Nigel Farage should have a Commons pass

On Friday, Iain Dale blogged about the fact that Nigel Farage, the outgoing leader of UKIP and MEP has been complaining that his Palace of Westminster pass has been removed. The Westminster authorities have decided to remove the privilege from all MEPs. They claim it is to "save resources" but there is a very strong suspicion that the move is to ensure that the two elected BNP MEPs cannot have passes.

Iain says:

I have to say I have never quite understood why MEPs had passes to the building in the first place, so I can't get as excited as Nigel Farage about this.

I disagree with Iain here and fully back Nigel Farage. I think Iain should be getting excited about this. The authorities have taken away a privilege from all MEPs apparently in order to ensure lack of access for two of them. Whether you like the EU or not it is surely right that we make it easy for our elected European legislators to liaise with our elected MPs? This measure will make that more difficult.

As I have said about the BNP before, when the debate was raging about whether Nick Griffin should be allowed on BBC Question Time, they have elected MEPs. From this, certain things flow in a democracy. The Westminster authorities may think they are doing the right thing but they are making a mistake.

How many more rules are they going to change to affect two specific MEPs but also cause problems for the remaining 70 who are not fascists?

PS: I have also noticed that quite a few of the comments on Iain's post seem to agree with me.

James Forsyth highights problem with our electoral system

John Pienaar's guest on his 5 Live political podcast this week was James Forsyth, the new political editor of The Spectator (it is still accessible here for a few days). The discussion was about BBC Question Time, Nick Griffin and the BNP and James made a number of what I thought were good points about the programme and how it played out.

What caught my ear most though was when he highlighted what he perceives as a major reason why the BNP has increased in popularity. It is a short section from about 9 minutes in for about 20 seconds:

A colleague of mine went out canvassing with them (the BNP) recently and he said it is amazing to talk to people on the doorsteps who are voting for the BNP and they are voting because they haven't seen a politician because they live in a seat that is so safe for the Labour Party that no-one's been there for 20 years. That's what we've got to, you know, politicians have to realise that they can't take votes for granted.

I suspect the point that James was trying to make here is of a one with lots of right-wing commentators and bloggers who are constantly trying to make the point that the BNP is growing due to Labour's failures. Of course what he has inadvertently highlighted is one of the huge problems with our current First Past the Post electoral system. In areas that are very safe Labour, or Conservative or any other party, there is no real incentive for politicians of either the incumbent party or realistically main opposition parties to focus their efforts there. This is not being defeatist, it is being realistic. Parties are bound to target their resources where they think they can make the most difference and under our current system that is in the marginal seats and wards. This produces situations where people are effectively disenfranchised.

The political voids that this then creates can be filled by parties like the BNP who can step in and as they are the only voice that is being heard make council gains before the Labour and other parties who have sluggish or non-existent local party infrastructure even know what has hit them.

So James highlights a very real problem but makes no attempt to define how to resolve it, just a plaintive cry that "politicians cannot take these votes for granted". The reality is that the current situation will perpetuate. The weakness is systemic and even if the bigger parties plug the voids in a few areas, the BNP can just move into other areas. The solution is to remove the safe seats and wards by reforming the electoral system to make every vote count.

James didn't say this though and from what I can tell The Spectator's editorial line does not favour electoral reform either. I would therefore be interested to hear what alternative practical steps he thinks can be taken to avoid from what I can tell is an inevitable consequence of our existing system.

BBC Question Time Live Chat - 22nd October 2009 - #bbcqt

It's Thursday which of course means that it's #bbcqt day again and as usual the Live Chat on this blog will start tonight at 10:30pm.

This week's show is from London and has been the subject of controversy as one of the panelists is Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP (British National Party) who was recently elected as an MEP. There have been protests outside BBC TV centre about this and my namesake, the Director General of the BBC has had to step in to back Question Time's decision to allow him on.

The panel will also include the Justice Secretary Jack Straw MP, the Conservative spokeswoman for community cohesion Baroness Warsi, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne MP and the playwright and author Bonnie Greer.

