Griffin on Question Time: a False Victory for Smug Liberals

A week on from his infamous performance on Question Time, MULE columnist Ragnor Ironpants weighs up the impact of the Northwest’s favourite Euro-MP’s TV appearance.

Media commentary since Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time has jumped on the fact he made himself look like a fool, and it’s tempting to think this is obviously true: no one can explain away the BNP’s record, and Griffin’s PR co-ordinator’s previous experience must amount to organising racist darts nights. But instead of celebrating Griffin’s appearance as an Adolph Brent moment, we need to consider the real fallout.

It’s obvious that the programme was going to be a BNP propaganda victory whatever happened. If Dimbleby allowed Griffin to criticise Labour’s record he would have won populist points, yet if they chose to attack him, he could claim he was treated unfairly – which is exactly what he subsequently did. By following the first path, the BBC made him look stupid in the eyes of the liberal and leftist types, but it’s not their erogenous zones he’s tickling when he claims that tours around the Lake District were banned because only white people were going on them. His subsequent claim that London has been “ethnically cleansed” will go down well with London’s racist minority, but will be received even better by those north of the M5 corridor to whom London is the hive of media and political elites alienated from their lives.

The producers may have thought that Jack Straw, MP for Blackburn, and Baroness Warsi both represented the North, but this just highlights a fundamental flaw in the format of Question Time. Because the big three parliamentary parties have to be represented, most episodes are reduced to banal point scoring. With the BNP milking the current anti-Parliamentary sentiment, it effectively meant that there were three empty seats. Anyone tempted to vote BNP would consider Jack Straw part of the problem in the first place, not the person to convert them. Similarly, the stubborn refusal of a large proportion of northern, working class voters to vote Tory made Warsi a pointless addition, while Chris Huhne represented the Liberal Democrats fittingly, by sounding like a geography teacher hectoring bored pupils about rock formations.

Bonnie Greer’s selection as the independent seat presumably reflects the producers’ experiences: middle class Londoners reading the Guardian’s media section while travelling to theatre binges. Greer is of course an immigrant, an African-American who became British through marriage and residency, but how is her experience going to put a “good face” on immigration for the benefit of those who may not have a job for the next four or five years, and who lash out at foreign workers as a reflex? There are no playwrights shaving their heads and lacing up their boots because an African-American’s play got commissioned instead of theirs, but there are kids affiliating themselves with the BNP because they think immigrants stole their jobs.

Greer presented the rational argument liberals claim will destroy the BNP. But it’s a pointless strategy. The smug liberalism that supposes a universal rationality doesn’t take account of the fact, for many people, it’s perfectly rational to dismiss the BNP’s Nazi fetish as a harmless distraction from the party’s sensible immigration policy. Indeed, when immigration was raised the debate lapsed into a game of each party representative trying to prove that they were the harshest on migrants. It’s this moment that will really win the BNP support. As Griffin sat back and watched the frenzy, he could claim not only that he was picked on and then left out of the debate, but that the BNP’s counter-mainstream credentials demonstrate their accurate reading of the less than evident ‘immigration crisis’.

This is exactly what Griffin has said over the past week. But rather than simple bitterness, this demonstrates how his apparent humiliation has been turned into a victory. Nine years ago he made a speech given alongside David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan leader, in which he said

Perhaps one day, once by being rather more subtle we’ve got ourselves in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, then perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say, “Yes, every last one must go.” Perhaps they will one day, but if you offer that as your sole aim to start with, you’re gonna get absolutely nowhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity.”

Huhne and Dimbleby may have probed him over it, but failed to recognise that the strategy was holding true: it didn’t matter that southern professionals or the nation’s blacks and Asians thought he made a fool of himself, because the ‘identity’ he has manufactured is not meant for them. When a question about why, with three million unemployed, migrants were still allowed into the country went unanswered, it represented the whole problem with the episode: populist racism and anti-immigrant sentiment were left un-diffused, but the liberals had their rational debate.

When three years ago Griffin justified to American Nazis his rejection of anti-Semitic rhetoric, he said that the “proper enemy to any political movement isn’t necessarily the most evil and the worst…the proper enemy is the one we can most easily defeat.” They can most easily defeat Muslims and other immigrants (rather than the “evil” Jews) because a popular racism has been drummed up by both New Labour and the press, who now have the nerve to claim they represent rationality.

A tactic that could have undermined Griffin, if he had to appear at all, was the sustained attack of at least one working-class northerner, critical of both mainstream politics and fascism. In the event they failed to realise the truth of the matter: Griffin is not the cause but a symptom of a populism cut from the flesh of a decade of racism and warfare, brought to life by recession. The racism born in the pubs and clubs of Lancashire and Yorkshire cannot be separated from the racism in Whitehall and Fleet Street.

The only good that could have come of the event was the hypothetical undermining of the BNP receiving a liberal middle class vote, which was not likely anyway. The BBC failed to realise that in towns disgusted with politicians, defining themselves in opposition to London, liberals and southerners, Griffin would look like the under-dog they identify with. Arguments about what makes people “indigenous” are academic to those saying they felt sorry for Griffin, and (if the BNP can be believed) applied for membership. They’re not going to care that it is absurd to consider Britons to be pure descendents of migrants from 17,000 years ago, but follow the racist mirages in the Mail or Express with fervour.

When he said he sought “control” of the media, we should be careful not to take him too literally: he has found a way of controlling it now, even though he is a figure of hate. And, worst of all, it is not BBC producers or London media types who will be victims of violence, intimidation and death-threats, but local minorities and activists in the North and the Midlands. The episode was a disaster and was always going to be a disaster, and no amount of smug backslapping will change that.