scored heavily with the great British public, who have seen a decent English bloke ritually pilloried in his own country by the baying ethnically diverse storm troops of the new and the far left, a duo of shifty politicians and a pair of self-righteous women. The lot of them, Inquisitor Bumbullbully included, failed on the ground that not one of them had any sense of self mockery or humour. On the basis of this performance at six Parliamentary seats will accrue to the BNP at the next election and Strawman will be lucky to keep his seat after his incompetent performance.
new laimmig.

mike

Interesting that although Griffin was clearly the most detested on the panel, Jack Straw ran hm a close second with his evasive waffle about immigration. He won't be as disliked as big Jackie Smith though, on next week as part of her desperate rehabilitation campaign.

Tom

What's hard to understand from the media coverage if this man is so horrible and his views so abhorrent, why did a million people vote for his party?

Lee John Barnes

The primary characteristic of the British is a sense of fair play.

They dont like bullys and they dont like watching a rigged hostile audience, a rigged hostile panel and a hostile host attack one man.

Now that No Platform is down the debate moves from Nick Griffin to BNP policies.

The millions of people who watched QT and who then went to the BNP website will now be reading BNP policies.

The endless middle class ethnic minorities playing the race card on the show will have alienated the white working class.

These middle class ethnics should get a train to those abandoned white working class Northern mining towns where the white, English working class live like Native Amserican indians in poverty ridden reservations.

This is the moment the BNP went mainstream.

david nelson

Maggie is spot on. Question Time perfectly illustrated why the appalling BNP have won support: the white working class/poor were completely unrepresented.

Colin

Apart from his ridiculous and unnecessary comments regarding homosexuality, I think he did much better than expected.

I thought Warsi was woeful. Huhne and Straw predictable and Greer irrelevant and off the pace, as usual.

TGF UKIP

Griffin did not seem to be as assured as he usually is when being interviewed one on one by hostile TV presenters and did not seem to have prepared himself well either. Most surprisingly he appeared to be thrown by the avalanche of hostility.

Unless his target audience factor in the BBC's selection of the audience to give him as hard a time as possible, I suspect Griffin and the BNP will view tonight as a disappointment if not disaster for them.
Be interesting to see the reaction to another invitation to appear which may come quite swiftly if the village thinks it has got him on the ropes.

I note the frequent and routine mention of right wing and extreme parties of the right with, predictably, no objection from Warsi.

Jim

Mr Griffin should have had more time to finish what he was asked by the ethnically correct, hand-picked crowd so I think he did quite well. Always going to be an ambush really.

james

Despite all the self righteous outrage and hypocrisy in regard to Nick Griffin claiming Churchill, unless I am mistaken in his lifetime Churchill variously claimed that the Indians or Hindus "are a foul race" and that also imperial Britain needed "to look after these people" in the sense they were incapable of taking care of themselves. We live in the 21st century but in the last century most of the Establishment and Royal Family routinely thought this way - therefore perhaps Griffin is more honest than people realize. Finally, Griffin will never enjoy power and poses no threat to society - in contrast Straw is trying to abolish public inquests for those murdered by the state (like Menezes) - who are the real Nazis here ?? Most of the audience picked this evening were baying morons - meanwhile the authorities gradually are reducing civil liberties more and more without any complaint - how sad people are so blind !

Wilhelm

Peter

As I predicted it was a chimps tea party, Jack Straw who has got the brain of a fruit fly, multi millionaire Chris Hune, who has the personality of a goldfish, bimbo's Baroness Warsi and Bonnie Greer . David Dimbles who has got the attention span of agnat and the london audience made up of third worlders all ganging up , bullying and attacking Nick Griffin, he didnt have a chance.

Well it has backfired, Griffin has got the sympathy vote.

Snowman

Sorry to tell you this, but did foresee how the debate would be run in one of our recent Fraser's blogs (except for the behaviour of the chair at the opening): everybody, except NG talking, and the audience interrupting. A wrong approach. If only the obviously planted questions were framed better (Straw couldn't even read his notes well), and NG given more time to answer, he would have been more than capable hanging himself.

The Guardian lot will proclaim a victory, the country up north will get more incensed. Interesting times lie ahead.

Wilhelm

Bullies 0

Nick Griffin 1

Noa Zrk

By the way, does anybody share my view that if patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, the wearing of poppies by is a visible demonstration of hypocrisy of the highest order. And the bigger the poppy the bigger the hypocrite. The odious Warsi was almost peeping out from behind her ginormous plastic bloom....

Verity

The audience was always going to be multi-ethnic Third World London rather than the country of Great Britain. So noisy unelected ethnics are shouting down leaders of legitimate, legal parties.

