Carefully planned kicking in the studio is no better than the mob

12 April 2012

Nick Griffin is not a sympathetic man. He completely lacks charisma and he doesn't speak persuasively.

His manner is freakish. He can't stop himself from grinning and giggling inappropriately. He's quite shaky and he licks his lips nervously.

His whole appearance is against him. He has slab cheeks and flabby jowls. Moreover, like Wackford Squeers, he has but one eye, when the popular prejudice runs in favour of two.

He also leads a wholly disreputable party, has a conviction for inciting racial hatred and is on record as having said many unforgiveable things, which he now implausibly denies having said.

Yet it was impossible to watch this grotesque edition of Question Time and not feel some little tinge of sympathy for him, nonetheless.

For this was not a political discussion programme but a show trial from start to finish.

There was only one question asked that was not about Griffin's own record and the policies of the BNP — about whether or not Jan Moir's column about Stephen Gateley's death should have been published.

But even this was soon converted into an attempt to convict Griffin of homophobia.
Mostly, this was just a carefully planned, non-stop kicking.

The other panellists had all come prepared with incriminating quotes from Griffin's past and his party's website and when they flagged, Dimbleby authoritatively weighed in with a reference.

Proceedings started with an overlong speech by Jack Straw about the contribution of black and Asian people in the Second World War. Thereafter there was no let-up in the attack.

Only when the panel were asked if the Government's immigration policies had helped the rise of the BNP was there any discussion of an issue, all the parties acknowledging stricter controls were necessary, although they would not, they said, "pull up the drawbridge".

But there was no acknowledgement of the grim possibility that it was the BNP that forced the main parties to address the topic more seriously.

None of the panel even looked at Griffin at all, as if to do so would confer upon him legitimacy he didn't deserve.

Not content with that snub, Bonnie Greer, sitting next to him, took things a little further by striking a series of dramatic postures indicative of her utter horror at his mere proximity.

There was a strange circus atmosphere to the proceedings altogether.

Many in the audience were obviously excited at participating in this drubbing, beaming with pleasure when they got to ask a question, whooping with delight when a good blow was landed.

Griffin didn't answer coherently about why he had denied the Holocaust in the past.

Asserting that he didn't have a conviction for Holocaust denial, he actually smirked and Dimbleby caught him at it, demanding: "Why are you smiling, it's not a particularly amusing issue?"

When Jack Straw called him "the Dr Strangelove of British politics", he chuckled weirdly too.

After seeing this, you wouldn't trust him to tell you the truth about what he had for breakfast.

There was an ugliness to the whole event too. On the radio, Any Questions invites you to listen to what people actually have to say.

Its TV derivative, Question Time, turns an apparently similar set-up into theatre for the mob.

What went on inside this studio was not, in the end, much more advanced than what was going on outside.

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