Prime Ministerial Debate III: Question Time

Watching the BBC debate show, Question Time, is a frustrating experience at the best of times. More often than not the panel of political representatives and media personalities are so busy spouting out their own sound-bites and prepared talking points that you are left screaming at your television set that they are not answering the question, or that they are lying, or that they have no idea what they are talking about, or that the views they are expressing have been outdated and discredited for twenty years… And even though the audience are allowed to speak and call these people to account, what usually follows is simply more of the same evasiveness and spin: the audience-member feels wonderful that their view has finally been represented, but the panellists air-time is longer and their voices carry more weight. The question is forgotten and only emptiness remains.

Last night’s episode of Question Time was doubly frustrating, because instead of being at home, where you are buoyed by a certain sense of detachment and the ability to turn the sound down, I was in the studio audience at Birmingham University and watched the entire thing live.

You would have thought that this would make it far less frustrating: instead of watching in futility at home, unable to get engaged with the debate and call the politicians on their spin and manipulation, in person I could actually put my hand up and get involved. I could ask my questions, I could state my opinions.

But I discovered last night that there is something much more frustrating than the impotence you feel at home when you see an entire panel of liars and idiots and there are no means of having your say: actually being in the audience, with your hand up for sixty minutes desperate to put forward your opinion, and not being called on throughout.

I’ll blame it on my positioning. We had no real choice in where we were seated and unfortunately I found myself at the far left end of a row quite near the back, not only out of the sight of most of the cameras, which concentrated mainly on the central section, but crucially – because of the placement of one of the main cameras that filmed the panellists – often out of the sight of David Dimbleby himself. Though he looked in my direction several times, for whatever reason, I wasn’t asked to participate. And so I had to sit, with my arm aching in the air, listening to hollow lies about the debate earlier that evening, awful and – yes – bigoted rubbish about immigration, the various ways in which the parties plan to cut public spending instead of taxing the rich and how democracy had changed for the better because of the implementation of vacuous television debates.

Still, despite not getting to add my own venom and bile to the vibrant melange of misinformation and spin, I had a thoroughly enjoyable time. It was nice, if nothing else, getting to boo Liam Fox in a roomful of people and hearing David Dimbleby tell us to “just bloody enjoy yourselves” before we went on air. It was also nice, in the sound-check portion of the technical rehearsal, to be able to ask a question of the fake stand-in panel even if I didn’t get to do it on TV. We were told we couldn’t address anything that might actually come up in the show, so I contributed this little enquiry to the proceedings: “This week, Stephen Hawking has told us that if we came into contact with aliens, it is highly likely that they will be hostile. Liam Fox, as Shadow Defence Secretary, should we go to war against the aliens?”

A heated debate ensued, with audience members and fake panellists suggesting that the rationale for war might be different if we knew that the aliens had oil and once we knew just exactly what the alien weaponry was like…and if they had weapons of mass destruction.

It was a hell of a long evening though. We arrived at the University at 5:45pm and didn’t leave until midnight. Once we’d arrived, we were bussed (quite needlessly – it was about a two minute walk) to the venue, where we sat around tables getting to know each other, eating free sandwiches and coffee and writing our second Question Time question.

We had already been asked to email a question earlier in the week. The question I had sent in was this: Would Conservative proposals to give parents public money to set up experimental new schools take vital funding away from the schools that we already have? I thought it would be something likely to come up being as how the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, was on the panel, and there had been such an excellent furore about the issue earlier in the week that saw Michael Gove absolutely eviscerated on Radio 4.

It didn’t, and I wasn’t asked to read the question. But my second submission was this: Is it really so wrong to call a person “sort of bigoted” after they have just expressed some “sort of bigoted” views?

That obviously didn’t fit in with the editorial take on the whole “bigot-gate” incident though, because the version of the question ultimately asked in the show was: Are you a bigot to ask the Prime Minister about immigration? With not a single person on the panel (including Ed Balls), or Dimbleby himself, attempting to clarify the fact that Gordon Brown did not explicitly call Gillian Duffy “a bigot”, but rather described her, undeniably “sort of bigoted”, views as “sort of bigoted”.

