By Stephen Tall
| Fri 23rd October 2009 - 10:39 am
So that was the Question Time that was. There is copious assessment of Nick Griffin’s performance, linked to here on LDV.
My views are straightforward. First, Nick Griffin came over badly, but that is immaterial: those who are BNP-inclined will likely have seen him as the victim of a liberal, metropolitan, media stitch-up; and those who despise the BNP will have had their view confirmed.
Secondly, my over-riding sense was of relief that the BNP don’t have a more slick, plausible leader. The moment is ripe for a truly charismatic, attractive, anti-politician to play the demagogue: Nick Griffin is decidedly not that person, thankfully.
Such are my thoughts on Mr Griffin – but what about Chris Huhne’s performance?
Here’s the click-through of posts published on the Lib Dem blogs in response to last night’s BBC1 Question Time, with Nick Griffin. If we’ve missed your post, or you write something later on, please post your link in the comments thread:
Ahead of tonight’s BBC1 Question Time – featuring the BNP leader Nick Griffin – The Guardian reports his verdicts on his fellow panellists. Here’s what he said about Chris Huhne, the Lib Dems’ shadow home secretary:
Big hitter. Menzies Campbell would have been more daunting.
And here’s what he said about the other panellists:
Over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog, Lib Dem shadow home secretary Chris Huhne – who will be appearing alonsgide BNP leader Nick Griffin on Thursday night’s BBC1 Question Time – argues that it is time for liberals to challenge the fascists head-on. Here’s an excerpt:
The BBC has judged that two MEPs in a nation-wide election entitles the BNP to a voice on Question Time, just as previously a similar threshold elevated Ukip and the Greens. The BBC’s duty of impartiality is too important to have broadcasting executives decide that some opinions are acceptable and others are not, providing
A Conservative MP accused of paying more than £100,000 of public money into his own company announced last night that he would stand down at the general election.
David Wilshire called the allegations “deeply hurtful and unjustified” and predicted he would be cleared by the Commons standards watchdog.
But in a brief statement, he said he had reluctantly decided it would not be “sensible” to seek re-election as the MP for Spelthorne.
It’s not only Vince Cable who’s been all over the papers – the Lib Dems’ science spokesman Evan Harris also has his say today on two very different issues.
First up, in today’s Independent, animal-human hybrid embryo research which, says Evan equires three things to prosper: legal permission, good scientists and more funding. Here’s an excerpt from his article:
Those of us involved in campaigning for human-animal embryo research to be legal during the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill always knew that this was a controversial area of research. But we also knew it was a
By Stephen Tall
| Mon 7th September 2009 - 9:45 am
2 Big Stories
Government’s Libya policy: confusion reigns
The mounting government confusion over its policy towards Libya continues today.
First we had the Prime Minister’s refusal to make a comment on the release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi; then it emerged that Gordon Brown had let it be known he agreed with the Scottish executive’s decision; over the weekend Justice Secretary Jack Straw acknowledged the obvious – that government policy was strongly influenced by trade and oil.
And now it emerges that Mr Brown is stepping up British attempts to win compensation for the victims of the bombing:
Racist attackers abducted a Muslim community leader at knifepoint, bundled him into a car and threatened his life unless he stopped running prayer sessions in a community hall that has been the target of a British National party campaign. Police have confirmed they are treating the incident as a hate crime and are investigating links with an earlier firebomb attack on the same man’s home. …
Two people have been charged under Section 55 of the Data Protection Act* with leaking the BNP’s membership list, including contact details and family information.
The list, which identified thousands of people linked to the far-right party, was posted on the web in November 2008. Information included addresses and other contact information such as mobile phone numbers and the names and ages of children in a family membership.
Dyfed-Powys police said a 27-year-old man and 30-year-old woman were charged under the Data Protection Act after a joint investigation with the Information Commissioner’s Office. The pair lived in the Nottingham area at the time of the leak.
