Did BBC give legitimacy to racist Nick Griffin?

 My concern has always been that it was the wrong platform for Griffin as it doesn’t usually allow sufficient space for people to challenge each other. And so Griffin could have got away with pretending to be a ‘normal’ politician by offering populist rants on Royal Mail, Afghanistan and other issues.

As it happened, the BBC’s David Dimbleby did not let him off the hook so easily and made him answer up to his highly controversial past. He was caught out: flustered, making inane statements and pretending he was being stifled by European law when asked to explain his antisemitic views. He must have felt stitched up.

But the BNP and Nick Griffin are very polarising people, so it’s likely most came back with their prejudices confirmed. Griffin sent out a triumphant email and his supporters will no doubt rally behind him.

And how did they all do? The verbose Jack Straw could have spent a bit more time rehearsing succinct answers to predictable questions: he floundered a bit when asked to talk about immigration. Sayeeda Warsi, the politician who had the most to gain, clearly rehearsed her points and came across quite well. She even made her party’s policy on immigration sound immeasurably more populist and clearer than Labour’s — though it is now the same as the government’s view.

Chris Huhne was unusually aggressive, when he did speak, but at one point was amazingly trying to sound even more hardline than New Labour and the Tories on immigration. I thought Bonnie Greer performed rather poorly, though the lefties on Twitter seemed to love her. Which is perhaps why I was less than impressed.

There was Nick Griffin himself, described by my self-selected group of Twitter friends as: ‘incoherent,’ ‘shifty,’ an ‘arse’ and more. Generally, we thought he was exposed as the nasty man he was. But then we would think that, wouldn’t we?

Patriotism

My favourite moments, however, came from the audience itself, especially when people said they were proud of this country and wouldn’t “go back” even if Griffin encouraged them to. “I’m sure we can have a whip around to buy you a plane ticket out of this country,” said one. It’s nice to see patriotic British Asians on TV.

Listening to radio debates following ‘Question Time’, it also struck me how many people now claim on radio and websites that although they weren’t racist and would never vote for the BNP, they nevertheless understood why others did. Funny: this argument is never used with Muslim extremists.

And what now? In an interview following ‘Question Time’, Peter Hain stuck by his view that the BBC made a big mistake by inviting him on the show and giving him that air of respectability. That was backed up by Griffin himself, who came on after to say that since he had been on the country’s top political panel show, he was now “part of the mainstream” and ready to sit permanently among the big boys.

Nick Griffin knows this much: it doesn’t matter how badly the haters try to expose him — his followers feel under siege enough to ignore all that as part of some massive leftwing conspiracy. What he really wants is to be accepted as part of the furniture and for his deeply racist views to be brushed under the carpet. He is playing the long game. Let's see if it pays off.