Tiffany Jenkins: BNP's views need to be challenged, not banned

Published on Tuesday 20 October 2009 21:23

UNLESS you have been living on a different planet for the past month, you will know that British National Party leader Nick Griffin is to be a panellist on BBC1's Question Time tomorrow night.

The planned addition to the political discussion programme of a member of a party with a fascist pedigree has created a storm of controversy. Many people, including Labour MP Peter Hain, argue that the BNP should be barred from appearing on the show.

Mark Thompson, the corporation's director-general, has rejected Hain's argument. Thompson stated that it was their duty "to scrutinise and hold to account all elected representatives" and that the BBC would do so "with due impartiality".

Thompson is right. Inviting an elected MEP on to the programme should happen because we live in a democratic society, regardless of his vile opinions. The cascade of calls for censorship is illiberal.

The suggestion that members of a political party be barred from this broadcast calls into question everybody's democratic rights.

Whether we like it or not, the BNP is a legitimate organisation. It has won two seats in the European Election and has just under 60 councillors across the UK.

As long as we operate as a representative democracy, the voters' choice should be represented in the public sphere, whether in parliament or on the nation's broadcaster.

Peter Hain – and others protesting against this airtime for the BNP – has an inflated view of Griffin's powers of persuasion and towering intellect, and far too little faith in their own ability to convince others. What are they scared of?

Do they believe that the public has only to hear a few words spoken by Griffin and they will morph into a racist mob?

This treats the viewer – that's you and me, by the way – as if we were completely gullible. The censor treats us, not as autonomous beings with rational thought, but as children who need special protection from backward ideas, by an elite who decides what we can and cannot hear.

And if people do watch and agree with Griffin, surely we should use the democratic process to mount an argument to win them over, rather than mount a boycott to silence the debate.

As the philosopher John Stuart Mill once argued, no opinion, however false, should be stifled, partly because the truth is made all the clearer for "collision with error".

Freedom of expression is not something that you only give to people who you agree with. Just as importantly, free speech must be upheld for people who you don't agree with.

Nor does free speech mean accepting all views as equally valid. It means having all opinions out in the open so we can challenge the ones we find distasteful and argue for those that we think are right.

It is only by debating and exposing the poor ideas of the British National Party that they can be defeated in public and at elections.

We cannot challenge bigoted ideas if we ban or hide them. Doing so lets the sentiments fester underground.

Indeed, while the BNP remains a rump of an organisation that has won very little influence in elections, making up as it does less than half of 1 per cent of local councillors, the obsession with silencing Nick Griffin has won the party undeserved front page headlines for weeks on end, and has given it the appearance of a protest movement.

The British National Party is a relatively small, incoherent and ineffective organisation, but the centring of politics and the inability of the other parties to win new members and supporters has meant that the party has become more influential than it deserves.

At the last election it won two seats in the European Parliament, but only due to the collapse of the Labour vote.

The influence of the BNP can be seen as a product of mainstream political failure. It has become a symbol of disaffection amongst voters, rather than an endorsement of any of the party's racist policies.

That is why its votes can sharply rise and fall from one election to another, despite what the party does or says.

Not that we should be complacent, or ignore the BNP. We should address its arguments. This party keys into concerns that should be tackled in public.

And, just as we take on the BNP, we should scrutinise the policies of the other parties.

Illiberal and nasty attitudes to immigrants are not the sole preserve of the far right.

As someone who is for open borders and the free movement of people, I would like to see all the policies on immigration of all parties challenged in open debate.

Labour's immigration policies are causing unnecessary havoc and harm, preventing immigrants from entering the country or moving around.

Bail for Immigration Detainees, an independent charity that challenges immigration detention in the UK, estimates that 2,000 children of asylum seekers are detained each year in detention centres.

They are the only children in Britain who can be locked up indefinitely without having committed a crime.

The Scottish National Party has, quite rightly, spoken out in the past against the points-based UK visa system, claiming it splits families apart because of the threat of deportation for family members who have been refused residency.

This system is due not to the BNP, but to the immigration policy of the Labour government.

The immigration issue needs to be prised open, not shut down. All political parties need to be put under pressure to account for their policies on the issues of race.

Calls to ban the BNP from broadcasting on the BBC makes us look scared of this shoddy party's ideas, when we can easily confront them.

This is not about the right of a collection of far-right cranks to have their time on the telly. It is about the right of the rest of us to make up our own minds and argue back.