I guess posts like yours are at least an insight into how a BNP voter would view all that.

And I don't know what Twitter you're using, but overwhelmingly the response seems to be:

- Griffin is an absolute fuckwit and a vile shambles of a man
- Straw is still a cock
- Bonnie Greer for Queen~!

Griffin spent most of the show fucking laughing at Straw and Warsi arguing with each other.

But the Labour party took a real beating tonight.

I put that because I thought I remembered you saying that at some point. Apologies if that's wrong.

What? Jack Straw clearly came off the best of the three main party representatives (I particularly liked his Dr. Strangelove line). It's a shame he was never allowed to fully explain the progress Labour has made with their immigration policy.

I did indeed vote BNP in the Euro elections, and i'm glad I did.

I'm very anti-EU, and oppose the centralisation of Europe, and seeing fools like the BNP members who got voted in represent it makes me feel all fuzzy inside.

I presume you'll be withdrawing your apology?

What? Jack Straw clearly came off the best of the three main party representatives (I particularly liked his Dr. Strangelove line). It's a shame he was never allowed to fully explain the progress Labour has made with their immigration policy.

He looked incredibly uncomfortable too - hands shaking, voice shaking, sweaty, that silly little "I'm in on the joke" chuckling all the way through, and the frail-mask slipped totally at end with the stuff about two men kissing being "creepy."

Are you serious? The nervous laugh he did throughout the show was just showing how mcuh he was shitting himself

Have to say I loved Jack Straw absolutely shitting himself the entire hour, he could barely calm himself down to waffle out an answer most of the time.

A classic moment was when Nick Griffin was referring to his visit to Libya and telling Gaddafi to stop funding the IRA

Straw's response after a moment of silence - "......well you were trying to get him to fund you instead!!!!"

Nice one Jack

Bobbins how do you figure Jack Straw came of best of the main 3 I thought Huhne won it but was a shiet showing alround.. Warsi trying to hide her seeming homophobia by skirting around erm what people can and cant do was hilarious.

I cant take jack Straw seriously as he looks like the Demon Head Master, and he doesnt have a grip on his own constituency according to the people that live there.

He got called on Immgration on QT and bottled it trying to attack the BNP and deflect the issue.. rather than answer the question. Ffs even Huhne tried to blame the Tories for the emss and they havent been in power since 1997.. Why can they just say we fucked up, this is how we will fix it.. Its not hard.. I think a bit of honest from the main parties wouldnt go a miss and may go someway to repairing the mistrust in politics..


A few we fucked it up admissions would be a start

Also, going off-topic, Bonnie Greer turns sixty-one next month. She looks well on it.

Well I can't believe that I'm defending Jack Straw but I was listening to what he said rather than thinking that he looked like the Demon Headmaster. As for immigration, you seem to want simple answers to very complex questions. Apologise and fix it, isn't really a nuanced position. He was giving honest answers about what they're trying to do to solve problems linked to immigration. It will never be a perfect situation, you just have to work to come up with ways of making it as fair as possible.

I was expecting Straw to make a tit of himself on immigration after the butchered quote Harry posted before the show but I don't think he did. He's definitely in denial if he genuinely thinks fears about immigration haven't increased BNP support but what he said about it was right. Stuff like putting a cap on population is impossible.

It was a good show. Griffin made an absolute tit of himself. He was shown up totally as a lying bastard who cannot back up any of the things he spews. I thought Waasi was the best guest. She conducted herself well, made good counter arguments and didn't have her head in the sand about key issues.

The only fear I have is how large the proportion of people who, like Harry, somehow feel that Griffin came off well on the show is. All we've heard from the media in the last few days is that British people are intelligent enough to make their own minds up about the BNP. I don't think that is true for a lot of people.

Last night, as Bonnie Greer prepared to enter the electric atmosphere of the BBC Question Time studio, she came face to face with Nick Griffin for the first time.

"It was the strangest thing because as I came out of my dressing room prepared for combat, it was as if he'd been waiting for me in the corridor," she says.

"I was the last to emerge and when he saw me, he turned and smiled his greasy smile and clumsily half extended a hand. I ignored it and thought to myself: what are you about? Are you forgetting I'm black? Are you forgetting you called me a black history fabricator? Are you trying to show me you aren't racist?"

But the off-camera behaviour of the leader of the far-right British National Party towards Greer, a black Chicago-born writer who became a British citizen 11 years ago, was to become even more bizarrely ingratiating as they entered the studio.