Today’s Guardian reports that Labour’s schools secretary Ed Balls is seriously considering a possible ban on British National Party members working as teachers in schools:
A source close to the schools secretary, Ed Balls, said there had been several meetings on the issue with teaching unions which are lobbying for a change in teachers’ contracts to prevent them from working if they are members of far-right groups including the BNP. The issue was being “actively looked at”, the source said.
There are two things which are absolutely clear to me in all this. First, the BNP is a loathsome political party, …
Welcome to the Sunday outing for The Voice’s Daily View series. As it’s a Sunday, today it comes with a bonus complaint and the easiest quiz question of the week.
2 Big Stories
Could Alan Johnson scrap ID cards?
Gordon Brown’s weakness means there is a set of senior Cabinet members who are now unsackable. If any of them were to take it upon themselves to indulge in a very un-Brownian desire to do something dramatic and decisive, it would be extremely hard for Gordon Brown to stop them.
Step forward then possibly, perhaps, just maybe Alan Johnson. (He is, after all, one of those who hasn’t acted dramatically or decisively to get Gordon Brown ousted.) The Sunday Times reports:
ALAN JOHNSON, the home secretary, has launched an urgent review of the £6 billion identity card (ID) scheme, paving the way for a possible U-turn on one of Labour’s flagship policies.
Johnson, who was promoted in Gordon Brown’s latest cabinet reshuffle, is understood to be “sympathetic” to critics who claim identity cards will undermine civil liberties.
The home secretary told officials that he wanted a “first principles” rethink of the plan, which was launched by Tony Blair following the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and has since been championed by Brown as a way of fighting terrorism.
“Alan is more sympathetic to the civil liberties arguments than previous home secretaries,” said an insider.
The Iranian elections
Although Lebanon’s recent elections saw a decisive victory for moderates, the official results from Iran show a landslide for the hardliners. These results have been disputed, but as so often the mainstream media coverage amounts to little more than “X says the elections were rigged, Y says they weren’t”, with little evidence presented to let you make a decision about who you think is telling the truth.
Step forward the online world, where there is much detailed argument available, including this blog post which – combined with the comments posted to it – gives a good flavour of the cases for and against the election results having been rigged.
2 Must-Read Blog Posts
If David Cameron believes in first past the post, he should quit his job
From Mark Reckons:
David Cameron has spent a lot of time in the last few weeks talking about how great the First Past the Post electoral system is. He will not countenance any change from this even though MPs can end up elected with often much less than 50% of the vote in their own constituency.
What I find fascinating about this is that if you follow his line of reasoning to its logical conclusion then David Cameron should not be leader of the Conservative party at all. Instead it should be David Davis … if this had been a First Past the Post election then David Davis would have been elected leader.
Twitter and politics
Euro-candidate and journalist Jonathan Fryer muses over the impact of Twitter:
Though a comparatively late convert to the practice (despite the proselytising of my friend, Stephen Fry), I’ve been finding it hugely useful in recent weeks and have noted how one can enter into dialogue with politicians of other parties as well as with journalists and bloggers of all persuasions, who are quite happy to ‘follow’ one on Twitter, but who might not wish to ask or accept to be one’s Facebook ‘friend’, in case that were seen to be some kind of endorsement.
Sunday Bonus
Don’t these US movie moguls have any respect for our heritage?
Like most of you I am not a fan of the BNP. Their views are irrational, parochial and dangerous. But they have now, for the first time, managed to get two MEPs elected, one of whom is their leader, Nick Griffiin, in the North West.
It’s quite likely that both of these MEPs will be in office until the next election, so we now have to consider what will be the best strategy to defeat them after their five year term in the European Parliament. In my view, a key part of this strategy will be to highlight what they’ve …
This is, I think, the first time I have compiled the Daily View (Wednesdays being Mortimer days) when the headlines in every paper haven’t been dominated by expenses. Hooray, real news!
