Exposed: Nick Griffin, BNP

One has to be grateful to the BBC for inviting Nick Griffin, the fuehrer of the British Nationalist Party, to last night's "Question Time," a popular and long-running news debate programme in front of a live audience. The programme helped to expose the crude polemics of a devious and twisted man, stripped him of the last gloss of faked decency, discarded Griffin as an irrelevant bastion of primitivism. But it also should enrage enough the educated part of the electorate to abandon Labour, as the ruling party is the main provider of voters for the BNP - the one million who voted for the nationalists in the June elections for the European "parliament."

Among the discussion panel was also (Labour) Justice minister Jack Straw, who added to the damage by quipping, "I don't think the BNP benefits from our immigration policies; it is more the frustration over MPs' expenses." It is that kind of ignorance and lack of grasp the BBC programme helped to eradicate; with mixed results.

I was cringing with incredulity listening to the garbled salvos of low-aiming soundbites from the BNP buffoon. But unlike Labour supporters and officials, who believe that ignoring and shutting out the extremists is the way to curtail their spreading, I believe that confronting the hollow and outright false and ludicrous banter from the BNP head-on, and drag it into the public domain as a kind of freak show, is exactly the right way to deal with these brownshirts. Labour's Minister of Wales Peter Hain - equally known for displaying frequent lapses of intellect so visible in Nick Griffin - thought that blaming the BBC to provide a forum to expose the BNP's hate mongering message amounted to a legitimation of the BNP. It demonstrates the helpless daftness of Labour, who for years have nourished the BNP with their outrageous immigration policies and with a million voters as of late.

So, what did emit from the horse's arse last night?

There was for once the Holocaust. In the past, Griffin denied its very existence. He modified this criminal denial with words of painstaking evasion: "I only changed my mind on that after reading secret British intelligence cables dealing with the subject. I have never been charged in Europe for denying the Holocaust, so how can I be called a denier? How can I be called a Nazi if my father was an officer in the RAF?" Asked about a quote attributed to him in which he equated six million deaths in the Holocaust with the flat earth theory he replied that "European law" stopped him explaining.

Leaves you speechless, eh?

But dragging the dead - friend, family or foe - through the dirt is one of Griffin's hallmarks, no matter how ridiculous it gets. No wonder then that he claims that Winston Churchill, who convinced the Americans of the utter evil of the nazis and spearheaded the Allies' thrashing of fascism, would be a supporter today of the BNP! Possibly, Mr Griffin, as we don't know the level of retardation in old age, and a 163-year old Sir Winston might fit your bill.

Showing total lack of knowledge in domestic history - he describes white Brits as Aborigines in their own country - does not stop Nick Griffin to wade deeper into his delusional quicksand morality. So he admitted sharing a platform with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke - but described him as "almost totally non-violent". Special...

But I can feel good and right from now on to call anyone who votes for the BNP a pathological idiot.