Liberal Democrat Voice also always have an open thread for BBC Question Time which is usually posted just before the start of the programme.

Join us from 10:30pm below.

The BBC are right to have Nick Griffin on Question Time

I think the BBC are right to have invited the British National Party leader Nick Griffin onto Question Time this evening. He is the leader and an elected MEP of a party that got 6% of the vote at the most recent European elections. To deny him a place on one of their shows would be to single out the BNP for special treatment and as my namesake Mark Thompson (the director general of the BBC) points out in a Guardian article today, it would be to expect political censorship of this kind to be outsourced to the BBC. That is not their job.

I have written before about why I think the policy of "No platform" is a mistake. As I said previously, my view is that you win debates and arguments by taking on your opponents, not by banning them from the debating arena. That way allows them to claim political martyrdom. Darrell Goodliffe also has a good blogpost about this here today.

I have read some blog posts and commentary that have expressed the concern that Nick Griffin might not actually come out all that badly. He might even do quite well in the forum of Question Time where populist rhetoric and soundbites sometimes get applause. I am afraid my response to this is that yes, it is possible that he doesn't go down dreadfully as me and I suspect most other people would like. It cannot be guaranteed that it will play out like we hope but again that is no reason to ban him from the show. It is the job of the fellow panelists and the members of the audience who oppose what the BNP stand for to take him on. Beyond that, we cannot control the outcome. That is democracy.

For those who are interested, I will be running my regular BBC Question Time Live Chat on this blog from 10:30 pm this evening.

Would the BNP "No Platform" this?

Peter Black AM draws our attention to a very interesting suggestion from a correspondent to The Guardian yesterday regarding the BNP's appearance on BBC's Question Time:

If the BBC is to invite the BNP on to Question Time, might I suggest that the other political parties all send non-white Britons to represent their point of view, to further emphasise how extreme is the BNP view of the country. Also, it is likely that the BNP would in turn "refuse to share a platform" with such people.

Andy Hunter

Hull

Peter thinks this is well worth a try and I am inclined to agree. The question is as Andy asks, if this was what was on the table, would Griffin "No Platform" the idea?

Continuing to "No Platform" the BNP would be a big mistake

Quick multiple choice question. What is the best way to deal with an opponent whose views you very, very strongly disagree with?

a) Engage them in debate and win the argument against them.

b) Refuse to have anything to do with them and hope they will go away.

There are still people (apparently including Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary) who think that option b) is the way to go when it comes to the BNP. I find it odd that anybody could still think that.

I have always in principle been against the "No Platform" policy whereby some opponents of the BNP have refused to share the same debating platform as them. The argument is that even being seen on the same platform as mainstream parties lends the BNP a legitimacy that they do not deserve. My view is that you win debates and arguments by taking on your opponents, not by banning them from the debating arena.

To the people who agree with "No Platform" and have been practising it all these years I just ask whether in all honesty they can say that following this policy has worked. Because from where I am sitting it has manifestly failed. It has allowed them to claim that they are being shunned by the mainstream parties and to play the political martyrs. It allows them to claim that they are representing something that the mainstream parties are not and they they speak to the "real concerns" of the electorate. I think this has contributed to their recent electoral successes at council and European Parliament level.

Of course I think that the BNP's ideas are abhorrent but I would share a debating platform with them and I would try to expose their incoherent, half-baked, racist policies for what they are.

Sweet and Tender Hooligan, Peter Black AM, Sara Bedford and Alistair Campbell are amongst a number of bloggers who seem to agree with me about this.

Eggs

Pelting the BNP Leader Nick Griffin with eggs is not the way forward. It just makes him look like the victim of an angry mob and will elicit sympathy for him.

Far better to engage them in debate and expose their policies for what they really are, hate filled, incoherent and nonsensical.

There has been a good debate on this going on on Charlotte's blog here today.

PR is not to blame for BNP Euro wins

Like many others this morning I am sickened by the fact that the BNP has won two seats in the European parliament following the count overnight. I had to endure the sight of fascists being interviewed on TV knowing they now have a 5 year elected platform from which to espouse their hate as well as all the funding that comes from the result.

