Who Should Tackle the BNP? Clue: Not the BBC

Laurence Lee, head of media

There’s something missing in the debate about the BNP and whether broadcasters should give them a platform. It’s a huge, gaping hole. The missing piece is a rebuttal from the mainstream political parties as to why the BNP is wrong in its core argument – and it means that, for the time being, the BNP can stay on the front foot.

For decades, the main argument of the far right has been misunderstood. They are routinely understood as being ‘for white people’, and are labelled disgusting bigots at any opportunity. But their violent streak can surely not have been the reason why millions of people switched from Labour directly to the BNP in the European elections. It’s rather that those voters bought the core political argument of the BNP – that mass immigration leads to unemployment and other social problems. Gordon Brown says ‘British jobs for British workers’ – so do the BNP. Changing the way you vote from Labour to the BNP couldn’t be simpler.

The issue, put simply, is this: if you can’t argue that immigration doesn’t lead to unemployment, then the BNP will always have a platform, particularly in times of mass joblessness, like now. I’m no employment expert, but several leading academics have said to me over the years that there has never been any empirical evidence that immigration causes unemployment. It’s a myth, but we’ve all come to accept the idea that it’s true. If those academics are wrong, and unemployment does increase with an influx of migrants, then the BNP will always have a platform.

But what if they’re right? This debate, surely, would be an ideal opportunity for the mainstream parties totally to undermine the very foundations on which the BNP is built and which provides its votes. The problem, obviously, is that none of the parties dare say that immigration doesn’t cause unemployment, as it would be political suicide.

The BNP have every right to appear on Question Time or any other programme, and it would be an affront to democracy if the millions of people who voted for them in the European elections were not given a chance to listen to them.

The other parties should embrace the opportunity to confront the BNP and argue them down. In simply saying you don’t like someone and they should be banned, you end up looking weak. But the mainstream parties can’t – or won’t – tackle the BNP’s fundamentals, because they believe them themselves. So the BNP will continue to prosper, and no doubt those millions of voters who put a cross in the BNP box feel tarred with the same brush when Ministers sling more and more mud after the BNP. Expect the BNP to come out of tonight’s debate with more, rather than less, credibility because of the failure of the main parties to tackle them head on.