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Wednesday 8 October 2008

Cover Story

Let the people of England speak

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

This programme was shown in July last year and, in a statement following the arrests, West Yorkshire police proudly announced that it had deployed a team of officers on the case ‘five days a week, ten hours a day’ ever since. Now at this point in the article, a really good journalist would tell you how big that team of policemen was. And how much the investigation had cost the taxpayer. And also cross-referenced it with how many burglaries, muggings, etc., had been carried out in the West Yorkshire area from July to 12 December. Especially unsolved ones. But I haven’t been able to find that stuff out: the police won’t tell me. But let’s just remember: a team of police officers, five days a week, ten hours per day.

I got interested in this case after writing an article for the Sunday Times about Blunkett’s proposed law prohibiting people from inciting religious hatred. This is part of the new Serious and Organised Crime and Police Bill, unveiled in the Queen’s Speech. According to Blunkett, it is intended to protect ‘individuals’ rather than ‘ideology’ — but this is a meaningless and disingenuous statement. It’s actually to stop you dissing Islam, full stop. I tried to find out from the Home Office what would constitute an offence under the new Act and nobody could tell me: they haven’t got a clue. I asked loads of times. And then, on 8 December, a Home Office press officer said to me the following:

‘It’s all about context. If you wrote something in your column about Islam, the Crown Prosecution Service might not be interested, but if the same thing was said by Nick Griffin in a pub in Bradford, they might well be.’

Now, leave aside for a moment the repulsive implications of such person-specific legislation and therefore the wholly subjective nature of this new ‘offence’. Forget for a moment that it will be left to the police (or the Home Secretary) to decide whether or not someone dissing Islam is doing it for naughty reasons or for nice reasons and what the hell difference that makes. What interested me once my article had been printed were the apparently clairvoyant powers of the Home Office press officer. Because, of course, four days after that conversation with the press officer, Nick Griffin was arrested for having said something in a pub about Islam.

It must be clairvoyance, because when I rang the Home Office back it insisted it had no involvement whatsoever in the Nick Griffin case. It didn’t even know that the arrests were pending, proposed or imminent, a different press officer pronounced. Its officials had not even talked to the West Yorkshire police about the case, I was told. Twice.

‘Stretching it a bit to be just coincidence, isn’t it?’ I asked.

‘We had no contact at all,’ the press officer repeated.

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