BNP Accountability Failure

The hysteria this week has surrounded the BNP. First, there was the issue of whether Nick Griffin should even be allowed on Question Time. Well, of course he should. If his party's values (regardless of how abhorrent most of us find them) appeal to enough members of the British public to get them seats in the European Parliament, then they have earned their right to be on political talk shows. That's called democracy. One of the main reasons that Hitler was able to gain so much support from his entire nation is because Germany felt so severely repressed by the Treaty of Versailles that they would support anyone who was able to take them out of their economic and social depression, even if that person turned out to be the most evil man that's ever lived. To repress Mr Griffin by refusing him a QT seat would only have given him a louder voice to the tone of 'I stick up for the ignored Brits'.
However, after the sensible decision had been taken by the BBC to allow him on Thursday's show, it seemed there was a backup plan to appease all those who thought that public service broadcasting had begun to condone fascism. The plan was to subject Griffin to a partisan verbal massacre. Almost every question was about the BNP, the audience was as politically one-sided as it is possible to achieve, and even David Dimbleby seemed to forego his due impartiality commitment by having deleterious quotes at his beck and call. Eloquence was simply replaced by a mob mentality.
Now let's state for the record that I hate the BNP; I am in fact very left wing. I particularly loathe the BNP's use of World War II iconography and its suggestion that Winston Churchill would have joined their party; that statement doesn't take into account the old, blindingly obvious concept: times change. Churchill fitted into the Conservative Party of the 1940s and was able to fight fascism accordingly; there is no doubt in my mind that if he were alive today he would have the intelligence and the integrity to adapt his political viewpoints to modern times and changing moralities so that he could fit into the Conservative Party today and fight fascists like the BNP today. And it's that kind of considered retort which should be thrown at Nick Griffin, not just shouting and whooping from the crowd while spin doctor politicians from other parties do all they can to coerce the mob into granting them the dubious moral high ground. Griffin needs to be held to account by intellectual debate, not bully-boy humiliation which will only add more fuel to their apparently persecuted fire. Appearing on Question Time should have shown any disillusioned British voters that the BNP was not a suitable electoral alternative by calmly scrutinising and assessing that party's beliefs; an objective which should have been easily achieved considering how corrupt those beliefs are! Unfortunately, I believe that objective failed.