22 Jul 10 | Uncategorized
James MacIntyre at the New Statesman is, er, a little unhappy at Nick Griffin’s appearance at Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s garden party today.
When it emerged that British National Party leader and author of “Who Are The Mindbenders” Nick Griffin had been invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace, I was invited to defend the decision on BBC Radio Five Live. The former Labour MEP I discussed the topic with was shocked — shocked! — by this outrageous insult to the Queen’s Black, Asian and minority ethnic subjects — especially those serving in the armed forces.
The argument against Griffin attending functions such as this is almost compelling: post-Empire, Britain’s over-riding narrative is the defeat of Nazi Germany. Witness the dismay at David Cameron’s truthful description of the UK as a “junior partner” in World War II. While it’s plainly true that the UK could not have survived without logistical support from the US pre-1941, and the Nazis would not have been defeated without US troops post-1941, for even the most unpatriotic Britons it still seems beyond the pale to suggest that the war was won by anyone other than a few plucky Spitfire pilots flying out of Biggin Hill. Maybe with some help from the Russians, at a push.
Griffin’s status as leader of Britain’s most prominent neo-fascist party clearly makes his invitation to the Palace a problem.
But if MEPs are to be invited to the Queen’s house for tea as a matter of protocol, as the palace claims, then a snub of Griffin would be far more problematic.
The BNP is a legal political party. Should the palace deny a member of a legal political party the same privilege it extends to others, the monarchy immediately becomes politicised. Undesirable, and constitutionally problematic.
So, you have two choices: ban the BNP (not a move I could ever support), or, sooner or later, let Nick Griffin eat a few cucumber sandwiches in the garden of Buckingham palace. It would seem the palace has made the decision to get this one out of the way.
Update: Channel 4 News is reporting that Griffin was refused entry to Buckingham Palace after he “overtly used his invitation for political purposes”
This I find problematic. While it’s obvious from a cursory glance that Griffin is using his invitation as vindication, (“…I will be there for the one million British patriots who now vote for this party despite all the hate from the media liars, the old parties and their thuggish far-left allies.”), aren’t people in Griffin’s position as MEP invited exactly because they are elected? Implying they are representing the people voting for them?
By pointing out Griffin’s politicisation of the event, has the palace allowed itself to become politicised?
28 May 10 | News and features
A campaign for a BNP teacher ban smacks of the thought police; people should not be punished for their private thoughts, however repugnant, argues Brendan O’Neill
One of the central pillars of a free, democratic society is that people should never be penalised or discriminated against on the basis of their beliefs. The state and society have the right to demand that all of us obey the law and perform our public duties to a high standard, but they have no right to tell us what to think; they have no right to invade our minds or to exclude us from the public realm on the basis that we have the “wrong beliefs”.
Yet today, trade union officials and apparently liberal commentators seem determined to demolish this pillar of democracy. They want members of the British National Party to be denied the right to teach in schools, not because they are professionally unfit, or lack the right qualifications, or have been recorded making racist speeches to their pupils, but because their private thoughts, their personal belief systems, are deemed to be unacceptable. This is a new kind of McCarthyism, aimed at the far right rather than the far left.
On Tuesday, the General Teaching Council cleared Adam Walker, a former teacher and BNP activist, of racial and religious intolerance. While he was a teacher in Sunderland in 2007, Walker had used a school laptop to post vile comments in an online forum. He described immigrants as “savage animals” and said Britain had become a “dumping ground for the filth of the third world”. It was nasty stuff, yet the GTC said its main concern is the fact that Walker had used school property during school times for personal reasons — which it has every right to be concerned about — rather than the idea that he is unfit to teach because he is racially intolerant.
Some commentators are outraged. Joseph Harker at the Guardian scoffs at the idea that “it is okay to have BNP members teaching our kids” and hopes that our new prime minister, David Cameron, will sort this problem out. After all, Cameron once said: “Any good headteacher would not have a member of the BNP within a hundred miles of a school. They should be able to fire someone for that reason.” This echoes last year’s claim by a group of GTC members that “it is not possible, in our view, for a BNP member to be a registered teacher”.
The extraordinary intolerance and illiberalism of these arguments seems to have passed people by. Discriminating against individuals on the basis of their beliefs is no better than discriminating against them on the basis of their religion or sexuality. Commentators are calling for “BNP teachers” to be banned from teaching in schools not on the basis that they are failing to stick to the curriculum or have attempted to indoctrinate students with racist thinking —which would indeed call into question their professional capabilities — but simply because, in everyday life, outside of the classroom, they adhere to a political belief system that many of us find obnoxious.
Bizarrely, many of the anti-“BNP teacher” campaigners justify their arguments in the language of “rights” and “diversity”. Harker says every parent has the “fundamental right” to know that their child is not being taught by a racist, while some GTC members justify their opposition to “BNP teachers” on the basis that their presence in schools is “fundamentally inconsistent with the ethos [of diversity]”.
This is a warped and Orwellian use of language. In the name of “parents’ rights”, the real rights of adults to believe what they want and to not be punished for it by the state is being undermined. For all their talk about “celebrating diversity”, teaching officials are sending the clear message that there are limits to diversity— it cannot possibly include, for example, allowing individuals whose views are judged to be beyond the pale to work in the education sector.
However much these commentators and activists try to hide behind the language of rights and tolerance, there’s no disguising the fact that they are explicitly arguing for the policing of people’s thoughts and the state-enforced exclusion of people from the public sector if their thoughts are deemed unpalatable. Treating individuals as sub-citizens simply because they support a certain political party is far more anti-democratic than anything the BNP has yet come up with.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of Spiked Online
31 Mar 10 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
A production of a new play about the British National Party and homophobia has been pulled from the stage in Dudley. Philip Ridley’s Moonfleece was due to be performed at the Mill Theatre – based in Daunton Community School – on Thursday, two days before a protest by the English Defense League was scheduled in the town. The play was pulled by the school on the basis that “some of the issues raised within the play were [not] suitable for a school or community setting”. The production already toured some of the country’s most racially-sensitive areas without protest. In 2004, Birmingham Repertory Theatre was forced to close a play which depicted rape and murder in a Sikh temple, after it prompted riots from the city’s Sikh community.
15 Feb 10 | Uncategorized
The British National Party has gone to great lengths to distance itself from the traditional “fists and boots” image of the UK far right. But this probably won’t help:
One man grabbed my nose and tried to remove it from my face. I was seized and shoved out of the door towards a parked car. I threw my hands out to steady myself. A BNP thug snarled: “Don’t touch people’s cars mate.” Obviously, I offered no resistance.
I had gone to the Elm Park pub in Hornchurch to report on a press conference at which Nick Griffin, MEP for North West England and chairman of the British National Party, was to explain how his activists had just passed an historic membership reform.
Although I had been invited, one prominent BNP politician had taken exception to an article in Saturday’s edition of The Times. After he lost his temper with me I was quickly shoved and lifted out of the building, hit in the back and had my face squashed.
Read the rest of the Times’s Dominic Kennedy’s account of his assault here
