The leader of the British National party, Nick Griffin, has at last been acquitted of inciting racial hatred, following two costly and embarrassing trials for the government. It is a triumph for Griffin and the odious and fascist BNP, the second best result he and his party could have wished for.
The best result would have been a guilty verdict and a spell in prison; but hell, you can’t have everything in this world. Not guilty will do almost as well.
This was beyond doubt a political prosecution instigated by the Home Office and the government and to which the Crown Prosecution Service was, one suspects, a reluctant accomplice. “This is not the police,” one West Yorkshire copper said, a little shamefacedly, during a raid on a BNP member’s house, “it’s coming from much higher up than that.”
And now the government has lost, it intends to shift the goalposts so that next time they charge Nick Griffin they’ll get him. Gordon Brown has hinted at a change in the wording of the legislation that will make it easier to convict. Quite outrageous really.
If the government intended a sop to agitating Muslim organisations (such as the Muslim Council of Britain), then the stunt backfired; twice a jury refused to convict someone for saying that Islam was a ghastly religion. If it was intended as a shot across the bows of the BNP then the failure was even more spectacular — the BNP will, of course, feast on this for months.
As a test of the government’s fervent belief in hate crime legislation, it suggested no sensible jury will be prepared to convict, no matter what dark matter they believe lies in the heart of the accused. And the rest of us are left fuming that a man could be prosecuted, at enormous cost to the taxpayer, for exercising his freedom of speech.
One of the things Griffin was accused of saying was this: quite soon Britain would suffer a terror attack perpetrated by British-born Muslims. This was thought of at the time — the summer of 2004 — as being a little inflammatory, and so he was arrested. His case came before the courts only a few days after the bombings of July 7, 2005.
In retrospect, of course, he was absolutely right — and his words differed in meaning not one jot from those uttered last week by MI5 chief Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller.
One assumes the fuzz won’t be round to feel her collar in the next few days. Times have changed; the things that Griffin said two years ago can now be uttered, with impunity, by members of the government or the head of the secret service.
Perhaps Griffin will soon be back in court, once Gordon has gerrymandered the rules; facing another costly trial which, whatever the verdict, will make the BNP leader once, twice, three times a martyr.
It’s a zeitgeist thing, guest-editing. Everybody’s doing it. Call it blue-skies thinking. At my old stamping ground, the Today programme, they decided to ask the charmingly confused Pete Doherty to edit an edition in order to carve a niche in the growing and profitable skaghead market. Then they changed their minds and brought in arguably one of the silliest women in the history of womankind, Yoko Ono. “It’s 10 past eight — love is the thing, hate isn’ t. Imagine you are big cloud full of rain — now sun come out where is cloud going? Maybe it still in your head, rain falling gently. Joining me from the radio car is David Miliband.” And so on.
The Independent was recently guest-edited by the international statesman, philosopher, economist and famous person who wears sunglasses indoors, Bono. And I believe a copy of the Daily Mail I saw recently must have been guest-edited by Reinhard Heydrich.
In marketing terms, this sort of stuff might work for a while, but it does posit the strange notion that celebrities are more than simply disposable commodities, quite often vacuous, who are there to entertain us for a while before being consigned to obscurity.
Be glad Britney isn’t your girl
Poor Britney Spears is getting divorced, again. This time after two years, rather than a matter of hours, as happened before in Las Vegas. And with an eight-week-old baby in tow. Oops, she did it again, this time by text message etc., etc.
The public debate about this young woman has centred around the question: is she a good role model for our young daughters? A great amount of airtime has been expended debating this important proposition. You sort of wish John Locke and the Rev Thomas Malthus were around to weigh in with their two penneth.
And the correct answer, of course, is no; she’s not a suitable role model, she’s a borderline certifiable dingbat from the Appalachian foothills with the IQ of permafrost. She wasn’t a suitable role model before she became famous and she’s about as much of one now.
You want role models for your daughter, then paper her bedroom with pictures of Mother Teresa, Joan of Arc, Rosa Luxemburg and Hazel Blears. Or relax and let her enjoy the fleeting, saccharine, pleasures of Hit Me Baby One More Time (a fine single) and, in time, come to her own conclusions about Britney.
The race to replace Prescott is getting scary
Candidates for Labour’s deputy leadership must appear left-wing and fiery to the party electorate and reasonably sane to everybody else. A tough act. The likeable Alan Johnson, for example, keeps telling anyone who will listen that he is a “working-class lad” — which makes him, in Labour terms, scarcer than a fully grown cod in the North Sea, but is nonetheless beginning to grate. Peter Hain seemed to assume he had the leftish ticket sewn up by dint of the fact that he was once even crosser about South Africa than almost anybody else.
Harriet Harman is waiting in the wings. Harperson is a feminist of the old school; not so long ago, she fretted that too many men were getting off murdering their wives by claiming provocation and called for the defence to be removed.
And there’s Hazel Blears, a decent woman saddled with the appalling notion that she is Blair’s candidate. My money’s on Harperson; as ever with Labour, the worst of all available options.
MI5 boss Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller’s assertion that we may soon be evaporated in a nuclear holocaust perpetrated by homegrown terrorists was described by a BBC correspondent as being “rare, hard-hitting and honest”. How did he know it was honest? For all he knew, it might have been a tissue of lies. I’m not suggesting for a moment that it was, merely that the correspondent couldn’t have known.
True it was rare — nice of her to do so ahead of the government’s appeal in the Lords over the use of controversial control orders that may lead to new security measures, little gobbets of legislation that chip away at our freedoms but are required because otherwise we might all be evaporated in a nuclear holocaust.