I have already seen that William Hague has been on the radio this morning trying to argue that Proportional Representation is to blame for the result.

I completely reject that argument. The BNP has got in in Yorkshire and the North West because of a combination of disgust in general with the political classes and especially Labour. They got almost 10% of the vote in Yorkshire and 8% in the North West. The unpalatable fact is that a lot of people in those regions were willing to vote for them.

But the biggest argument against blaming the electoral system is that it is precisely the First Past the Post system used at Westminster that has contributed so much to this problem in the first place. Voters feel disengaged from politics and great swathes of the North West and Yorkshire are safe seats where there is usually little campaigning from any of the major parties as they instead focus their energies on marginal constituencies. This lack of political activity and engagement creates a vacuum that parties like the BNP can then move into. If we had a fairer electoral system for Westminster, these politically bereft areas would have much stronger campaigning machines on the ground from the major parties and the BNP would have been unlikely to get any MEPs as a result. I have heard anecdotal evidence that in some areas, the only leaflets people received were from the BNP. This is a shocking indictment of the lack of campaigning capacity of the bigger parties and is a direct result of the broken electoral system we use in our country for Westminster elections.

So if anything last night's results are an argument for wholesale reform of our electoral systems used in all elections.

Electoral system distortions lets BNP in

There is an interesting article from Hugh Muir in The Guardian today. In a piece entitled "Who opened the door to the BNP?" he says that in their pursuit of winnable seats, Labour and the Tories left a vacuum that the BNP has gladly filled with its county council seats in Lancashire, Leicestershire and a strong showing in Essex.

The whole article is worth a read but this section in particular stood out for me when he addresses the question of why the vacuum is there:

But why was there a vacuum? Because Labour failed and, largely speaking, the Tories were no better. They too were chasing the middle class vote and the marginals and they were not about to worry themselves about areas they regarded as Labour fiefdoms, even those that had become failed states. They concentrated on the winnable seats. There is a logic to it. But the result of the decision by both parties to practise politics as the route to election victory rather as a tool for representing the broadest possible spread of communities left the door wide open for Griffin and his snake-oil salesmen.

Hugh is spot on here.. Our rotten electoral system allows one party fiefdom's to build up which are then neglected and allow parties like the BNP to sneak in by the back door.

Remember this the next time an opponent of electoral reform tries the old canard that a proportional system would let extreme parties in. As I have said time and again, Single Transferable Vote would make it almost impossible for the BNP to get in as voters can list their candidates in order of preference (and stop when they have put numbers against all they favour) so the BNP would not have any numbers next to them at all on most ballot papers. STV means candidates have to have broad support before they can get elected.

Campaigning in Bracknell

I spent a few hours on Saturday in Bracknell town centre campaigning with members of my local party. We were selling jumble on the Bandstand and myself and two other members (including Ray, the PPC) walked all around the centre handling out leaflets and talking to people.

I was very encouraged by how many people were willing to take leaflets and only one person ostentatiously screwed it up and dropped it on the floor! I was also pleasantly surprised to see how willing many people were to listen to what we had to say. Bracknell and Bracknell Forest Council are Tory fiefdoms with little other representation and lots of people were saying to me that this is not right and that some decent opposition was needed. They took the words right out of my mouth!

There was a BNP stand right next to our stall in the centre with a few volunteers and they seemed to attract a reasonable amount of interest. That should just make us all the more determined to campaign hard ourselves and make sure we counter their arguments. There was an interesting point where who I assume was a BNP member started shouting questions about the EU at us where he seemed to be blaming us for the fact that Peter Mandelson got paid one million pounds when he ceased to be an EU commissioner. I am not sure why he thought we were responsible for this! He also had a bee in his bonnet about the EU accounts and the fact that they have never passed an audit. I have written about this before myself and am as concerned as anyone that the EU structures are reformed to root out corruption and problems of this nature. Again, I am not sure why he thought we were responsible for this.

Still, all in all it was a very good day and I enjoyed pounding the pavements in the traditional style.