After the coffee and question-writing was done, we moved into the real studio, where the alien-based technical rehearsal occurred and people were told whether or not their questions had been chosen. Sadly, after spending the earlier part of the evening with a great group of left-leaning people (utterly by accident – we were obviously drawn to each other), somehow I ended up sitting next to an excitable Tory guy who clapped vigorously at every empty trope Liam Fox uttered all night and tried to convince me that David Cameron had “won” the Debate.

Indeed – the Debate. Before Question Time began, we had a giant screen brought into the makeshift studio and watched the entire Prime Ministerial Debate live as an audience. This was actually pretty cool. Unlike watching at home, with just me and my wife grumbling to each other, or even watching it live in the auditorium, where you are not allowed to make a sound, watching the debate cinema-style in a big room full of people meant that we could boo and cheer as we pleased to the various points the leaders put across. We could clap when they said something sensible and we could call out “RUBBISH!” when they said something we disagreed with. Unfortunately, it was quite depressing to see how many people cheered and got excited when David Cameron laid into the usual Tory memes of immigrants and people on benefits. Indeed, on Question Time too, my heart sank at how deeply so many people feel this hostility towards immigration.

Still, the biggest cheers of the night went to Clegg, and when we were polled later via a show of hands, in our room, Clegg won. If I were a focus group manager for Gordon Brown I would point out two major observations from last night: Gordon Brown smiling makes the entire audience laugh, and not in a good way. And everything that he says – no matter how valid, reasoned and true it may be – simply does not connect with voters who have been misled and lied to by a promise-breaking Labour government for thirteen years. If anything loses him the election though, it will be the shit-eating grin he whipped out right at the end of his atrocious prepared final statement. The statement was bad enough – an attack on Clegg and Cameron instead of a robust defence of Labour and positive reason to vote for them, that ended with him telling people he was “desperate” – and then when he smiled I have never heard such a groan fill a room. Just terrible, and I actually thought he did really well once you take presentation out of the equation. That said, I was fairly disgusted that he failed to point out the fundamental, £40 a week better off in work guarantee and rise of the minimum wage, that, according to the two manifestos, separates Labour policy on cutting benefits from the Tory one considerably. In a bid to out-Tory the Tories, he simply pressed on about “no life on the dole” and forcing people to work. That correlating rise in the minimum wage and promise that when you are forced into a job you will be guaranteed to earn at least £40 a week more in work than you would on benefits, however, makes the Labour policy much more humane, but not a single voter watching the Debate last night will know about it.

I also can’t believe that the opinion polls have Cameron winning the Debate last night. What did he actually say that was any different from any of the two previous Debates, or indeed from the Conservative manifesto? Absolutely nothing. I guess it just proves that old adage that if you repeat a lie long enough, people start to believe it as truth. He was evasive, he offered platitudes instead of arguments, his policies don’t add up and all have fundamental flaws, and yet he drills through all the sound-bites and pounds them into your head and by the end of ninety minutes you feel like you’ve been convinced; a sophistry of the highest order.

It would have been nice to have said that on Question Time too – but I guess there’s always next time.

I just hope that next time it won’t be Prime Minister Cameron I will be talking about, and that on May 6th, even without having heard me speak on TV, the great British public will show me that they’re not as dumb as I think they are, and go to the polls and vote for our future, instead of our draconian past.

Technorati Tags: Question Time,UK Politics,Politics,General Election 2010,General Election,Prime Ministerial Debate,Gordon Brown,Nick Clegg,David Cameron

On Immigration, Gillian Duffy IS Bigoted…

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past twenty-four hours you will be aware that a lot of fuss has been made about a certain Prime Minister calling one of the residents of Rochdale a “bigot”.  Indeed, this fuss appears quite capable of completely derailing the already failing Labour election campaign and knocking them out of the race entirely.

Yet am I the only one out there who agrees with Gordon Brown?

The most important thing to take away from the “Bigot-gate” incident is not that Brown was caught calling a Labour supporter a “bigot” when he left his SKY News microphone turned on after waving her goodbye, but that what he in fact said was this: 

When asked what Duffy had said that had made the meet-and-greet such a “disaster”, he said, quite hurriedly, trying to short-hand his explanation: “oh everything - she’s just a sort of bigoted woman…said she used to be Labour”.

The difference between saying “she is a bigoted woman” and “she’s just a sort of bigoted woman” are immense.  In the one case you are dismissing a person entirely, whilst in the other you are stating a vague feeling about what was said and why it left a bad taste in your mouth.  Not that she is a bigot, but that what she said was “sort of bigoted” and it was surprising coming from a woman who “said she used to be Labour”.

