Question Time

Well why not? The well known homophobe and anti-Semite, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, was allowed to give an alternative Christmas speech on Channel 4 last year. At least with Nick Griffin people will actually be able to challenge his views directly and preferably humiliate him as much as possible in the process.

As someone who finds the BNP's views and policies abhorrent, I actually think Nick Griffin appearing on a programme like Question Time is one of the best things that could happen. As has been shown many times over, it's the one programme where politicians can really be exposed for what they are, and I think there's a good chance that the BNP's paper-thin veneer of respectability can finally be removed.

Denying groups 'the oxygen of publicity' has never worked. Moreover, there's an old saying, "Give 'em enough rope and they'll hang themselves".

It's absolutely the right thing to do, there were a lot of people who voted for the BNP at the last elections, without really knowing who or what they were voting for. This programme should expose the realities of voting for the BNP and hopefully make some people think twice before voting for the BNP in the future.

I probably didn't make my point very well in last post: My point was, there is more to the political spectrum than just right vs left; there's also the libertarian vs authoritarian continuum to consider, something that is often forgotten by many journalists. For instance Friedman was very right-wing, but not a fascist. Ghandi was very left-wing, but not a communist. In other words, just considering left vs right is not proper political analysis.

There is a little more to left vs right wing than just economics, I concede. However I would say capitalist vs communist economics basically does define the left-wing/right-wing continuum, certainly if one considers the Nolan Chart: For more social matters/attitudes, it factors in that other continuum-- authoritarian vs libertarian. Thus you have four quadrants: Left-authoritarian, right-authoritarian, left-libertarian and right- libertarian.

This explains it better than I could: http://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2

Anyway I think getting Griffin and his ilk on to QT would be 'good', in that people can see just what a miserable bunch they are. I do wonder how many people who voted for them in EP elections, realise just how extreme they are.