Word: griffin
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...switch on the BBC's late-night weekly politics show, almost three times the program's normal viewership and around half of the total TV audience for the 10:35 p.m. slot. They were drawn like moths by a fiery controversy over the BBC's decision to invite Nick Griffin, the leader of the extremist British National Party, to join the debate. The taxi driver was determined to share his opinions on the matter, no matter that his passenger was dreamily communing with her iPod. "I'm not a BNP supporter," bellowed the cabbie, craning round to make sure...
...June elections for the European Parliament, the anger of these voters propelled the BNP to its greatest-ever success. The racist party won close to a million votes and two seats in the Parliament. That, in turn, earned Griffin his Question Time invitation. "Question Time is the public's chance to challenge the politicians. That is why it is so important that they should sometimes be able to hear and interrogate politicians from the relative fringes as well as from the mainstream," wrote Mark Thompson, the BBC's Director General, in an eve-of-transmission exegesis of BBC policy published...
...early to judge if Johnson was right. In 1984, when French far right politician Jean Marie Le Pen made a high-profile TV debut, his Front National party received a substantial boost in the polls. Griffin's shambling performance didn't on the face of it seem likely to gain him many converts and may have cost the BNP future votes. Some viewers may have been startled by the revelation that Griffin had once shared a platform with Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and won't have been reassured by Griffin's risible statement that the KKK is "almost...
...some white Britons, especially those in poorer areas, at least part of the BNP message resonates: that, as Griffin puts it, they are "shut out in their own country." Disenfranchised and alienated, such viewers will have drawn a different lesson from Question Time. They saw Griffin attempting to hold his own as politicians from Britain's mainstream parties, showing a rare unanimity of purpose, attacked and belittled him. Yet politicians in Britain are at best damaged goods, their authority sapped by constant partisan skirmishing and their reputations tarnished by recent revelations of Westminster's venal expenses culture. In that context...
...Question Time ate itself, turning into a debate about Question Time. The real issue has never been whether Griffin and his ilk should be allowed to join the show's panel. The fundamental problem is how the mainstream parties can reconnect with the electorate and assuage their fury. With British parliamentary elections due by June 2010, party tacticians may be tempted to borrow from the BNP's populist playbook, talking tough on immigration and integration. Such rhetoric often proves a vote winner. But exploiting voters' discontent can simply stoke it. Until mainstream parties figure out how to earn back public...