"We were seated next to each other and as we were having our microphones attached, he leaned towards me like I was his new best friend and tried to make small talk. "Bonnie, how many times have you been on?" he asked. "Bonnie, do you find it scary?" I looked him straight in the eye. "No," I replied sharply, "but you might."

Speaking exclusively to the Evening Standard immediately after filming at Television Centre in west London, Greer, 60, describes - over a stiff vodka - the ordeal of sitting next to Griffin as "probably the weirdest and most creepy experience of my life".

"I spent the entire night with my back turned to him. At one point, I had to restrain myself from slapping him. But it was worth it," she insists, "because he was totally trounced. I had thought we'd face a formidable orator, somebody who knew his facts and had his ducks in a row but the guy was a mess!

"From the moment the audience began shooting questions, it was a case of the Emperor's new clothes. He was completely exposed as an evasive liar who couldn't even stand up his own quotes and looked like a buffoon."

The other panellists - Justice Secretary Jack Straw, shadow minister for community cohesion Sayeda Warsi, and Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne - came down on him like a ton of bricks, she says.

"They were formidably prepared with quotes and statistics, and [host] David Dimbleby was excellent at holding him to account. I don't know if the cameras picked this up but Griffin was trembling and shaking like a leaf.

"There was a pivotal moment in the show when Dimbleby pressed him on whether he was still a Holocaust denier and he just looked totally bereft. For a couple of seconds there was a deafening silence. It was an amazing moment. You could see the panel thinking, 'He's done for'.

"He had climbed in the ring with some heavyweights and in all honesty, he got slapped around. The audience and the panel took him down time after time. It was a blood sport. He looked totally out of his depth. I was shocked by how ill-prepared he was. He didn't seem to have credible answers to anything."

Before the show there were those who expressed concerns as to whether this elegant but softly-spoken intellectual would be robust enough to take on Griffin.

As the only non-politician on the panel, her job would be to lift the debate above party politics, but she'd need to be less the lofty academic and more the voice of the people.

Outside the BBC complex, hundreds of screaming anti-fascist protesters were engaged in running battles with the police because they believed Griffin - an MEP whose party won six per cent of the vote in the last European elections - should not have been invited.

At stake was the future credibility and popularity of the BNP and its leader who would no doubt try and present a sanitised version of himself and his party.

Was she satisfied with her performance?

During the show, which focused on making Griffin account for his pernicious views on subjects ranging from immigration to the Holocaust to homophobia, Greer was well received but came across more as a bemused lecturer than the feisty combative some had hoped for.

For example, when Griffin was asked to explain how the BNP could justify using Winston Churchill as its symbol, Bonnie pointed out that Churchill's American mother was rumoured to have Mohawk blood and that he could not have joined Griffin's "all-white" party.

Later she scolded Griffin for calling David Duke's Ku Klux Klan a "non-violent organisation" and said he was talking "BS".

And she invited him to the British Museum for a lesson to understand once and for all that there is no such thing as "the indigenous English people".

But it took a black audience member to really raise the roof when he told Griffin: "You're a disgrace. The vast majority of this audience find what you stand for to be completely disgusting."

Why was she not more strident in her attacks on him? "I didn't need to, because others like Jack Straw waded in so heavily. I felt my job was to subtly lampoon him, toy with him, expose the idiocy of his ideas.

"I didn't want to come across as the angry, screaming black woman pointing my finger and hollering because that's how people like Griffin and his supporters view black women. I saw us as a team - it wasn't an ego thing, wasn't as if I had to take him down all on my own."

There was a touching moment, she says, just before they started recording when Sayeda Warsi ran over to her and said: "Are you okay sitting next to Griffin?" "I said: 'I'm from Chicago, I'm not scared of this guy!' And we just hugged spontaneously. We were like two prize-fighters going into the ring to do battle."

Was it a tough choice to appear alongside Griffin on the show? "When I was asked I deliberated for days. As someone who grew up in America and who is more cultural than political, I wasn't sure what I'd bring to the table. But then I realised, I'm the only one on the panel who has chosen to come to this country.

"I chose to come here because I saw it as a country of decent, fair people. But also because this country gave my father, Ben Greer, who was a black sharecropper from Mississippi, his first decent experience of white people he'd ever had.

"He came here during the war, in a blacks-only unit as part of General Patton's army and was involved in the second wave of D-Day landings, and later he always spoke about how well the white working-class Brits had treated him, the very people who today are said to be turning to the BNP.

