Nick Griffin is right

It has been nearly six months since I blogged about the prospect of the BNP winning the right to represent Britain in the European parliament and a week since 'Nicky' Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time. I found the excitement that preceded his appearance bewildering: why was everyone so sure what the consequences would be? It seemed strange to me that the Free Speechers saw Question Time as the sort of forum wherein can take place clear-eyed debate and the demolishing of weak theories. And neither was I convinced that Question Time would be the BNP's springboard to power. With the benefit of my enlightened and subtle mind I concluded that we could predict no more than that the shit would be stirred; how it would settle was unforeseeable. I now realise that things are no clearer in the post-Question Time landscape; the shit, it seems, is in constant motion.

Too much time has since passed for it to be worthwhile talking about what happened during the show; whether I think Jack Straw waffled for long enough to defeat fascism or who wore the most pluralistic tie. But one of things that Nick Griffin said, it got me thinking it did. He said, "Everybody's always going on about the Aborigines but no one but no one gives a fuck about the English." He's right! I thought - I don't give a fuck about the English or the British, for that matter. The panel's response to this was that 'the English' is a silly concept because people who live in England have been marrying foreigners for hundreds of years; the English are not genetically distinct from the rest of the world. But that's not why I don't give a fuck, I thought, I wouldn't give a fuck even if they were genetically distinct and, what's more, conceding that it might be important to preserve genetic types is to buy into a racist myth. And this got me thinking about why I don't give a fuck about all kinds of other things: why don't I give a fuck about preferential treatment for women; why don't I give a fuck about why black people seem to be allowed to say nigga with impunity and white people aren't and why I don't give a fuck about mocking Christianity when I would be wary of mocking Islam. And then finally: might I not give a fuck about all these things for the same reason?

So I'm going to have good old-fashioned think about these things to see if they are connected. Then I'll get back to you. Boy, you're lucky.