And on this point Brown was absolutely spot on.  Duffy was not some misunderstood victim of a cruel and intolerant monster.  She was a woman who, in the midst of talking about benefits and the economy, suddenly said: “You can’t say anything about the immigrants…all these Eastern Europeans what are coming in – where are they flocking from?”

Now, just as Brown claims that what he said was not exactly what he meant, perhaps Duffy herself did not mean to sound as bigoted as she did when she spoke about “the immigrants” and their “flocking” in.  But in the one minute handshake conversation on which Brown was forced to make his opinion, all he had to go on was that she claimed to be a Labour supporter, yet spouted the standard right-wing tabloid garbage about “all these Eastern Europeans”.  If I had been having that exact conversation with Duffy, I would have come away thinking exactly the same thing too.

Furthermore, the media is also claiming that this off-mike/on-mike outburst was a public illustration of the exact kind of behind-the-scenes tyrant Brown has been portrayed as being over the past few months: an intolerant bully who blames everybody but himself. 

I did not get that at all from listening to what was actually said.  I just heard a tired and disappointed man who felt that the last few minutes had been a “disaster” say quite calmly that he thought it was ridiculous to have been put in that position and wanted to know who’s idea it had been.  He did not say he wanted anyone’s head on a platter; he did not shout and curse and scream.  He said that the meeting with Duffy had not gone well, he should have never been put in the position of having to deal with her, and when he was asked what she had said which had made him feel it had gone badly, he pointed out, quite fairly, that what she’d said had been “sort of bigoted”.

In any civilized country with a less-hysterical media, this private and reasonable conversation between a politician and his aides might have been mentioned as a point of humourous faux pas and then quickly brushed aside for more important things (for instance: the solid answer Brown had given Gillian Duffy when confronting her “sort of bigoted” views – that, though we have about a million EU nationals coming into the UK each year, we also have about a million UK nationals going into the EU so it all evens out).  Instead though, we had this empty, sensationalist flogging of the issue – filming Duffy’s reaction to what was overheard by deliberately misquoting what Brown had actually said; showing her (understandable) offence when she was finally played the tape and the word “bigot” was heard in a manipulated context; swarming around her house as if one woman’s obvious offence at an individual, heat-of-the-moment, personal evaluation of her principles were some vital crux of the election campaign; and mentioning the gaffe as if it were headline news every five minutes and having various talking heads dissect the ramifications of events now largely caricatured out of all recognition to the actual facts of what happened.

I also think it is important to note the source of this irrelevant hysteria: Rupert Murdoch’s SKY News. 

The mike which caught Brown’s statements was a rogue SKY News microphone that the Prime Minister had left on.  Murdoch, of course, is an arch-conservative; the owner of the US’s rabid FOX News Network, and, here in the UK, owner of Cameron-backing The Sun, The Times and The News of the World.  He is a highly partisan player in this election and his news organization is being used as a tool to help promote the Conservative cause.  This could be seen during last week’s Prime Ministerial Debate, when SKY host, Adam Boulton, violated the agreed rules of the debate and attempted to derail the surge in Liberal Democrat momentum by asking Nick Clegg an erroneous question about party donations which had already been cleared up and dismissed earlier that day, and it could be seen yesterday, when a reasonable man’s reasonable comments about an angry woman talking ignorantly about immigration was used to smear his election campaign and discredit an entire political party.

That our politics have come to this is a sad indictment of the current British system, and one can only hope that a hung Parliament, and radical voter reform, will help change all that on the morning of May 7th.

In other news: I will be attending the BBC’s Question Time tonight in Birmingham.  I don’t know if I’ll get to ask a question, but it sounds like it should be a good one: Ed Balls, Vince Cable and George Osborne were announced last time I checked, and we all get to watch the final Leaders Debate together beforehand – a political junky’s dream :-)  I’ll let you know how it went, and, of course, you can watch it tonight at 10:45 on BBC One, following the news and the final debate.

 

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,Gordon Brown,Gillian Duffy,Bigot-gate,Bigot,Media,General Election 2010,General Election,Rupert Murdoch,Question Time,Rochdale,Sky News,Labour Party

Intelligence and Decency Won Last Night on Question Time…but at What Cost?

