Nick Griffin on Question Time

Well that was about as illuminating as a fart in an echo chamber. A bussed-in audience of well-spoken people in nice glasses and – be sure of it! – exactly the right representative ethnic make-up of these isles. The panellists, audience and chair were all starting from the basic premise that this was their personal pulpit from which to pick on the fat lad.

Don’t get me wrong – Griffin, however much he plays dress up, is an outright racist whose weird worldview is based on egregious misunderstandings of almost every principle of science, history, logic and morality. It is the clinging-to-the-wreckage outrage of a man cast adrift by change

But, for all that we claim to be a democracy in this country. Democracy. From the Greek ‘demos’ meaning ‘people’. Griffin may be wrong, but he is no wronger than any number of people propping up bars, standing in queues or voting BNP up and down the country. All he has is a bigger audience. And that’s fine. We have to accept that and argue with it.

Where Question Time went wrong was treating this as the Nick Griffin Special. It wasn’t. He’s just another minor politico from a special interest group pleading his case in front of an audience. Jack Straw’s tedious Recollections from History were as engaging as a marshmallow dissolving in tepid milk, Chris Huhne did the usual Lib Dem trick of vanishing from your memory as soon as you changed channel, and Baroness Warsi was a decent performer, but all too obviously a Tory Central Office trick to put a prominent Asian Conservative on air to remind us that this isn’t your daddy’s Conservative Party. Only Bonnie Greer managed to make Griffin look like the nonentity he is by treating him with a kind of teasing disdain.

Seemingly every question was yet another hot stream of indignation concerning various Griffin outbursts down the years that began “How can you say…?” This is Griffin’s home turf, his meat and drink, but even there he failed to land big punches. But the sense you had was a debating club where the chair, the debaters and the audience were all in unity. Result? Griffin probably won a little sympathy. His lack of big-stage experience showed under the glare of the lights in his stammers and twitches, and hateful though the man is you probably felt a tiny twinge of pity for him.

So he lost the ‘argument’ (such it was) but probably did well enough not to make any of his constituency think “shit – we’re backing a loser here.” These are people who already nurse a sense of perceived ostracism and this set-up probably only served to bolster it.

You see where I’ve ended up? The same place as the programme. Not a single mention of policy. Picking apart the BNP manifesto – even if you ignore the anti-immigrant bullshit – is like picking the wings off a fly. Half a dozen question of education or transport policy would have revealed the Griffin doesn’t really have the answers for anything.

[On a sidenote, I 'watched' the live show by means of live Twitter updates before catching the programme on the iPlayer. While my feelings on Twitter are already documented at tedious length, but this was the first time I found it engaging (if ultimately unenlightening).]