Well that was entertaining. ‘Dick’ Griffin, as one audience member called him was about as uninspiring as could have been expected and seemed to take a perverse pleasure in metaphorically dropping his pants, inviting everyone to queue up to kick him.Twitter really came into its own tonight both for some of the comments made under the trending topic #bbcqt and for the parallel universe of @realnickgriffin.  There was speculation about who would win in a fight between militant homosexuals and non-violent Klansmen and attempts to set up a flashmob of same-sex kissing outside the BNP HQ.
That would be hilarious, and I think I would be up for that, but isn’t the BNP HQ miles away in Wrexham or somewhere like that?
Griffin shot himself in the foot so many times he probably had to be carried home afterwards.
I don’t think I have enjoyed Question Time so much since Robin Day was in the chair, although to be honest I haven’t really watched it much since Robin Day was in the chair, and hardly at all since the panel was increased to five.
And then something stopped me in mid laugh: the realisation that this idiot managed to get enough votes to be elected and represents Britain in the EU parliament. There might be foreigners seeing him speak somewhere who think he actually speaks for us. Its a bit like the feeling I got when Boris Johnson was at the Olympics handover ceremony, but more sinister.
Spare a thought for the casualty departments in the North, which are probably creaking at the seams with injuries from people kicking themselves and slapping their foreheads that they stayed at home on polling day and let it happen.
Thank God I got out to vote – I’m just too knackered (after my PM meeting experiences yesterday and four weeks of student bookselling…) to kick myself.
Am I the only person who *hasn’t* met the PM?
Fairer to say I was at a meeting that the PM was also attending – so about the same as the Labour party conference, just on a smaller scale. But I did get a question in
http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/4698786.Prime_Minister_grilled_by_T_A_readers_on_city_issues/
Politics is Perception.
If the working people in Crawley PERCEIVE that a candidate (right or left) is addressing their real grievances, that’s who they’ll vote for in the Election.
The right-wing, especially the BNP, are still PERCEIVED as addressing the real grievances of many such people. This is palpable nonsense, but that is the perception.
The Labour Party can change that perception by addressing working people’s genuine grievances, rather than waste time ridiculing/demonizing the likes of the BNP.
Here is the American experience :
Chomsky : “So take right now, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It’s very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that’s not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it’s kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I’ve never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, “I’ve done everything right all my life, I’m a god-fearing Christian, I’m white, I’m male, I’ve worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I’m supposed to do. And I’m getting shafted.†And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there’s nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered – it’s the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don’t care about you—they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.
Well, you know, the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren’t we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren’t getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].
I mean, the liberal democrats aren’t going to tell the average American, “Yeah, you’re being shafted because of the policies that we’ve established over the years that we’re maintaining now.†That’s not going to be an answer. And they’re not getting answers from the left. So, there’s an internal coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they’re very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything—a crazy answer, but it’s an answer. And it’s our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don’t ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer…”
As I see it, a “real grievance” to most thinking voter in Crawley is that Blair (& Campbell et al) misled/lied to us regarding Iraq’s WMD’s, and our MP is keeping silent.
Silence is consent.
If Labour’s Moffatt (& Brown) do not unequivocally leave Bliar ‘to hang out to dry’ (ie distance themselves from him), then all the Tory Psrty (& ‘Wannabe MP’) has to do is to say they were also misled/lied to in Parliament, and they will sweep to victory on a tsunami wave of public suppport – albeit drowning in their own hypocrisy.
Hypocrites we can live with & forgive – because we’re all guilty – but not liars….or apologists for liars.