So the Question Time BNP debacle has now been and gone.  By all accounts, including my own, Nick Griffin was well and truly trounced.  He was shown to be cowardly, evasive, manipulative, disingenuous, grimly unfunny, racist, ignorant, and, surprise surprise, a homophobe as well.

All week long the BNP have, quite rightly, been demonized in the British media.  As speculations grew about exactly what questions might be asked of the racist party leader come Thursday night, the press was filled with reminders of the veritable catalogue of repugnant thoughts, quotes and deeds that might come back to haunt Nick Griffin, exposing him and his views before he’d even stepped foot on the Question Time stage. 

Another leak of the BNP membership data added to the embarrassment, exposing the charlatan methodology the party uses to fix its numbers – as the Nazi Party did before it – in order to create the false appearance of a party much bigger than it really is.

This morning, reflecting on last night’s broadcast, a smorgasbord of offensive and dull-headed sound-bites have played across the media, further exposing the hollowness and toxicity of the BNP and it’s leader: Griffin’s shady use of language in claiming that he was not “convicted” of holocaust denial; his refusal to explain his position on the holocaust on the basis that such talk would be illegal, despite Justice Secretary Jack Straw’s repeated assurance it was legal to do so; his ridiculous cartoon image of “indigenous” British people that had no basis in either history or reality; his outright admission that he was courting the support of former Ku Klux Klan leaders, with the ludicrous added caveat that this particular Klan was a “non-violent” one; his ignorant denunciation of Islam on the basis of selective passages from the Qur’an that have near-identical (and just as explosive) corollaries with passages from the Christian bible; his inability to disavow statements he has made in the past claiming that the only way to get the real agenda of the BNP across would be by first presenting a facade of electability to the British public in order to get voted; and, amongst other obnoxious incidents of evasiveness, idiocy and outright racism, the declaration that homosexuality is “creepy”.

Oh yes…Nick Griffin and his BNP have been well and truly exposed this week, and every single person in the Question Time audience and Question Time panel made sure that the feelings of the majority of the British public were made clear: you are a racist, your party is a racist party, and we reject your views and your politics of hate entirely.

But…

I’m still not sure that Question Time was the right place to do this.

The reason is: last night what I saw on TV was not Question Time.  What it was, was what I said it always should have been: a live television debate about the BNP’s legitimacy and politics, wherein their views were expressed and then routinely exposed and destroyed.

The usual Question Time format went completely out the window – although, ironically, it was only because of the BNP’s appearance on there that it was: Question Time usually spends its hour asking its panel questions about the week’s politics.  As the decision to include Nick Griffin on the panel became news in itself, the story dominated the week’s news, and thus also, logically, dominated the Question Time questions.

The facts are though (and they have been at the root of this controversy since the decision was first announced): including someone as poisonous as Nick Griffin on a show like Question Time, as if his views on the week’s most pressing issues were as valid as anybody else’s, is an incredibly dangerous game.  It absolutely gives his parasitical party of hate – self-admittedly putting on a front of false respectability in order to become electable first, and then enact their true agenda later – the appearance of a legitimacy that they not only do not deserve, but that they simply do not have as a political organization in this country.

Taking previous week’s Question Time questions: do I want to hear an unashamed racist’s opinion on Strictly Come Dancing’s Anton Du Beke calling his fellow dancer a “paki” backstage and the controversy sparked by Bruce Forsythe’s radio comments on the subject; do I want him adding anything to the debate about MPs expenses, from which the BNP have currently benefitted under the false narrative that they are an “outsider” party who can save us from “elite” expenses-swindling politicians; do I want Nick Griffin’s thoughts on how we can best cut public spending in this country and sort out the growing deficit, when I know that the BNP’s position is that “foreigners” are “coming over here” and “stealing” all our money in benefits?

No.  Because it is not adding anything to these debates other than age-old lies and propaganda; lies and propaganda that have long been rejected and dismissed as illegitimate. 

It is not simply another opinion in a wide spectrum of differing opinions, that deserves an equal hearing; it is an intentionally malicious and misleading opinion that remains as disreputable and dangerous now as it was when it was first rejected after the Second World War seventy years ago.

