The English Defence League marches are heinous, but tolerated by the English authorities. Not so in my homeland, where the Scottish Defence League have
been told by Edinburgh council that they cannot hold a march where
they’d hoped to be joined by 200. Part of me welcomes this news: Scotland has its social ills (mainly sectarianism) but racial tension has never really flared. As Alex Salmond says, there are many
colours in the tartan.
Then again, banning the march may serve to give credibility and a cause to the crackpots who call themselves the Scottish Defence League. Their march would probably have been a tragicomic affair, and they’d have disappeared into the black hole of public ridicule. But a ban is just what these agitators want. The BNP thrives on the idea of being the voice of the people, gagged by the politically-correct elite. The biggest blow ever made against the BNP was putting Nick Griffin on Question Time: the oxygen of publicity proved to be toxic.
Every so often, extremist groups start up in Scotland and they are always a joke. They try to blow up letter boxes with E II R on them, on the grounds that Scotland has only had one Queen Elizabeth. I suspect the Scottish Defence League is made up of the same type of fantasists and incompetents, and is unworthy of the attention of the 47 MSPs who campaigned to stop it. It is unworthy of the attention even of Aamer Anwer, who ran the Glasgow Uni Socialist Workers Party when I was a student. He’s popped up as a human rights lawyer now, natch, and the head of something called ‘Scotland United’.
For a long time, I was persuaded by the “don’t give them the oxygen” line. But the experience with the waning BNP suggests the best way to deal with such groups is not to keep them in the dark, but let them perish in the sunlight. It’s a shame that they have been spared this fate.
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