"My daddy always said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. So I decided to come for him, and also for my deceased white English mother-in-law, Joan Hutchins, who had never met a black person before she met me, and who welcomed me into her heart."

The day had begun with top-secret calls from Television Centre to Greer and the other panellists that they should be ready and dressed to go "any moment" and that cars would be dispatched to pick them up with "just 15 minutes notice".

Greer picked her outfit carefully: a demure dark top and jacket and on her wrist, a colourful African bead bracelet. "I was wearing the colours of Jamaica and of Africa," she laughs. "A touch of ethnic."

They were provided police contact numbers - and in Griffin's case a police escort - in case they had to change their route at the last moment.

At 6pm, with hundreds of protesters engaged in running skirmishes with the police out front, they were quietly smuggled in through a back entrance.

"Usually we all mingle in the green room before the show but there was no mingling this time and we all had our own private green rooms. The show itself was tense, like no Question Time I've ever experienced.

"To me, the stars though, were the audience. It was a typical London multicultural audience and they were just brilliant in the way they held Griffin to account. It made my job easy."

Does she think that the BNP membership would swell, despite Griffin's poor showing? "No, I think that young people watching the show who might have been tempted to join the BNP will think again after seeing his dismal performance.

"Having him on and holding him to account on such a public forum is like getting to interrogate the Wizard of Oz - he's been built up and up, but then you find he's just a windbag and there's nothing there."

At the end, she laughs ruefully, Griffin turned to her and gave her his business card. "Bizarre - I can't even begin to understand why."

She shrugs. "Afterwards, there is usually a communal supper for all the panellists. But not this time. Nobody could bring themselves to break bread with Nick Griffin."

The only fear I have is how large the proportion of people who, like Harry, somehow feel that Griffin came off well on the show is. All we've heard from the media in the last few days is that British people are intelligent enough to make their own minds up about the BNP. I don't think that is true for a lot of people.

I didn't think it was wise to have Griffin shot down by the very people that some of his voters (disillusioned, not racist) feel alienated from.

The attention that British National Party leader Nick Griffin is currently receiving stems from the European elections. The BNP got nearly a million votes and ended up with two seats in the European parliament. He and Andrew Brons became MEPs. They have not, as yet, made any impact in Brussels, but perhaps that is not surprising as their aim is for Britain to withdraw from the EU.

Some people were surprised by the numbers who voted for a party which is regularly denounced as racist. There was a similar reaction in 2006 when the BNP won a clutch of council seats in Barking and Dagenham. I did a report on their campaign for the BBC's Ten O'Clock News. Initially I thought it would be difficult to find people who would openly admit on camera that they intended to vote for the far-right party. It was easier than I imagined.

At Dagenham Working Men's Club I found potential BNP voters, and some were willing to talk openly. Among then was a brick-layer, a trainee nurse and an electrician. I got them to look straight into the camera. They gave their names, their occupations and said they intended to vote for BNP. All were either former Labour voters or came from Labour-voting families. None of them knew much about the BNP beyond the fact that it was anti-immigration. They knew nothing about the history or the background of the party's leaders or activists.

The mood in the club was one of sullen resentment. The neighbourhood around them was changing rapidly. Their known world had gone. I remember that one of them had got hold of the Labour manifesto from 1997. There was only a brief reference to immigration but the man read out the words "every country must have firm control over immigration and Britain is no exception". They felt betrayed and voiceless. In their view Labour had not been straight and no-one had asked them whether they wanted a sharp rise in immigration.

Certainly in that club the bond between the white working class and Labour had been broken. They seemed isolated, adrift and in that mood voted for the BNP. They did not particularly like the party. Theirs was a protest vote, a cry to be heard.

Later the Labour MP for Dagenham Jon Cruddas criticised my report. He felt the publicity could benefit the BNP. In fact it had been one of his Labour colleagues, Margaret Hodge, who had drawn our attention to the area when she warned that the shortage of housing for white working class people was driving people into the arms of the BNP. In the event the BNP did well and now have 12 councillors in the area.

It was easy to show the BNP for what they really were. Their election literature did that.

Many of the people I met knew that the BNP was regarded as a racist party but it did not deter them from voting for the party. They did not care because they felt ignored and sidelined. I also recall a comment from a colleague. He said the white working class was probably the only section of society that could be openly abused. They could be called "trash" or "chavs"' and no one objected. What I took away from Barking and Dagenham was the need for the mainstream parties to re-connect to white working families.