Stephen

Tom: A million people voted BNP because in the working class towns of northern England which have been the main losers of the politics of the last thirty years, and where real economic hardship is endemic, it is very easy to blame outsiders. The appeal of the BNP is that 'foreigners' or Muslims (the 21st century equivalent of the Catholics, Jews, Irish, 'Coloureds' who have been vilified throughout English history) can be labelled as the cause of all our ills. When they have been sent home all, it is said, will be well. Of course, the tendency to blame someone else is natural and common to most communities: usually it is someone outside the family, clan, tribe, or, in modern times, the nation state who is ostricised. We see a similar phenomenon at work when people are demonised for being southerners, northerners, 'leftists', thatcherites, muslims and so on. None of which is to suggest that there aren't political and social issues to do with immigration. But it is an attempt to explain why a party that would 'repatriate' third or fourth generation British citizens (though who knows to where) has limited support in limited parts of England. It is interesting that the BNP does not feature much in the political landscape of Scotland or Wales. Is that because the English take the place of 'foreigners', non-whites or muslims?

Merlyn

People are skirting around the issues. Its not only about mass immigration its about a certain section who come here in droves, take the benefits, reproduce and then say they hate democracy and want to change the laws and bear placards stating 'we will dominate the world'. Its simple, nobody wants house guests that complain about the service. Who is ready to do something about that, Lib/Lab/Cons?

David Lindsay

If the BNP wants votes here in the former mining areas, then it will stop identifying with Churchill. But it won’t.

In the Thirties, there were two British threats to constitutionality and, via Britain’s role in the world, to international stability. One came from an unreliable, opportunistic, highly affected and contrived, anti-Semitic, white supremacist, Eurofederalist demagogue who admired Mussolini, heaped praise on Hitler, had no need to work for a living, had an overwhelming sense of his own entitlement, profoundly hated democracy, and had a callous disregard for the lives of the lower orders and the lesser breeds. So did the other one. Far more than background united Churchill and Mosley.

In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that: “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed, functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini.

Churchill’s dedicated Zionism was precisely that of the BNP: he did not regard the Jews as British, so he wanted them to go away. The anti-British terrorists who went on to found the State of Israel agreed with him, very nearly coming to an understanding whereby Hitler would have expelled the Jews by sending them to British Palestine, which he and the Zionists would have conquered together for the purpose.

All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War in the Far East was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well against him in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

But we have not forgotten the truth about him in the old pit communities. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought, making it a failure in its own terms. The anti-Semitism and the general racism, the brutality and the contempt for democracy, the admiration for Mussolini and especially for Hitler, are omitted from accounts of those who agitated for war in the Thirties, but heavily emphasised, sometimes to point of fabrication, in accounts of those who pleaded for peace.

If you leave aside Churchill and Mosley, then both sides wished to harness the full capacity of the State to correct the root and branch injustice of capitalism in itself, in order to conserve national sovereignty and traditional values, and in order to prevent a Communist revolution; that was the position of all three British parties at the time, and the reason why certainly Labour, and arguably also the modern Conservative Party, had been set up in the first place. But one side also wished, for exactly the same reasons, to prevent another war in Europe, or in countries beyond Europe to stay out of any such war. The contemporary resonances of both aspects could not be more obvious. Those who held to both, across or astride the political spectrum, deserve to be reassessed.

As, far less sympathetically, does Churchill. The BNP is as welcome to him as it is to Mosley.

Fearless Frank

There's only one question that counts now that Question Time has been shown: did it do Nick Griffin and the BNP any good?
No, no, no, that is NOT the question.
Whether or not it made Griffin look good, there are millions who vote for him or sympathise with him.
Do you think they will suddenly change their minds if (in the opinion of some) the BNP leader made a tit of himself?
I think this whole stupid hyped up furore has been seen through the prism of the political caste: "Have we survived this intrusion from a rank outsider?".
However he came across on QT (I haven't seen it), he has this going for him: he's not Tory, Labour or Libdem.
And while the mainstream parties are united in their contempt for a large part of the population, the BNP will clean up.

Tron

I see the metropolitan elite think that Old Nick lost the battle of the BBC.
I think the British Pubic saw an English bloke get mugged. He turned the other cheek and they slapped that as well. A black American woman talked down to him and offered to teach him her politically correct version of our countrys history while the crowd bayed for his blood.
I think he may have got some sympathy from the Great British public . Five against one is not a fair fight.

biggestaspidistra

"The laughter will have hurt Griffin"

I know nothing about the BNP, except for the squealing and deafening 'anti-fascism' that erupts when it is mentioned, but I think this has hurt the Spectator.

