Cover Story

Let the people of England speak

Rod Liddle

1 January 2005

The BNP may be odious but, says Rod Liddle, there is something fishy about the arrest of its leader

Well, I just wanted to know if you were happy to sign the arrest warrant, I said, as plaintively as possible.

‘(Long pause) I can’t say anything about this. I’m sorry.’

It’s all a bit of a mystery, isn’t it? Although why, heaven alone knows. West Yorkshire police seem simultaneously proud of the operation and terribly reticent. The Home Office is, yet again, dissembling.

Meanwhile, the BNP leader Nick Griffin thinks it highly unlikely that he will be charged with anything at all and believes the whole thing is merely an attempt on the part of the Home Office — he is very clear about that — to ‘break’ the BNP. It wouldn’t surprise me overmuch if he were right about that. But I suspect it’s more a case that the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, wished to placate New Labour’s enormous Muslim constituency which has been querulous of late, partly over the war against Iraq, partly over the arrests of suspected Muslim terrorists here in the UK. What better way to do a bit of placating than round up the ghastly racists of the BNP? And how fortuitous that the next time the BNP members appear in court it will be on 2 March, just as the general election campaign is expected to get under way.

But a number of questions remain in the mind. For example, who is telling the truth, the West Yorkshire police or the Home Office? And how does the Home Office explain away that statement to me from its press officer which predated Nick Griffin’s arrest?

More seriously, we might start to worry ourselves about the laws against inciting racial hatred and the new one intended to combat what has been called religious hatred. Griffin was arrested on suspicion of contravening the former of these. As his comments were confined exclusively to Muslims (and even then in comparatively moderate tones) and the new law about inciting religious hatred was intended to give Muslims hitherto absent protection, why do we need a new law? What’s the point of it? If people can be arrested for dissing Islam, then the new law is surely entirely superfluous.