Now, again - and this distinction is important – I am not saying that these opinions should therefore be banned from TV and repressed entirely; I am simply saying that there is no more place for them on a show like Question Time than there is for the opinions of a man with severe brain damage who can answer questions on the politics of the day, only by linking every answer he gives to the imagined betrayals of his wife.

Should a man with weird brain damage who blames his innocent wife for all the world’s evils be allowed on TV?  Yes, of course he should.  But should he be up on the Question Time panel debating the issues of the day with prominent politicians as if he is their equal?  Probably not.

The BBC clearly began to realize this, however, for, as I said, the Question Time that was on last night was not the usual Question Time format.  All the questions were directed at the BNP and its policies, and all four of the other panellists couldn’t help but demolish Griffin and his ignorance.  Even the one “non BNP” question – about Jan Moir’s appalling Daily Mail article about Boyzone singer Stephen Gately’s death – was really about exposing more of Nick Griffin’s intolerance and homophobia; continuing the attack that reduced him to a hate-fuelled and preposterous clown rather than a serious political threat.

Now, all of this was to the good, and it made for excellent viewing: but it wasn’t Question Time, it was something else.  So why not call it something else?  Why did the BBC insist on “putting Nick Griffin on Question Time” instead of fulfilling its self-professed commitment to give air-time to all elected officials by airing a one-off special debate about the recent rise of the BNP and what it means for British politics?  The results would have been the same: racism and stupidity simply cannot hold up under scrutiny.  But there would have been none of the bad taste in our mouths about the staining of the Question Time legacy, nor the ready-made spin for Griffin and the BNP this morning where they – almost rightly – claimed that the Question Time appearance was an ambush.  Indeed, I worried as I watched Griffin get pounded time after time with truth and exposure that left him floundering and useless against the sheer force of his four fellow panellists’ denunciations, that some people might even begin to feel sympathy for the man.

With the BNP already positioned as the “outsider” party for “indigenous” (white) Brits who feel alienated by the political establishment; did the appearance of that political establishment, and the BBC, throwing away the usual Question Time format to gang up on their leader not add to that narrative marvellously?

Will it not be used for months, or even years, to come as propagandistic evidence that Griffin is some sort of courageous underdog, standing up to the system that wants to keep “people like him” down?

For someone like me; last night was like pornography.  An idiot racist was getting eviscerated by intelligence and fact in the face of his ignorance, evasion and lies. 

But I could have happily watched that same pornography in another time-slot and left Question Time to be Griffin-free late…discussing things like the postal strikes; bonuses for bankers; why the 10:10 bill was defeated in Parliament; suicide bombers in Iran, etc.  The usual Question Time fodder.

Instead of that, we had a week in which the BNP dominated the news, Question Time, and everything else. 

Sure: for most of us, it just proved what we always knew: the party is racist, disgusting and vile.  For some though, perhaps this week of exposure has been like an ongoing advert for a party they never realized existed.  A party who share their racist views; who are saying the things the other parties aren’t saying; a party who they will choose to vote for next time…

Freedom of speech should never be abandoned, and Question Time, though arguably the wrong venue for this debate, acted admirably and successfully in letting the British National Party have just enough rope to hang itself…  But only time will tell if, by doing so, it has also allowed the party to expand its poisoned message, increase its visibility and legitimacy, and simultaneously generated sympathy for its hideous party leader.

Last night we anti-fascists certainly won the battle, but the war, I fear, is still very far from over…

Technorati Tags: BNP,BBC,Racism,Question Time,Nick Griffin,UK Politics,Politics

Questioning Question Time…

On Thursday, Nick Griffin, MEP and leader of the racist British National Party, will take a seat on the much-hallowed panel of BBC Question Time…and I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about it.

The BBC’s argument for including the party on the show is that, having recently won two seats on the European Parliament, the BNP are now a legitimate UK political party, with undeniable voter support, whom they cannot simply ignore.  Just as they occasionally allow members of UKIP and the Green Party to sit on the Question Time panel, it is only fair, they say, to offer the same courtesy to the recently elected BNP, no matter how reprehensible their views might be to the majority of the British public.

But are the BNP really the same sort of entity as UKIP or the Greens?  Should an illegally constituted and inherently racist, white supremacist political party really be sharing a podium on national television with members of the Labour Party, Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats?