Frank P

I feel quite sorry for Griffin. He has a really weird misaligned physiognomy which is obviously the real reason for his inner manic rage. As for his politics: well we all knew that anyway, so what’s all the fuss about? The rest of the panel were risible though - and only slightly less ugly. What a pity that the only one of the panel who was prepared to accept that there is a people of Caucasian race known as the English, in a country called England, was a manqué Gestapo Officer with gargoyle features and a twitch. The rest of the panel reminded me of those weird exotic dragons that David Attenborough featured on ‘Life’ this week, stalking an injured bison; except that the dragons had the dignity of ancient instinct and a savage beauty, unlike the panel who are supposed to be sapient beings. Moreover the toothless mauling of their victim, even with the watery venom from their forked tongues resulted in their prey walking away more or less unscathed and with the full sympathy of the voyeurs watching the charade in their armchairs. Game set and match to the bison. But eventually ssome real predators will getcha Nick, so don’t be too complacent.
The invited audience? Well, what would you expect from a carefully chosen hand-picked mob of Leftie activists from Londonistan, with a token white fascist or two to feign ‘balance’.

Dumbleby the Elder, he of the great Televisiana Dynasty, didn’t really want to be there, did he? The Judge looked almost as uncomfortable as the accused in this mock soviet show trial.

Good pantomime though. A media jamboree! But how come Old Bill failed to contain a handful of far-Leftie disrupters accompanied by a posse of reporters waiting for some action. They had to call the freakin’ cavalry, for Chrissakes, after rent-a-crowd has 'stormed' the puny BBC defences (or were let in by sympathizers or co-conspirators?). That was the final proof of just how far this country has descended into the abyss.

Overall, I think, game-set-and-match to the bison.

The best laugh was that little shit Straw Jack pontificating about 'moral compass'. What a wanker our jigged up 'Justice Minister' is. If any of them came out of it with their reputation intact it was Baroness
Arsi. But I refuse to specify what I think her reputation was before this farce - so you can take that any way you like.

Noa Zrk

David Lindsay
"If the BNP wants votes here in the former mining areas, then it will stop identifying with Churchill. But it won’t".
I'm not really in agreement with you on this. The miners had few political heroes to look up to, unless you include Lenin, Hardie and, God forbid, Scargill. If the last self serving idiot is revered then truly the educational system has declined beyond repair and the miner's descendants have lost all sense of history and critical self-analysis. For the BNP Churchill is a publicity cliche and not much more, triggering the patriotism, nationalism and determination buttons. So what? A lot of people will respond positively to that without self doubt and a prior Marxist-Leninist historical analysis.

Moraymint

Griffin was made to look pretty stupid and the audience was generally hostile. However, one wonders what the mood of the programme would have been if the audience had been drawn from one or two sink estates?

Austin Barry

Jack Straw seemed a wobbly, evasive, nervous wreck of a man and did himself, the Government and British dentistry no favours at all.

Michael Booth

Well, as far as I can see, both Nick Griffin and Jack Straw want to take away my civil liberties and both threaten democracy in their different ways. Straw, however, has been busy undermining our constitution, laws and liberties for years, such is the reality of the New Labour Project. He defended his decision to sit on the QT Panel by saying it was important to have someone with honesty and integrity there - surely the biggest joke ever! It was all predictable as others have said.

Boudicca

Lee John Barnes
October 23rd, 2009 12:02am

I agree with you. The BBC usually ensure that the QT audience represents a cross-section of opinion - but not this time. Everyone in the audience seemed to be opposed to Griffin and (although his views are extreme and abhorrent) he was presented with a selected 'lynch-mob' consisting of the Chairman (Dimbleby was hardly un-biased); the panel and the audience.

The BBC should have ensured that there were some representatives from the section of the electorate Labour abandoned ... the white working class .... who are mainly responsible for voting BNP. Perhaps THEY could have explained to the rest just how Labour's policies of unrestricted immigration have affected their lives.

For Jack Straw to deny this was pathetic and the reason why the BNP WILL damage Labour's vote at the next election.

jon ryan

I see all the obedient little BNP apologists had to stay up late and carry out their orders and post paens to their Führer.

Us grown ups were able to sleep easy in the now certain knowledge that if this clown is the best they can come up with, fascism in this country has as much future as a chocolate hammer. (White chocolate, natch)

Barry

Can't help wondering how Blair, Brown or Cameron would have performed in equally hostile circumstances.

He presence was box-ticking by the BBC - policies were never on the agenda. They did everything possible, short of providing an electric chair, to ensure he was put on the back foot.

A national audience assembled outside London, say Birmingham or Manchester, would have been more interesting.

AngloWelshDragon

Maggie @1152pm. Bang on!
Bring the same QT panel to my former mining village in Derbyshire, hold it in our village hall with a local audience and you will see a very different programme.