The big news at Westminster is that Gordon Brown is doing his usual thing of arriving at a political moment (in this case electoral reform) several weeks late and trailing faux consultation in his wake.
BBC political editor Nick Robinson said the prime minister’s statement will not endorse a change of voting system nor any particular system but it will call for a debate on whether
Kudos to the Guardian which has obtained council-level euro results and munged them together into one giant spreadsheet with click-sort columns, over on its datablog.
The hook the Guardian are using is that it allows you see just how well the BNP did in your area, but anyone with a political hat will want to play with the data and slice it in numerous different ways.
Congratulations, then, to South Lakeland, for the highest Lib Dem Euro score anywhere in the country; commiserations to Barking and Dagenham where we polled under 5%… and ooh – is that a weak correlation …
Now it’s the turn of UKIP to struggle with actual numbers. Their deep pockets have paid for dozens of billboards across Britain’s cities, many emblazoned with Winston Churchill and the catchy little factoid that the EU costs Britain £40million a day.
There will be – and should be – widespread disgust at the suggestion that BNP leader Nick Griffin is going to attend a Buckingham Palace garden party, hosted by HM the Queen. For the overwhelming majority of Britons who support racial and cultural diversity, it is offensive to see the British National Party attending a function hosted by the Head of State in honour of public service. It would be embarrassing for the Queen herself, who has been rightly keen to emphasise she is constitutional monarch for Britons of all faiths and races.
Leaving aside for a moment the thoroughly disagreeable politics of these parties, any gain by UKIP or the BNP in the European elections on the basis of anger over expenses would be a …
The BNP like to style themselves as the party that tells the truth, which is why the tales of their fake photos and made-up statistics matter. Here’s the latest BNP fakery:
AN ex-Guardsman branded the BNP “scumbags” last night for using his photo and faked words on an election flyer.
Former Scots Guards NCO Stuart Walker, 37, was shocked to see a picture of himself in uniform outside Buckingham Palace on a poll leaflet.
He told The Sun: “I was completely outraged when I saw this leaflet. I think they got the photo off a website and the quote they’ve made
We’ve taken the slightly unusual step of inviting Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome to write this guest post as his latest internet venture is one on which there is much common ground.
It’s a great pleasure to write for Liberal Democrat Voice. I read it most days and learn a great deal from it. More than occasionally it gives me ideas for posts on ConservativeHome!
We have many things in common as Conservatives and Liberal Democrats and many things that divide us. Perhaps the most important area of common ground is our belief in a Britain where every person – regardless …
The BNP’s European leaflets have attracted some attention for their fake photos and the law suit arising from their use of another photo, but they’ve also got a made-up statistic.
The current leaflets feature a section titled “Why we’re all voting BNP” with photos accompanied by a bit of text, presumably this is to encourage people to think BNP voters are just like you. Unfortunately for the BNP none of these voters are real and you can prove it by using web-based reverse image searches.
Rather unfortunately for the *British* National Party, it looks not only as if none of the people are real supporters, but several of the photos are most likely of people who are not British. Ooops.
File under “you couldn’t make it up”. The BNP’s 09 election campaign, which they presumably regard as the first step to the road to their promised land of racial purity, is clearly setting out to target migrant workers.Never ones to worry about a hackneyed image they use that iconic image of a Spitfire to illustrate “the Battle for Britain”.
Just one slight problem. The Spitfire they used is one from 303 squadron. Which was made up of Polish airmen who escaped from Nazi occupied France.
John Hemming MP pointed out the lunacy of the BNPs position:
In a posting today on LabourList, David Lammy has talked up the popularity of the BNP by misquoting and misinterpreting evidence about how many people visit their website.
The MP for Tottenham wrote:
it attracts more than half of all internet traffic to political party sites, according to the online monitoring firm Hitwise.
But that’s not true.
