BNP: Death Bed Performance

Time for an autopsy

EXTRACT: However, the reason why the BNP is facing extinction is obvious - it was targeted by the establishment. As we in the CPGB argued at the time, Nick Griffin was fatally holed by his disastrous October 2009 appearance on the BBC’s Question time, which is still popular viewing on YouTube and elsewhere.7 On that day the show ditched its normal deadly dull format to become a far more entertaining Let’s do Griffin time - and it certainly did. Before an audience which peaked at 8.2 million people - more than half of all those watching television at the time and around four times the number who usually tune in to Question time - Griffin was outed as a bumbling would-be ‘fuhrer’. For instance, he defended David Duke, the “totally non-violent” former Ku Klux Klan leader and, far worse, refused to answer a direct question concerning his views on the Nazi genocide (or “holo-hoax”, as he once called it) on the pathetic grounds that “European law” prevented him elaborating upon his position. Obviously a man of principle and courage. The BBC had turned him into a laughing stock.

Griffin himself later admitted that he had been the victim of a “lynch mob”, bitterly complaining that the way the programme had been produced was “unfair”, because it had been “altered” to concentrate on him and his policies - with all but one question focused on the BNP. Poor thing. Showing how dreadful Griffin’s performance really was, many BNP members gave vent to their dismay and embarrassment. Lee Barnes, the party’s legal officer at the time, raged on his blog about how Griffin should have stood up to these “whining, middle class hypocrites” that use the “race card for self-enrichment” and “thrown the truth right back into their fat, sanctimonious, hypocritical, self-serving faces”. From that day, Griffin was a dead man walking.
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