Name recognition beats clever debate points-scoring any day of the week

I must say I thoroughly enjoyed "Let's kick the cr*p out of Nick Griffin" night on the BBC. Wonderful fun!

I was rather concerned that Griffin would be comfortably subsumed within the normal format of Question Time with blah-blah-blah about the Mail strike and bleat-bleat-bleat about Afghanistan. I also braced myself for him to be politely applauded by the audience for his reasonableness.

But we must never under-estimate the BBC.

The audience were without doubt the stars of the show. As soon as I heard their first reaction I thought "Crikey the BBC have really stacked that audience!"

Audience selection for these sorts of things is a fine art. They don't just open the doors and let the first load of people in. They don't just ask for interested people over the internet and give tickets on a first come, first served basis. They actually use proper researchers. People with degrees who phone you and ask you a series of questions about your political views and background. I think they normally ask for a photo also. Then they get back to you if you are selected. And they scrupulously select a balanced audience. If Nick Griffin does complain about the audience profile, he'll get a dusty response. He'll be given evidence that the audience numerically reflected how the nation votes. (You will have noticed a couple of BNP supporters shouting "rubbish" at Jack Straw at the end - well two people is about what they are entitled to if you look at how the nation votes overall).

But it was wonderful to see the ire aimed at, and the full-throated condemnation of, Griffin. Truly exhilerating and, I think, vindication (in the short term at least) of the policy of "giving him enough rope and he'll hang himself".

And of course, in the morning, all us Liberals gleefully enjoyed the headline in the Indie: The BBC gave Griffin the oxygen of publicity and he choked. Oh how we gloated!

But I am afraid that what actually happened in the programme will not matter much. The surrounding publicity will give Nick Griffin and the BNP sufficient name recognition to increase their vote anyway. On Friday GMTV was inundated with people saying Griffin had been treated unfairly. The BBC online Have Your Say section was flooded with support for Griffin. OK, some of those would be "put up" jobs, but not all - there was a veritable torrent of comment in that direction. And OK, the YouGov poll saying 25% of people would consider voting for the BNP may be a bit of a blip as is, perhaps, their poll increase from 2% to 3%.

However, like or not, I fear we will have to get used to debating with the BNP. Their vote is likely to increase somewhat.

So I look forward to the debate going a bit deeper. I would have liked to hear Griffin on normal policies, like the Mail strike. I would also like to have gone a stage beyond "Racist!" with the debate on the BNP's policies. A young Asian gentleman asked Griffin where he would like him to go. Griffin said he was happy with him staying in this country. Next time, I'd like to hear discussion of the BNP policy on this matter:

...we call for...the introduction of a system of voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin assisted by a generous financial incentives both for individuals and for the countries in question.

So in the middle of a recession, with the NHS, schools and police crying out for money, the BNP wants to waste money on "generous financial incentives" to hand out one way tickets to people - turning the government into a sort of Thomas Cook on steroids.

It's discussion of that sort of total madness that I'd like to see next, now we have initially lanced the boil of the BNP's mystique.

Oh and by the way, this article in the The Times nicely puts paid to Griffin's utter rubbish about Britain having an "indigenous race":

A leading geneticist has accused Nick Griffin of misinterpreting his work to claim that Britain has an “indigenous” white population that dates back to the Ice Age.
The BNP leader claimed on BBC One’s Question Time last night that the white English, Welsh, Scots and Irish were “Britain’s Aborigines”, descended from the first people to inhabit the British Isles around 17,000 years ago.
His assertion appeared to be based on research by Professor Stephen Oppenheimer, a geneticist at the University of Oxford, who published his findings in 2006 in a book called The Origins of the British.
Professor Oppenheimer, however, told The Times that Mr Griffin had misinterpreted his science to support his political views.
“I assumed he was misinterpreting me,” Professor Oppenheimer said. “After the programme I went back to look at what I’d written. I wrote quite a bit about issues of racism. I feared some people like Griffin would probably hijack this — I assumed that fascists would cherry-pick different bits from my book to support their views.”

...Mr Griffin decried multiculturalism, which he said had been imposed on the British people. “We are the Aborigines here,” he told the audience. “It is racist to shut white people out of their own country. The majority of the British people are descended from people who have lived here since time immemorial who now feel shut out from their own country.”

Professor Oppenheimer questioned that assertion, saying that all British people were of immigrant descent and that it was impossible to identify an “indigenous” population of the sort claimed by Mr Griffin.

“He’s missed the point of the genetics in terms of his perspective that he can determine who is indigenous British,” he said. “All British people are immigrants.”

Professor Oppenheimer backed an assertion by another panellist, Bonnie Greer, the American-born black writer, that the original Britons were Neanderthals.

The Professor added: "As [Ms Greer] pointed out, the original Britons were Neanderthals. They were exterminated, then the Ice Age left a clean sheet. The modern population is essentially of north Iberian origin. So what’s British?" “The purpose of looking at mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome in this way is not to identify the race of a person. They are just markers representing a tiny fraction of our genome. They do not tell you what someone’s like and pale European skin colour is largely the result of just one mutation, which protects them from getting rickets as infants. He’s using this information to bolster his political views, but genetics can’t do that.”