Jack Straw was a disaster. Nothing in that programme is going to turn back disaffected, disenfranchised white, working class (predominately) men from protesting voting for the BNP.
Straw had nothing on immigration and economic migration and even black members of the public were urging him to state a credible position. New Labour drove these people into voting BNP and still they have nothing: WTF are you going to do about depressed wages, longer housing lists, social alienation in your own streets and estates . . fuck all is still the answer.
The programme may have played well to those wanting to project their own metropolitan liberal outrage but it payed very differently in many small northern towns.
To be fair, i largly feltt no-one had any solutions or opinions that were not directly related to Nick Griffin sitting at the table. He was the wall against which the rest played 5 person squash (and they were hitting hard ;))
I was a bit disappointed with the ground they covered, although I didn’t see the final third or so of the program. It seemed to just be about poking the freak with pointy sticks - talking about Holocaust denial, the KKK (ffs!) - I’m not arsed about hearing these lunatic fringe beliefs get an airing on a program like QT. I was hoping to see Griffin try and fail to articulate a stance on something more in the mainstream of UK politics. The BNP are not interesting in and of themselves, it’s the failures of the labour party that have fueled their current mini revival that’s the interesting and important part
It reminded me a bit of Joe Biden having to debate with Sarah Palin - when you’re debating with a cabbage it’s as hard or harder than going up against a sharp intellectual. Easy to look like a domineering bully (something Biden managed to avoid IIRC). In the event Griffin was not the root vegetable I thought he might be, but he did seem to struggle to articulate himself at times. Not a very fluent spokesperson.
I expect there to be a lot more joining BNP in the future. We have become a society where divisions are ever growong, and one fo the most striking is that of education.
You don’t have to look hard to see evidence of this, where income is related to qualifications, and where you live is obvioulsy related to income, the result is that some areas we have large pools of low educational achievers, who are outcompeted for work and are a ready audience for the message of Griffith.
The income vaue of education itself has fallen, because we now have so may more higher educated work seekers, which further pushes the low achievers to the back of the queue.
Under-educated, under employed, under represented, under advocated, under income - what a fertile ground this is for the likes of BNP, and its worth noting that many of those ‘underclass’ pools are white populations - you only need look at the program on the council estate in Bristol where an Asian female reporter went to live on a fly on the wall documentary to understand the extent of racial discrimination.
The BBC went about this the completely wrong way. They should have had nothing but economists on pressing Griffin on the issue and talking over his head. Or fishing stocks in the North Sea. Or oil policy. Or anything but race.
I watched it on iPlayer after it was posted late last night and still have the same opinion - it really wasn’t much more than a free-for-all with brief moments of sanity that convinced no one of anything other than the fact that whatever they believed going into the debate is still right.
Except for the part where the program convinced me that Griffin was a whiny little bitch. “Mooooommmm! They’re PICKING on me!”