I think what has happened here is that the popularity of the bnp.org.uk domain compared with conservatives.com, labour.org.uk, libdems.org.uk and so on has been confused with “all internet traffic to political party sites”. (Thanks to Hitwise for confirming to me that looking at just these …
As previously featured on LDV, Duwayne Brooks was running to be a Liberal Democrat councillor in one of yesterday’s by-elections. Duwayne, along with fellow candidate Jenni Clutten, won. Congratulations to them both.
Labour’s campaign was at times, shall we say, unusual, with a heavy emphasis in their leaflets of a plan of their to have the Union Jack* flying over Lewisham Town Hall. As Dave Hill has written over on The Guardian:
How does that work for you? It made me a little queasy. Shouldn’t Labour concentrate on exposing the BNP for what it is rather than pandering to the nationalism
By Simon Titley
| Sat 22nd November 2008 - 4:20 pm
A few days ago, a dissident member of the British National Party posted his party’s membership list on the internet. The publication of this data provides us with some interesting information about the demographics of BNP membership.
The Guardian (20 November) published an interactive map showing the concentration of BNP membership by parliamentary constituency.
On BBC2’s Newsnight (19 November), its political editor Michael Crick drilled down further. Newsnight commissioned polling company Ipsos-MORI to analyse the BNP membership list. The top five places where BNP members live are Halifax, Blackburn, Blackpool, Leicester and Romford. There are hardly any members in Scotland and few in the rest of London outside Romford. The membership is 80% male.
The places where BNP members live was also analysed according to the ‘mosaic’ system used by marketing companies to break down the country into different social categories. The highest concentration of BNP members is in the ‘Ties of Community’ category, defined as “close-knit communities, small industrial towns, terraced housing, strong Labour voting”.
The second concentration is in the ‘Blue Collar Enterprise’ category, defined as “council estates, not well-educated, self reliant (often bought their council house), ‘Sun’ readers”. The category where BNP membership is weakest is ‘Urban Intelligence’, defined as “young single, well-educated, Liberal views, prosperous”. The biggest concentration of BNP membership in terms of social class is C2 (skilled working class), more concentrated there than among the lower D/E classes of unskilled working class and unemployed.
The demographics of BNP membership come as no surprise – older, uneducated, white males form the bedrock of support for far-right parties throughout Europe. But what this profile also illustrates is that, in demographic as well as ideological terms, BNP membership is the polar opposite of Liberal Democrat support.
By Hywel Morgan
| Fri 21st November 2008 - 7:45 pm
So the latest data leak has nothing to do with the Government’s lamentably lax data management polices. It has however generated some responses which should, but worryingly don’t always appear to, concern liberals.
It’s now relatively easy for anyone to find out if their neighbour is a BNP member. It took me about 10 minutes to find a credible link to the list last night and if it has made its way onto the peer-to-peer networks then the cat cannot now be put back into the bag.
The leaked list seems reasonably accurate. The most the BNP are …
Leaders of the far-right party believe that their hardline message will chime with voters when, as expected, crime rises during the recession. They can be expected to exploit fears of crime caused by migrant workers in places where immigration from eastern Europe has been high.
Winning seats on police authorities would give the BNP influence over forces’ budgets, the appointment of chief officers and the allocation of resources.
Senior officers and police authorities are alarmed at the proposals for direct elections, which are supported, in differing forms, by Labour, the
Steve Trevethan Might we have a definition of government debt?
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David Raw @ Tristan Ward. Given your views on carers, I would strongly advise you to remain healthy and not to grow old....
Katrin Harding Thanks for grasping this issue! On the consultation sessions- I’d love to join one but the timings are impossible as a parent of young children. I’m happy t...
Peter Martin @ Kira,
The words you quoted were from Peter Davies'. Not me. I wouldn't agree with raising VAT on energy to 15% right now. I'd leave it as is.
The point ...
Peter Martin “‘why can’t social care and NHS spending be treated as ‘investment’’. Of course, that wont wash”.
I'd agree if were talking about re...
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