Wild kind of look to the day

Oct 23

Wild kind of look to the day

The most considered thing I've read on the whole Griffin-Question Time debacle came this afternoon in a series of Twitter posts from a musician of whose work I'm a great admirer.

There's a seed of a political ideology in this:

Is it me or did people get all irate before Question Time was broadcast and then just go, "Oh, OK then,"? I don't think anybody learned a thing.

Some of the rhetoric and soundbiting being thrown about was quite embarrassing. A calm, intelligent debate would have been more interesting.

But we live in a sensationalist age in which everything has to be sensational in order to appear purposeful.

Politics is meant to be dull - it's a complicated thing and to always be finding issues to be hysterical about is not getting it at all.

It's like music - if you just go for whatever is the latest sensation, you'll probably never hear music for what it can be.

David Ford, @davidfordisdead
http://www.myspace.com/davidford

David Ford begins a UK tour next week:
25 Oct Phoenix, Exeter
26 Oct Thekla, Bristol
27 Oct Albert Rooms, South Parade Pier, Portsmouth
28 Oct Rescue Rooms, Nottingham
29 Oct Black Bottom Club, Northampton
31 Oct Boardwalk, Sheffield
1 Nov Duchess, York
2 Nov Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh

over 2 years ago The Minister of Truth responded:

With the best will in the world, the BBC are a damned sight less blameworthy than the 'mainstream' politicians and 'mass media' publishers and editors who set the agenda that enabled the BNP to flourish in the first place.

The BBC is in the unique and invidious position that its constitution requires it to cater to all tastes at all times. It is a clearly impossible task.

However, I consider it not entirely unreasonable for the BBC to adopt the view that a lawful political party that secured almost a million votes and two elected representatives in a national election held less than six months ago has done enough at the ballot box for one of its representatives to appear on one edition of its flagship political debate programme.

If an invitation were not extended to the BNP by the BBC in such circumstances, then nor should similar invitations go out to Plaid Cymru, the SDLP or the Greens. Is that where we're heading? Who is - and who should be - the arbiter of which politicians appear on Question Time? The BBC is damned on that front whichever way it turns.

Now, I'm playing Devil's advocate: I didn't want Griffin on the programme, and because of that I voted in the way that scares broadcaster the most - I neither watched the programme's transmission nor have engaged iPlayer to catch up with it.

But the unpalatable facts remain:

(a) the BNP has prospered electorally over the past decade because there has been a succession of pinhead Home Secretaries determined to out-Enoch Enoch in their desire to appease the likes of Murdoch, Desmond and Dacre; and

(b) a small (but significant and growing) number of electors in the United Kingdom in 2009 are nasty racists.

The BBC has certainly played its part in creating this week's immediate cause celebre - and it has undoubtedly done so because it saw a way to gain a cheap ratings at minimal expense - but the BBC is not responsible for the reprehensible manner in which the Blair and Brown administrations have governed the country in between blowing long and hard on their dog whistles.

And while I'm not going to go all 'conspiracy nut' on this point, it also has to be remembered that the BNP serves a useful purpose for both the Conservatives and Labour alike. If our leaders were so determined to snuff out the BNP, they could always proscribe the party. They have not done so, any more than they proscribed the National Front previously or any but the most extreme sectarian parties in Northern Ireland. Rightly or wrongly, the logic goes that it's better to have a few visible and 'legitimate' lightning rods to attract and mollify most of the nutters and freaks than it is to send their movements entirely underground.

We have danced with the Devil this week and - as you say - we've got away with it through luck rather than judgment. It is indeed most fortuitous that Griffin is a fundamentally inept politician, but for so long as our politicians and thinkers are (per Mr. Ford's comments) unprepared and/or unwilling to talk about proper issues - including race, multiculturalism and immigration - in a sensible manner and choose instead to pander to the whims of third parties, this is all we're going to get.

over 2 years ago Julien Allen responded:

First of all, I'll take back the adjunct "in every respect". Clearly someone other than the BBC is to blame for the creation of an environment where not only does Nick Griffin get elected to parliament, but whilst discussing the imposition of new rules on its constitution, nobody even thinks to ask the question of why blacks and asians are trying to join the BNP. I can't quibble with your analysis of "who's to blame for this idiot" as Charlie Brooker put it.

That said, I am surprised you've bought into the BBC's arguments quite so much. The claim that it would be a grave breach of their charter to let the Greens and UKIP take part in QT but not the BNP is horribly bogus. Neither the Greens nor UKIP have a history of incitement to racial hatred nor are they illegally constituted and as far as I know their members don't release gangs of thugs into the streets in Bradford and Blackburn to bully, abuse, threaten, intimidate and physically assault asians. If the BBC were remotely driven by a sense of duty to the betterment of the public, not purely by ratings, they could think of dozens of morally and legally valid arguments not to invite the BNP onto their "flagship debate programme" (an expression you use in such a way as to imply that it has some indigenous quality of its own, whereas we all know that ITV's 'flagship' current affairs programme was for many years "Tonight WIth Trevor McDonald"). It would be anti-democratic to prevent them from having public meetings or standing for office. It is not anti-democratic to forbid them from appearing on Question Time. No-one has to be invited, it gives a degree of intellectual legitimacy to the programme to invite a fair cross-section of opinion, but no more than that.

You say the BBC is in an invidious position. I think it is in a privileged position but which carries great responsibility. Indeed an institution with that amount of public funding should be held to account in the decisions that it makes. With the best will in the world, It does not have a duty to appeal to racists, any more than it needs to clog up the schedules with trash out of duty to cretins (even though it does). The duties of the BBC are:

(a) sustaining citizenship and civil society;
(b) promoting education and learning;
(c) stimulating creativity and cultural excellence; and
(d) representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities;

I can't see where it says to run dangerous publicity stunts in the name of ratings.

A decision explainable only by ratings is all the more repulsive in this case for being so dangerous. Had an operator of the quality of Tony Blair been invited on to speak for the BNP he could have catapulted the BNP into the political mainstream, thereby distracting the whole country from the failures of real politicians (as we saw on QT, all the main parties became heroes for the day). As I said, the decision made by the French TV channels to give Le Pen an equal platform three decades ago ultimately permitted him to occupy mainstream territory in French politics and arguably changed the country and its politics (influencing Sarkozty amonst others) for ever.

I'm pro-BBC and I'm anti-Murdoch (I don't have Sky). I'm also pro the National Health Service, but I reserve myself the right to criticise it. I think it got it wrong, but I could cope with that if I didn't think it was cynical as well.

The Ministry of Truth

The Two Minutes Hate will commence momentarily

Wild kind of look to the day

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