Later this month, British National Party leader Nick Griffin will be on the panel of the BBC's Question Time programme. It is a totemic achievement for his political movement and the far-Right in Britain, granting Griffin and the BNP all the dignity of the political mainstream.
The ensuing hysterics and denunciations remind us yet again that most British politicians, and the chattering class as a whole, have not the least idea how to combat the BNP. Nor do they have any understanding of how it now manages to boast quite a few local councillors and, since early June, two British seats in the European Parliament.
One needs scarcely restate that the British National Party is a repugnant outfit of racist ideology and repulsive aims. Only white, 'indigenous' people are allowed to join. The BNP's central, although increasingly coded, policy is the expulsion of millions of our fellow citizens, purely on account of the colour of their skin - including people who are the great-grandchildren of immigrants.
In addition, the BNP is anti-Semitic, although these days it pays more public attention to Muslims. Griffin himself is a Holocaust denier, insisting that 'nonsense about gas chambers is exposed as a total lie'.
His party seeks the repeal of all our anti-discrimination laws, thinks we should all be allowed to keep guns and bullets in our homes, wants to restore both capital and corporal punishment, and takes a touching interest in the humane treatment of animals. Griffin, a Cambridge graduate and an able man, has worked hard to recast the BNP image. Today it is increasingly one of family men, sharp suits and soothing tones. And recent policy resolutions have shrouded the BNP's views in misleading new language.
Virtually every tenet is at once affirmed and repudiated in a mist of words. Any attempt to assert, quite accurately, what the BNP truly believes is met with outraged citation of some recent, determinedly fudged 'official' position.
Yet a succession of undercover reporters and hidden-camera documentaries have pitilessly exposed the yawning gulf between what the party declares aloud and what its Obergruppenfuhrers say in private.
Back in 2005, BNP press officer Phil Edwards declared: 'Black kids are growing up dysfunctional, low IQ, low achievers that drain our welfare benefits and the prison system and probably go and mug you.'
Confronted with the tape by Sky News the following year, he argued: 'If I had thought I was going to be recorded... I would not have used such intemperate language but, let's be honest, the facts are there.'
Nevertheless, no sensible person can blame the BBC for granting the British National Party its spot on Question Time. The Corporation' s charter expressly enjoins impartiality in all things political, and there is no just ground on which a perfectly legal political party with significant electoral support can be denied a seat at the cool kids' table.
In Scotland, for the time being, the BNP has failed to win any traction - not because the Scots are peculiarly urbane and tolerant but because this is a distinctly different social landscape.
Here, there have been other, more respectable outlets for political frustration, from the SNP to the far-Left. But the SNP is now the Establishment at Holyrood, the Scottish Socialist Party has imploded, and Fife no longer elects Communist councillors. We remain far too complacent about our own supposed immunity to racist politics - there is nothing funny about our own baleful hatred of the English - and there should be legitimate concern about the advance of far-Right racist politics elsewhere in these islands.
Even in the 1930s, Sir Oswald Mosley and the faintly comic Blackshirts came nowhere near the mass support currently enjoyed by the BNP. In fact, sympathy for the far-Right tends to build under protracted periods of government by the Left.
In the 1970s, the National Front briefly boomed in Britain, winning the odd council seat and beating the Liberals (and, on one appalling occasion, even the Conservatives) in Parliamentary by-elections.
And it is worth remembering the hinge-point in its sudden and very rapid decline - when Margaret Thatcher, then Leader of the Opposition, in January 1978, took doughty advantage of a TV interview and refused to duck a question on immigration.
'People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture,' she declared.
' We do have to hold out the prospect of an end to immigration - except, of course, for compassionate cases.'
She pointed out that many recent arrivals, too, were 'fearful that their position might be put in jeopardy, or people might be hostile to them, unless we cut down the incoming numbers'.
Not since Enoch Powell's infamous Birmingham speech, a decade earlier, had a British politician dared say anything so racially provocative. Today, a mere Tory candidate would be thrown out just for saying 'swamped'.
Thatcher, of course, was no bigot. In government, apart from firmly tightening rules on British citizenship, she did very little to match her rhetoric. But what she had done - and it was important - was to acknowledge widespread public concern and to touch base with millions of ordinary, anxious voters. From that point, National Front fortunes declined remorselessly.
The British National Party cannot be beaten by ostracism. It cannot be dissected, exposed and destroyed when its opponents refuse to share a platform or a studio with its leaders, refuse even to engage in argument and offer no rebuttal, save the cry of 'racists!'.
In fact, the BNP rejoices in just such martyrdom. It positively prospers when blasted by mainstream politicians who denounce it in language that, by implication, insults those who vote for it. The BNP takes full, current advantage of an order where at present, on certain issues such as immigration, our relations with Europe, violent crime and family breakdown, our political class holds a position dangerously at variance with public opinion.
Nor is the BNP taking the fight to the intensely contested marginal seats, but to the Labour rotten-boroughs of Greater London and, especially, northern England.
Scarcely any MPs have direct experience of confronting the BNP. Only a handful, such as Jon Cruddas of Dagenham, are any good at it and none holds high position in any of the major parties. Most MPs fatally underestimate the guile of Nick Griffin, who has spent his entire career demonstrating he is more than a thug in a suit.
Racist, far-Right politics will not be destroyed as a serious force by righteous flight, but by engagement; not by name-calling, but by scrutiny. Above all, there must be wholesale reform of our professional politics, with open-primary selection of candidates and 'recall' procedures to remove corrupt and dead-beat MPs.
