Question Time

Tomorrow, the new European Parliament will convene, chaired by its oldest member, Jean-Marie Le Pen. This should bring home to people the nature of those to whose legislative will we are subject there, in the Commission, and in the Council of Ministers. It should also disabuse anyone of the notion that the BNP is anti-EU in principle.

Having MEPs was the reason given, quite explicitly, for putting UKIP and the Greens on Any Questions? and Question Time. So the Beeb’s great and good are beside themselves, since, if the BNP took them to court over not having them on, it would win hands down.

And why not?

If utterly unrepentant old hands of the Communist Party (at the time the paid agents of an alien power), of Trotskyism, of the International Marxist Group, of the nominally Labour faction of Soviet fellow-travellers, of IRA fund-raising, of the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation, of the “free”-marketeering agitation for everything from the legalisation of heroin and cocaine to the legalisation of sex with children, and of the hired help of apartheid South Africa and Pinochet’s Chile, are allowed on, then why not the utterly unrepentant old hands of the National Socialist Movement and of the National Front?

If supporters of the funny money PFIs, or of the wholesale privatisation of local government services, or of NHS charges (though only in England and only for those under 60), are allowed on, then why not those whose views on, say, race or the death penalty may be wrong, but are nowhere near as unpopular as any of those?

And if supporters of the Iraq War are allowed on, then why not those who probably do not hold a single opinion, however odious, anywhere near as unpopular as that?