Even the Daily Mail’s photoshopped version of the audience hand-out for Question Time says “write your question on the card”. Y’know, so you’ll be prepared to ask it. Preparing for what you’re going to say in a national televised public debate isn’t everyone ganging up on Nick Griffin – it’s Public Speaking 101. A class that Griffin apparently didn’t attend.

And since you bring up sidestepping, I enjoy the way that you take Sarah’s comment about Griffin being racist and simply turn around, levelling the same accusation at ‘ethnic minorities’ rather than tackle it at all. It’s really not ‘us vs. them’ because there is no ‘us’ and there is no ‘them’.

It also seems implicit in your statement that it’s okay for Nick Griffin to be racist to everyone who isn’t white, because they’re racist back. Unfortunately for this argument, Nick Griffin isn’t five years old, and this isn’t the playground.

Nice line – can I use it in a poem or a piece of FICTION?! – anyway it is easy to be a “competent speaker” when you have rehearsed every line as most of the panel and audience had obviously done – a point you neatly sidestepped.

As for “obviously racist” – racism works both ways and there is plenty of racism (both overt and covert) towards white people by ethnic minorities.

Question Time is a panel of politicians debating current issues most present in the public consciousness. Inarguably two of the biggest news stories over the past couple of weeks have been Jan Moir’s crash course in distance-forensics and Nick Griffin’s appearance on QT. Both of these were discussed at length.

This, Nick, is pretty much the definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy: you became the news of the day, appearing on a topical discussion programme about the news of the day. You clearly revelled in the attention it garnered your party leading up to the event, and then, because you had a particularly bad outing, cried foul.

Did you honestly expect it go like this?

Dimbleby: Nick Griffin, where do you stand on civil partnerships?
Griffin: I think homosexuals are creepy.
Dimbleby: Very good. Next question?

Also, fifteen million hits is, well, bollocks. Alexa rankings show them pushing on an increase these past few days, but nothing like the 15m they claim. That rate, pushed them up to 10,000, that’s more than 25,000 unique hits, but if they were heading for 15m unique hits then that would have made them as popular as the BBC. On average, visitors are down, page bounce is well up, time on site is down and search engine referrals are down.

As you rightly pointed out, the number of hits doesn’t gauge how popular a site is in good terms – only how much it’s getting mentioned.

I got the episode, by the way. The format was annoying and Griffin-centric, although that may have been down to the fact that everyone wanted to ask him something. Even those who could be construed to be BNP supporters were asking him BNP related questions. Everyone contributed to it, so it wasn’t a gang-bang in that sense because even the BNP would see that it’s dumb to get their man in that position and then ask Chris Huhne about what the Libs would do with prisons.

Griffin failed because his answers were twattish. I was glad to see that he did get into a little rant. I get the feeling that once the dam broke and he went on about leftist conspiracies and the rest, he knew he was fucked and was kicking himself for being goaded on it – hence the hand-wringing, shaking.

Straw was a failure on his own part. He looked just as nervous and out of place as Griffin did, and to be honest, he was shown up on immigration – which should have been the most researched point on his notes – with his lack of valid response.

i agree with the point above about over liberalisation though: the truth is that to simply heckle does not refute his claims (and however vile these need refutation)

I’m sure all the students in the audience who’d read the Indy’s ’10 Reasons The BNP Are Arseholes’ that morning felt great about calling Griffin a scumbag and applauding each other, but I can’t see that they’ll have swayed away anyone who was thinking about voting for him. Meanwhile, Griffin did manage to crowbar in a few points that seemed superficially plausible (indigenous people, etc), and nobody bothered to take issue with his logical failings because they’d all come with their notes ready-prepared. :(