Why Labour's Question Time stance could simply fuel the growth of the BNP

Harriet Harman conceded that the BNP's success was down to Labour's failings and pledged to convince people they didn't have to look to the far-right for a party to protest with.

So far, so good. The mood was very much of challenging the BNP's propoganda and making sure people knew all the facts. Nick Griffin's success - although he could still go the same way as so many of the one-term BNP councillors voted in around the country and fail to live to the promises he makes and get booted out next time - was the wake-up call which national politics needed to realise that hoping the BNP would just go away wasn't enough.

Yes, their politics are rooted in racism. Yes, it's not hard to scratch the surface and see, as one Times commentator called it, the "fading Nazi tattoos". But despite that, people still voted for them. Why? Because the main political parties weren't telling them what they wanted to hear. Hell, they weren't even explaining to them why they weren't saying what they wanted to hear.

So why then is Labour turning up its nose at the thought of appearing on Question Time alongside the BNP? As David Miliband said, every vote is treated equally, and therefore if a fringe party gets elected it, by right, is entitled to an occasional appearance on programmes which reflect the democratic process. Therefore, with two MEPs sitting in Parliament promoting the idea of European navys patrolling the Med and blitzing ships with immigrants on them, it figures that the BNP should every now and again should get to have their say on Question Time.

The BBC has been criticised in many quarters for its decision to allow Griffin on, but to say no to the BNP on the programme just because the political elite don't agree with what they are saying (and rightly don't agree, I might add), makes a mockery of what it stands for. Ultimately, Question Time invites Piers Morgan and Jermaine Greer on the show, and they haven't been elected.

And it certainly shouldn't back down in the face of planned boycotts by the likes of Peter Hain, who told WalesOnline this week that he was encouraging other senior politicians to boycott it.

Labour is the only one of the three main parties to suggest it wouldn't appear alongside Griffin if he was invited on Question Time. In doing so, it's not challenging the BNP, it's simply trying to hide behind the "no platform" argument which we've already discovered is bust.

I've worked on several newspapers which operated a "no oxygen of publicity" argument for the BNP. They were given their democratic right - fair coverage in the run up to an election they were standing in, but that was it. Put simply, it doesn't work. In the same way you may not seek to water and feed weeds growing in the garden but they still spread, the BNP still spreads by using its own oxygen of publicity - publicity which Labout has been particularly bad at just trying to ignore. In the same way you have to be proactive about removing the weeds, so too you have to be proactive about showing people that the BNP simply aren't who they say they are.

Of course, this isn't news to members of the Blackburn Labour Party who, in 2002, found out to their cost in 2002 when they were beaten in a by-election in a district of Blackburn which was considered their heartland - by the BNP.

Labour's error then, indeed the error of all the main parties, was to assume that people wouldn't fall for the BNP waffle that the council was planning to allow a former care home to be turned into an asylum seeker refuge centre. An application had been made to the council for that to happen, but the council refused. The rhetoric from the Labour councillors at that planning meeting was fierce towards the BNP - but it never made it much beyond the town hall. The local paper covered the story - I was the reporter who wrote it - but the vast majority of councillors seemed to think that because they could see through the BNP, everyone else would too.

Walking up and down Mill Hill high street three days before the election, tasked with filling a double page spread on voters' thoughts ahead of the election, two things struck me. The first was the amount of interest in the election - although this could be put down to a lot of national TV interest in it, given many thought voters wanted to give Labour a bloody nose in Jack Straw's constituency back yard. The second was the number of people who openly told me they planned to vote BNP.

Many agreed it was a protest vote against Labour, who had lost a stalwart local councillor in the previous elections after voters got fed up of her spending more time in the town hall than with them. But many also repeated a lot of the BNP's lies as though they were fact. Did I know there was an asylum seeker centre opening? Did I know the council was paying tens of thousands of pounds to an Asian area to recreate a statue Saddam Hussein had built in Iraq, as tribute to the dictator? Did I know all the council's money got spent in Asian areas?

The fact that the BNP was still peddling that latter argument, several months after it deployed it to win three seats in nearby Burnley, spoke volumes for the pathetic way local politicians were behaving towards the BNP. The attitude was very much "they'll go away." Labour had even tried to foist the councillor the voters had chucked out months before back on to the people of Mill Hill. Quite simply, they didn't take the threat of the BNP seriously.

The BNP didn't go away and Robin Evans, quite a affable chap who later told me he hadn't understood what the BNP was about, and left to set up his own party but who is now back in the BNP fold, won by a handful of votes. His first appearance at a town hall meeting still had many councillors in a state of denial. As it turned out, Robin Evans was the master of his own undoing. His performances were pitiful in meetings, and he didn't get much done at a local level.

To their credit, the two other councillors in Mill Hill - a former council leader, Labour's Malcolm Dougherty, and a Lib Dem councillor, understood what had happened and worked very hard with the local community to show that if the 2002 by election was a protest result, the point had been made.

Labour in Blackburn - along with the Tories and the Lib Dems - have been much smarter at taking the BNP on head on. Not in a way which means the BNP punches above its weight, but in a way which ensures both sides of every story are put out.

A similar picture is evident in Burnley. BNP councillors come, they go, and the party hasn't made any real progress. Councillors and politicians know they have to challenge what the BNP says, largely because a lot of BNP propoganda is based on a grain of truth which has subsequently been turned into a misleading bread factory of nonsense.

So when Question Time ring up the Labour Party and ask who they intend to put up for the show where Nick Griffin will be on the panel, there's no point taking some ideological boycott stance - that will simply give Griffin free reign at government policy and perhaps generate the bizarre spectacle of the Lib Dems and Tories defending government policy - further elevating the Tories' "government in waiting" stance.

In Press Gazette, a former Question Time producer argues the BBC's move is wrong because appearing on Question Time will give Griffin as "soft platform" to pontificate unchallenged, as opposed to a Paxman/Today programme-style grilling from a journalistic heavyweight.

That's only true if the other politicians don't stand their ground and correct him. Which, if they've heeded the lessons of local elections, they won't. Not turning up, however, as Labour is suggesting, simply plays into the hands of the BNP and allows the weeds to spread further.