Well, I've just watched the entirety of the program. I have a few points to make.
1: Nick Griffin & Jack Staw both came across as completely untrustworthy liars. Jack Straw dodged answering questions or used careful political verbiage to say 1 thing while meaning another. Griffin backpeddled a hell of a lot, particularly on the comments about the KKK and the Holocaust denial.
2: Sayeeda and the lib dem fella (think his name's Chris) carefully twisted some of Nick Griffin's few valid points. His comments on Churchill may well be true, we don't know. His comments on Islam have SOME factual basis- there is a large amount of teaching in the Koran/Qur'an that women are 2nd class citizens, and while the text about killing unbelievers figures in other texts such as Christian text too, there's more extreme Islamic terorrists nowadays than extreme Christian terrorists. We (my immediate family personally) have, in the past, been invited to 2 Muslim weddings but didn't attend as my mother would have had to go into a separate room for the service and eat the leftovers after the men had finished. That's 2nd class treatment of women. Also his comments on the immigration issue being focused on resources, and only being interested in deporting criminals, illegal asylum seekers, etc. are a reasonable argument. The problem is, it's coming from Nick Griffin. There's a lot of video quotes propagating much more extreme and visceral views, and a lot of printed quotes which, misappropriated or not, do little to help his image. If it had been anyone else making such comments they would have been far more well recieved. The trouble with Nick Griffin is you've no idea if he actually means what he says, or if the more rational views he presented on the program have no bearing on what he actually thinks. Which is why I would never trust or vote for him. If somebody led the BNP and actually did believe this things, I'd be more open to them. And the thing is, a large amount of the BNP-voters or members do think those things- but with Nick Griffin there's no way of telling and a lot of evidence to the contrary.
3: What he said about there being a modern motion to exterminate the idea of an English nationality or indigenous people is also true. Nobody would say an Aboriginee isn't an indigenous Australian. Nobody would say an American Indian isn't an indigenous American. Yet nobody can be indigenous English anymore. MY interpretation of indigenous is nothing to do with colour. Nick Griffin claims his isn't-whether that's true I don't know. But there's an active denial of indigenous British/English/Scottish/Welsh/irish nationality. If you trace ANYBODY from any country back far enough, their ancestors will come from somwhere else- including aforementioned groups such as aboriginees or native American Indians. Yet this is more actively campaigned about with Birtish nationality than most others. I can't pick English as my nationality, can't pick England as my country of residence. My university form had a section asking about national identity- I was openly advised not to put down English or British. Indigenous-ness and nationality don't have anything to do with colour, so why is there a campaign against there being indigenous British?
I wouldn't trust Nick Griffin on these issues. If a politician I did trust (short list) raised such issues, I'd be inclined to vote for them.
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Fuzzle Guy: Apart from going swimming I've never been more wet in my life than when I went to see Take That.
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