Majorityrights Central > Category: Thread Wars

On Wednesday night the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze devoted 45 minutes to consideration of whether BNP members should be employed in public services.  7 minutes 40 seconds was given over to the (decidedly) cross-examination of Mr Lee John Barnes, who these days goes under the title of National Coordinator of the British National Party legal department.

His performance was nothing if not combative, and earned him and the party some level-headed and fair praise from one panel-member, Michael Portillo.  For breaking the BNP taboo, he will no doubt receive the due amount of contumely and criticism from former friends and colleagues.

The programme can be heard for the next few days here, with Barnes’ contribution starting at 11 min 56 sec.

Barnes answered (rebuffed, really) the less than neutral questions of panel members Melanie Phillips and Clifford Longley.  The first question, though, came from the programme’s presenter Michael Buerk:-

Michael Buerk: Do you accept that some people want limitation on who should be allowed to be BNP members is because your party is widely regarded as racist?

Lee Barnes: Erm, there’s a lot of people in society who are very ignorant of what our party stands for.  Our party isn’t racist.  Basically our party has a positon which is on immigration ... it’s on ... it’s ... primarily our focus is on space more than race, erm, and if you check most of our literature you will find that’s true. There’s isn’t a real racial issue in there anymore.  If anyone is in this country illegally or unlawfully we’re gonna ‘ave ‘em out regardless of race, colour, creed.

Spacist not racist!  Does anybody really believe that?  Probably not.  But, obviously, the party has not been able to defend itself against the charge of racism.  I’m not constrained by the minefields of the political world.  I’m interested in developing an argument that thoroughly nukes the “r” issue.

Towards the end of last week I spent three or four days picking up not one, not two but three Guardian bans while defending the BNP membership against the deracinated hanging judges of the Comment Is Free website.  That takes my CiF bans to sixteen, assuming I haven’t forgotten any of my earlier dramatis personnea.  Does it get me in the Guinness Book of Records?  Probably.  Shouldn’t I be ashamed of this obsessive desire to force innocent liberal backs to the wall?  Er ... erm ... aaah ... nope.  I’m just shameless like that.

Besides, this really only mildly obsessional effort is devoted to a perfectly noble cause: to test the intellectual quality and rhetorical strength of my current ideas against the best, generally, that the other side has to offer, and to refine them further in the light of that experience.  This, in other words, is a work in progress.

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