We must tackle BNP

Published on Saturday 24 October 2009 19:56

THE "oxygen of publicity" is a phrase which inevitably gets used whenever there is a debate about the British National Party and its odious ideology. The implication is that small and insignificant embers of racist discontent will flare and cause a conflagration if any public space is given to the BNP to expound its creed. In fact, this is a false analogy. Publicity does not give the BNP life, rather it is a disinfectant which kills its infection.

This is a much harder argument to make than the alternative that the BNP should be given no room in the media. But the force of it should have become patently obvious this week with the appearance of the BNP leader Nick Griffin on the BBC's Question Time. Whenever he was asked a straight question about the views he has expressed in the past, he wriggled to avoid giving a straight answer. Mr Griffin's appearance was marked by evasion and half-truths, the very faults that he accuses mainstream politicians of displaying when they discuss issues such as immigration.

Comments from various SNP politicians that the programme should never have been aired north of the Border because of the BNP's insignificance in Scotland are misplaced. As Jim Murphy, the Scottish Secretary, pointed out this week, the number of Scots prepared to vote BNP has risen in the past decade from a derisory 3,000 to a more alarming 29,000. And as our report today on campaigning in the Glasgow North East parliamentary by-election demonstrates, the BNP appears to be striking a chord with numbers of voters there.

No-one should be under any delusion that racism and its political manifestations are not a problem in Scotland. In 2001, the resettlement of Kurdish asylum-seekers in Sighthill, Glasgow, caused serious racial tension, including several violent incidents.

Racism, regrettably, will flourish in the current harsh economic climate. When people start losing their jobs, it becomes all too easy for some of them to be convinced that immigrants are taking that work. That political trend has been obvious for some time in the employment black spot, textile towns of northern England where the BNP has its strongest roots, and we should not be surprised at similar shifts in Scottish opinion.

Experience there has shown that the way to deal with such insidious movements is not to attempt to suppress them. Then they only get driven underground where their adherents become convinced that they are victims of an official conspiracy to deny what they believe to be the truth to the rest of the population. In such circumstances, the likes of the BNP does not wither and die, it thrives and recruits.

Scotland should be better equipped than most countries to deal with the BNP's contorted thinking. Scots, as First Minister Alex Salmond is fond of quoting novelist William McIlvanney, are a mongrel nation whose culture and economy has benefited from centuries of immigration. Scots too, are one of the most migrant peoples of the world; there is hardly a corner of the globe where Scots have not settled and prospered.

The belief that all people are equal, regardless of their class, colour, or creed also has been long- established in Scotland. It is a belief which underpins much of out education and legal systems which, while they have their faults, are still much admired.

The thinking of the BNP, which seeks a curb on immigration and unequal treatment of people according to colour is thus repugnant to the majority of Scots. But the minority for whom it has a superficial appeal can only be convinced of its fallacies if it is juxtaposed to the real world history of migration and culture of equality that are obvious in modern Scotland.

That requires the BNP to be allowed a place in the mainstream media. Opponents of so doing will contend, as appears to have been found by one opinion poll published yesterday, that the BNP will be boosted. Such apparent gains, however, will be short-term, for the BNP's bilious ideology is fundamentally flawed and can be easily demonstrated as such. But before it can be sprayed with the antiseptic of rational argument, it has to be brought out into the open.