The new divide in British politics: Us and Him. Question Time was no victory for rigorous and free debate – it merely confirmed Nick Griffin’s elevation as the voodoo doll of public life.
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3416
The BBC, Jack Straw and others have tried to present last night’s http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=8012, which featured Nick Griffin of the British National Party (BNP), as a victory for free and grown-up debate. It was no such thing.
It was a cultural lynching of Griffin by members of a political elite bereft of ideas and lost for words. It was a cynical performance by politicians and BBC bigwigs, designed to demonstrate their inherent goodness and sense of mission against the easy target of a bumbling buffoon with backward ideas. It was a calculated act of moral distancing, an attempt to conjure up two moral universes – Us and Him – at a time when British political life has little else going for it. And it involved, not open, adult debate, but its opposite: the suppression of discussion, analysis and nuance, all buried beneath the theatrical display of the new Non-Nick consensus.
The show confirmed what Griffin has become for the political elite: a voodoo doll they can stick pins in to try to ward off their own political misfortunes. New Labour justice secretary Straw got the ball rolling in response to a question about whether it is right for the BNP to use Second World War and Churchillian imagery in its campaigning literature. No, he said, because it is a racial party and is thus different to all other parties in Britain. ‘What is common about every other political party, regardless of their differences, is that they each have a moral compass, a recognisable moral compass based on longstanding cultural, philosophical and religious values of Western society’, he said, to wild cheers from the audience – surely the first time in months, if not years, a Labour minister has been publicly whooped rather than whipped.For Straw, a leading figure in a party that struggles to define modern British values and which is fast losing support amongst the public, winning a mere 7.5 per cent of the whole electorate’s support in the local elections in June, posturing against Nasty Nick is the only way he can assume some moral authority and outline the decency of the political class.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7611/