Frizby

I didn't watch it but from reading articles across the web and more importantly peoples comments, it sounds like he was set-up to take a kicking. The most poignant remarks seem to be that the panel and audience were totally unrepresentative and unfairly stacked against Griffin. That likely means he'll get more people asking "What is he really trying to say". If he hones and moderates his message, which he will do to get more votes, then a great many people will think he has a point and vote for him as a protest vote.

British politics is at such a low that Nationalistic fervour is raising it's head. Gordon Brown should have the decency to call an election asap and nip it in the bud.

Ian Walker

The key thing for me was Griffin waffling on about "indigenous people" being here since "time immemorial" (except when Greer pointed out that there had been no-one here during the Ice Age, which was the laugh-out-loud moment of the night).

The thing is, Nick, that I don't really care where yours or my ancestors come from. I'm more interested in where my children and grandchildren will be going.

Warsi did herself no harm at all last night - very good performance, although she needs to drop the smug affectation when she makes a good point. Straw wasn't great, but then having to be an apologist for Brown's government is a big burden. Huhne did come across as a bit wild, but he was clearly passionate and angry, which will go down well with the public.

Alison

jon ryan "...fascism in this country has as much future as a chocolate hammer."

From where I live in Bradford, fascism's future looks quite rosy. Not the kind you're referring to though.

Sophie

Ah well, Nick Griffin is as much of a political heavyweight as I expected (i.e. not very). This was clearly the highlight of his career to date, whereas for everyone else it was just part of another day's work.

I am a bit disappointed that almost the entire program concentrated on racism and immigration. I would have been interested to hear Mr Griffin's opinions on, for example, environmental issues, global food shortages, healthcare, education (apart from the ridiculous notion about not giving children sex education), the Uk's relationship with the US, expenses, pensions, the postal strike or pretty much anything else.

I suspect the lack of these or other topics played into Mr Griffin's hands to some extent as, having little coherent or sensible to say about racism and immigration, I can only imagine he would have been even less coherent or sensible about anything else.

As a previous contributor mentioned here, I did sleep easy following the transmission.

jack straws dad

Alison, I agree. But your comment will be lost on Jon Ryan.

Barry

Sophie - yes, the last thing we want is yet another full, honest, no holds barred debate on immigration.

Fat chance.

Fabian the Fabulous

To all those delighted at what they see as Griffin's poor performance on Question Time, let me ask: what do you say to the million-plus who voted for him?

jon ryan

"To all those delighted at what they see as Griffin's poor performance on Question Time, let me ask: what do you say to the million-plus who voted for him?"

I say:
1/ They can get help on the excellent National Health Service
2/ A million is less than 2% of the UK population
3/ Screaming Lord Such got 4.1% of the vote in the Rotherham by-election of 1994.
4/ This shows what you do by playing with statistics.
5/ Griffin makes me laugh more than Such did

Maggie

jon ryan,
I'm glad you cleared that up. There are lots of self-interested groups who fall into that "they only represent 2% (or a lot less)" bracket. Let's ignore them all.

jon ryan

@ Maggie: You ignor them if you wish. I won't. Nor will I loose any sleep over Sweaty Nick's Circus. They need an eye keeing on them, like a boil on the body. But this boil seems about to burst. It'll squirt stinking pus all over the place, but only briefly. And then the body will heal.

nb: while on the `body` analogy, all bodies have an anus...

Fabian the Fabulous

jon ryan, 3.49pm:
Thank you, your reply speaks volumes... about what a supercilious, sneering person you are.
Did you mention 'anus' in another post? Any idea where yours is? That's right, your stuck up it.

Beer Moth

Austin Barry

Post of the week,thank you for the chuckle. Very Wodehousian.

jon ryan

Oo er! That's me told, then! and by a bloke called Fabian the Fabulous no less! (I'd love to be down the Fascist Arms when you introduce youself to the admiring girls (or is it boys? we're all liberals now, of course)) - "Hi, I'm Fabe, Fabian the FABULOUS."

I do wonder about parents giving their children weird names. Here is proof positive that it doesn't always work out.

Oh, and it's `you're` Fabe. `You're stuck up it.` Contraction of `you are.` `Your` is a form of the possessive case of `you.` Hope that's helpful, luv.

Bill Corr

The BNP website claims that the BNP has been deluged by enquiries about membership.
Make of THAT what you will!

Considering Griffin faced the following: hostile co-panelists, a hostile chairman and a VERY hostile audience made up of adolescent Trotskyites and recent immigrants, he did fairly well.

If, of course, the BNP gets a spokesperson who is better at the glib soundbite and off-the-cuff riposte the BBC smoothies will think of 1001 excuses to keep him or her off the air.