If I understand you correctly, your problem is not with any aspect of immigration, but with the general public's irrational media-fuelled fears of immigration. I really don't see what amount of "plain-speaking" from leading politicians can solve that problem.

The same could be said about Europe, take away all the 'myth' and crap that has been built up over the years and being a bit simple, in terms of setting out a basic view, has the potential to help restore some of the faith in politics and politicians.

I'm still wondering whatever happened to the referendum on the EU we should have got

I was expecting Straw to make a tit of himself on immigration after the butchered quote Harry posted before the show but I don't think he did. He's definitely in denial if he genuinely thinks fears about immigration haven't increased BNP support but what he said about it was right. Stuff like putting a cap on population is impossible.

It was a good show. Griffin made an absolute tit of himself. He was shown up totally as a lying bastard who cannot back up any of the things he spews. I thought Waasi was the best guest. She conducted herself well, made good counter arguments and didn't have her head in the sand about key issues.

The only fear I have is how large the proportion of people who, like Harry, somehow feel that Griffin came off well on the show is. All we've heard from the media in the last few days is that British people are intelligent enough to make their own minds up about the BNP. I don't think that is true for a lot of people.

By the end you could see in his eye's he knew he'd fucked it, his best chance and he'd been utterly destroyed.
I really enjoyed it

BBC Gets Hundreds Of Complaints Over BNP

The BBC says it received more than 350 complaints after BNP leader Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time.

The bulk of complaints - more than 240 - accused the BBC of being biased against the BNP, the broadcaster revealed.

Some 100 viewers complained about Mr Griffin being allowed on the programme, while 50 others contacted the BBC to express appreciation of the programme.

The BNP leader himself says his party will be complaining about the bias he considers was shown towards him.

During Question Time, Mr Griffin claimed his party's immigration policy was supported by the majority of the public - and insisted he was not a Nazi.

Facing a hostile audience, he criticised Islam and defended a former head of the Ku Klux Klan.

The visibly nervous Mr Griffin was branded "completely disgusting" by members of the audience as he struggled to articulate his extreme views to a highly critical panel, often resorting to inappropriate laughter.

At one point moderator David Dimbleby snapped at the BNP leader for smiling as he struggled to answer a question about his past denial of the Holocaust.

He was booed as he attacked Jack Straw's father for being in jail for not fighting in the war while his own father was serving in the RAF.

The show opened with a question asking the panel whether it was right that Winston Churchill had been adopted by the BNP.

Mr Griffin said that his party would have been the only one to accept Churchill's views, particularly those on Islam.

One black member of the audience said the MEP was a "disgrace" who was trying to poison the minds of the electorate.

"The vast majority of the audience think what you stand for, your views, are disgusting," he said.

Another audience member added: "You would be surprised how many people would have a whip round to buy you a ticket, and your supporters, to go to the South Pole; it's a colourless landscape, it would quite suit you."

Mr Griffin said that he was being painted as a "monster" by the press who were peddling "terrible lies about him".

Dimbleby put to him: "What are the lies? Were they lying when they said you denied the Holocaust?"

Mr Griffin replied: "I have not got a conviction for denying the Holocaust."

Dimbleby pressed him again about whether he had denied the event before snapping: "Why are you smiling? It's not particularly amusing."

Sky's chief political correspondent Jon Craig said: "It was a propaganda victory, certainly.

"But more likely a propaganda victory for the organisation that staged this TV debate rather than for the BNP leader, Nick Griffin.

"Griffin was exposed on Question Time as a nasty piece of work, with unpleasant views on race, immigration, Islam, homosexuality and Winston Churchill."

The BBC has defended Mr Griffin's appearance on the show, insisting it was "appropriate" to invite him to appear given the level of support his party achieved in the last European elections.

The BNP will have the right to get free television advertising during next year's General Election.

The far-right party will be given at least one party election broadcast in the three weeks before polling day.

Under broadcasting law, any party contesting at least a sixth of the seats in England is entitled to a free broadcast of up to four minutes and 40 seconds.

Bingo, the general media has sorely overestimated the general intelligence of the native populace. The belief Griffin came off well according to some people in spite of reality is utterly indicative of their support no matter what, and their ill reasoning isn't going to be changed by logic nor fact.

"I spent the entire night with my back turned to him.

I don't know if the cameras picked this up but Griffin was trembling and shaking like a leaf.

Honestly did anyone watch it right. How can a guys view change so much in a short time to a non racist view.