Censorship Controversy on Popular BBC Show

On Oct. 22, 2009, hundreds of Britons stood outside of the London BBC headquarters to protest the appearance of Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party (BNP), on BBC's show Question Time. The controversy is centered on the party's whites-only membership requirement and their immigration policy. Question Time is a debate television program in the United Kingdom, that program usually features politicians from the three major political parties in the U.K. and two other public figures. A moderator guides the discussion about contemporary issues. Only political parties elected to the European parliament are allowed to appear on the show. On Oct. 15, 2009, the BNP gained its first two seats in the European parliament. According to BBC, BNP leader Nick Griffin was elected for the NorthWest region while Andrew Brons was elected to represent the regions of Humber and Yorkshire. BBC's deputy director general Mark Byford stated that it is not BBC's job to censor BNP as BBC has a "responsibility of due impartiality." Byford said, "They should have the right to be heard, be challenged, and for the public who take part in Question Time and the viewers to make up their own minds about the views of the BNP. It's not for the BBC to censor and say they can't be on." Conversely, BBC reported that former London Mayor Kevin Livingstone said BBC would be responsible for any rise in racist attacks. Livingstone stated, "Unlike any other party, when Nick Griffin speaks, or when they get elected in an area, what we see is an increase in racial attacks. "He comes on, says his bit, does his bit, but for the angry racist it's the trigger that turns into an attack. And we first saw this when Enoch Powell made his 'rivers of blood' speech, there was a huge surge of attacks on black conductors on our buses." BNP leader Nick Griffin's appearance on BBC's Question Time was anything but an advertisement for the BNP. The entire time, Griffin faced a cosmopolitan London audience that for the most part did not support his party at all. Griffin struggled to answer questions during the show related to the accusation that he was a Holocaust denier, and attempted to justify his claim that Winston Churchill would have been a member of BNP if he were alive. Audience members mainly geared their comments towards BNP's immigration policy, which is characterized as racist. One audience member attacked BNP's deportation policy by turning it around and saying that many people in Britain would pay to ship Griffin and his party supporters to Antarctica, because it is totally devoid of color. According to The Guardian, a British newspaper, Nick Griffin said, "[he] was the victim of a 'lynch mob' audience drawn from a city [London] that had been 'ethnically cleansed' and was 'no longer British.'" Griffin went as far as requesting that another Question Time that should be set in a place where there are still a significant number of English and British people. Griffin told The Guardian, "People wanted to see me and hear me talking about things such as the postal strike. One or two questions about what a wicked man I am, fair enough, but the whole programme-it was absurd. Let's do it again but do it properly this time." To Griffin and many other viewers, the program lacked focus on the issues, and instead focused on the racist nature of the British National Party. To others, the program did its job; it exposed the exclusionary views of the BNP. However, according to the BNP, they had the single largest influx in interested new members the next day, 3,000, a 30 percent increase from its previous membership. The BNP sees its role as the "[keeper] of a future for the indigenous peoples of these islands [the British Isles] in the North Atlantic which have been our homeland for millennia." The BNP believes that immigrants have taken over the country and have transformed the pure British culture, into something the original inhabitants of the British Isles would not recognize. The BNP believes that the indigenous Britons are no longer represented in politics. In their eyes, the prevailing British political parties, mainly the Tories and the Labour Party, have neglected the indigenous Britons and even exacerbated the immigration problem. According to the BNP, immigration in Britain has gotten out of control. In their immigration policy, the BNP suggests deportation, a closed-door immigration policy, and the giving Britons of non-British descent an incentive in the form of grant money, to return to their countries of origin as possible solutions to what they see as the immigration problem. The BNP maintains that if countries like Saudi Arabia would not allow mass immigration of Christians, why should Britain have to allow mass immigration especially of non-Europeans? The controversy over the BNP's existence has been mainly because of its whites-only membership policy. But due to a Central London County Court Decision stating that the BNP violated the Race Relations Act by stipulating a race credential in their membership policy, the BNP is now considering changing their constitutional amendment of race as a requirement.