On the one hand, my dual beliefs in both freedom of speech and in the inherent paucity of substance that lie at the centre of idiotic far-right views lead me immediately to an I don’t agree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death your right to say it kind of position: the only way to deal with deplorable and fascistic points of view is to expose them to the glare of public scrutiny and watch them shrivel and die. 

Once Griffin and his followers receive a loudspeaker from which to publically hurl their hate, reasonable people, it is hoped, will then hear their assorted nonsenses and see them for the empty-headed fallacies that they are. 

It is only by repressing and hiding vile and unsustainable philosophies such as these that we give them their power.  They become the “truths the powers-that-be don’t want you to know” instead of what they really are: hollow ciphers of ignorance and intolerance that manipulate political confusion and prey on the intellectually vulnerable.

By taking away the cloak of mystique and and disallowing fascists to hide in the shadows of their marginalization, we educate the public and expose racist scoundrels for what they are.  We see that these unjustifiable intolerances have no viable foundations on which they can be defended logically, rationally or morally, and that, under the most basic line of questioning, their positions indubitably fall apart. 

The issue vis-a-vis Question Time, however, isn’t so cut and dried.

Although I agree that the best way of destroying the BNP is by exposing their heinous views to public scrutiny and convincingly discrediting them through argument and debate, it does not necessarily follow that Question Time is the correct platform on which to do that.

Whilst, say, a documentary-style feature that demolished BNP positions one by one – allowing people like Griffin to defend their poisonous views as much as possible, only for them to inevitably fall victim to the vastly superior arguments and indisputable facts put forth by their opponents – (or even a one-off live debate special between BNP leadership and a collection of anti-fascist campaigners, human rights advocates, and members of the general public) would be a possible way for the BBC to acknowledge the depressing fact that two of these racists now have seats on the European Parliament, Question Time is a different beast altogether.  Question Time is not meant to be about putting each individual panellist on trial, but rather about answering the political questions of the day with a distinguished panel of politicians and cultural figures; the underlying assumption being that everyone on the panel is similarly qualified to answer the questions being put to them.

By appearing on the Question Time panel, your political voice becomes inherently legitimized.

Question Time is not a show designed to dissect BNP policies and Nick Griffin’s personal racism, but a show where the panellists are supposed to give their opinion on all the issues of the day – tax, immigration, law and order, foreign policy, the NHS, postal strikes…whatever.  When we sit there and ask someone like Nick Griffin what he thinks about the ongoing dispute between the CWU and Royal Mail, or what the BNP’s position might be on the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen, we are not exposing the British National Party to the glare of public scrutiny – we are accepting them into British political establishment as equals, whose views are as legitimate as those of the current Cabinet, or the major opposition parties, and something about that gives me a slightly sick feeling in my belly.

It is one thing to recognize that, unfortunately, a small minority of the British public voted for the racist British National Party in the European Elections this year, and to want to create a dialogue about that fact instead of sweeping it under the rug…but it is quite another to pretend that this is a political party like any other.

The BNP are, without a shadow of a doubt, a white supremacist party, who have only now, under the threat of legal action, started looking into changing their constitution of their party to allow non-white members.  Not because they want non-white membership (or because they actually think there are any non-white people who would want to join once the constitution is changed), but because they must either do that or face drastic criminal charges that will end their political life.

Let’s just say that again for those who are hard of hearing: in 2009, the same year that the United States voted in the first African American President in history, the BNP quite literally do not allow people who aren’t white to be a member of their party.

Whilst I still do think that exposing people like Nick Griffin and the racist British National Party to public scrutiny is the best course of action, and that no view, no matter how reprehensible, should ever be censored…I remain unconvinced that denying a guest-spot on Question Time to the BNP is censorship.  There are many other television-based platforms and many other ways in which this discussion about the BNP could have been constructively held, but the one which gives these unashamed racists the appearance of political legitimacy leaves a very sour taste in my mouth indeed.

Still, I think it’s wise here to remember the words of John Stuart Mill:

“the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.  If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

Though Question Time might well be the “wrong” platform on which the BNP should be trounced, it is still as good a place as any for Nick Griffin to have his litany of errors collide with the shining light of truth.  The BBC could have handled this better, sure, but either way the conclusion is the same: we can only defeat ignorance by exposure and education, and it is my hope that on Thursday night, the BNP will be exposed.

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,Racism,Philosophy,Question Time,BBC,John Stuart Mill,Free Speech,BNP