And we must pay attention to valid anxieties - the extraordinary looseness of our borders, and the unabashed, hateful, cultural war waged by members of the minority lunatic fringe of British Islam against their adopted country. continues here
The ensuing hysterics and denunciations remind us yet again that most British politicians, and the chattering class as a whole, have not the least idea how to combat the BNP. Nor do they have any understanding of how it now manages to boast quite a few local councillors and, since early June, two British seats in the European Parliament.
One needs scarcely restate that the British National Party is a repugnant outfit of racist ideology and repulsive aims. Only white, 'indigenous' people are allowed to join. The BNP's central, although increasingly coded, policy is the expulsion of millions of our fellow citizens, purely on account of the colour of their skin - including people who are the great-grandchildren of immigrants.
In addition, the BNP is anti-Semitic, although these days it pays more public attention to Muslims. Griffin himself is a Holocaust denier, insisting that 'nonsense about gas chambers is exposed as a total lie'.
His party seeks the repeal of all our anti-discrimination laws, thinks we should all be allowed to keep guns and bullets in our homes, wants to restore both capital and corporal punishment, and takes a touching interest in the humane treatment of animals. Griffin, a Cambridge graduate and an able man, has worked hard to recast the BNP image. Today it is increasingly one of family men, sharp suits and soothing tones. And recent policy resolutions have shrouded the BNP's views in misleading new language.
Virtually every tenet is at once affirmed and repudiated in a mist of words. Any attempt to assert, quite accurately, what the BNP truly believes is met with outraged citation of some recent, determinedly fudged 'official' position.
Yet a succession of undercover reporters and hidden-camera documentaries have pitilessly exposed the yawning gulf between what the party declares aloud and what its Obergruppenfuhrers say in private.
Back in 2005, BNP press officer Phil Edwards declared: 'Black kids are growing up dysfunctional, low IQ, low achievers that drain our welfare benefits and the prison system and probably go and mug you.'
Confronted with the tape by Sky News the following year, he argued: 'If I had thought I was going to be recorded... I would not have used such intemperate language but, let's be honest, the facts are there.'
Nevertheless, no sensible person can blame the BBC for granting the British National Party its spot on Question Time. The Corporation' s charter expressly enjoins impartiality in all things political, and there is no just ground on which a perfectly legal political party with significant electoral support can be denied a seat at the cool kids' table.
In Scotland, for the time being, the BNP has failed to win any traction - not because the Scots are peculiarly urbane and tolerant but because this is a distinctly different social landscape.
Here, there have been other, more respectable outlets for political frustration, from the SNP to the far-Left. But the SNP is now the Establishment at Holyrood, the Scottish Socialist Party has imploded, and Fife no longer elects Communist councillors. We remain far too complacent about our own supposed immunity to racist politics - there is nothing funny about our own baleful hatred of the English - and there should be legitimate concern about the advance of far-Right racist politics elsewhere in these islands.
Even in the 1930s, Sir Oswald Mosley and the faintly comic Blackshirts came nowhere near the mass support currently enjoyed by the BNP. In fact, sympathy for the far-Right tends to build under protracted periods of government by the Left.
In the 1970s, the National Front briefly boomed in Britain, winning the odd council seat and beating the Liberals (and, on one appalling occasion, even the Conservatives) in Parliamentary by-elections.
And it is worth remembering the hinge-point in its sudden and very rapid decline - when Margaret Thatcher, then Leader of the Opposition, in January 1978, took doughty advantage of a TV interview and refused to duck a question on immigration.
'People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture,' she declared.
' We do have to hold out the prospect of an end to immigration - except, of course, for compassionate cases.'
She pointed out that many recent arrivals, too, were 'fearful that their position might be put in jeopardy, or people might be hostile to them, unless we cut down the incoming numbers'.
Not since Enoch Powell's infamous Birmingham speech, a decade earlier, had a British politician dared say anything so racially provocative. Today, a mere Tory candidate would be thrown out just for saying 'swamped'.
Thatcher, of course, was no bigot. In government, apart from firmly tightening rules on British citizenship, she did very little to match her rhetoric. But what she had done - and it was important - was to acknowledge widespread public concern and to touch base with millions of ordinary, anxious voters. From that point, National Front fortunes declined remorselessly.
The British National Party cannot be beaten by ostracism. It cannot be dissected, exposed and destroyed when its opponents refuse to share a platform or a studio with its leaders, refuse even to engage in argument and offer no rebuttal, save the cry of 'racists!'.
In fact, the BNP rejoices in just such martyrdom. It positively prospers when blasted by mainstream politicians who denounce it in language that, by implication, insults those who vote for it. The BNP takes full, current advantage of an order where at present, on certain issues such as immigration, our relations with Europe, violent crime and family breakdown, our political class holds a position dangerously at variance with public opinion.
Nor is the BNP taking the fight to the intensely contested marginal seats, but to the Labour rotten-boroughs of Greater London and, especially, northern England.
Scarcely any MPs have direct experience of confronting the BNP. Only a handful, such as Jon Cruddas of Dagenham, are any good at it and none holds high position in any of the major parties. Most MPs fatally underestimate the guile of Nick Griffin, who has spent his entire career demonstrating he is more than a thug in a suit.
Racist, far-Right politics will not be destroyed as a serious force by righteous flight, but by engagement; not by name-calling, but by scrutiny. Above all, there must be wholesale reform of our professional politics, with open-primary selection of candidates and 'recall' procedures to remove corrupt and dead-beat MPs.
And we must pay attention to valid anxieties - the extraordinary looseness of our borders, and the unabashed, hateful, cultural war waged by members of the minority lunatic fringe of British Islam against their adopted country. continues here
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