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The arguments FOR giving fascists freedom of speech.

Don't gag, challenge
By Jeevan Vasagar
Monday April 15, 2002

Last summer, a few days after white and Asian rioters had gone on the rampage in Burnley, I sat in a dingy working men's club on a predominantly white council estate and talked to British National Party supporters.

The previous weekend had seen skirmishes between men armed with bricks and hammers, the petrol-bombing of a pub, and an alleged assault by police on the local representative of the commission for racial equality.

The club drinkers, after an initial double-take when I walked in, explained that they had voted for a racist party because the lion's share of the council's money went to Asians.

Their claim was demonstrably untrue. But it had helped ignite three days of horrendous violence and gained the BNP 4,151 local votes at the general election.
The conclusion seemed straightforward; give the BNP a chance to take part in the democratic process and it will abuse it. As fascist parties have always done, it will whip up suspicion and envy, no matter how misplaced, and use it for electoral gain.

As is the BNP's current fashion, the letter from its press officer, Phill Edwards, cloaked racism in dinner party language, calling for a "debate" on immigration, and for the BNP to have a place in that debate.

Some readers were, understandably, furious. The paper was accused of happily spicing up the letters page with neo-Nazi propaganda, while a desperate battle is being fought to keep local political power out of the BNP's hands.

But the lesson of Burnley is not that the BNP should be gagged, it is that it should be challenged.

The men in the working men's club learned with surprise that government money had been evenly divided between white and Asian areas of the town - and that investment was on its way for their own neighbourhood. No one, it seemed, had told them that.

If we refuse a voice to the BNP, and others such as Islamist fundamentalists who hold views that liberals find repugnant, we will not silence them in places such as Oldham and Burnley.

The BNP sits at an extreme and unpleasant end of a wide debate on race in Britain. Its views are based on bad science and bad history - and those can be defeated in argument.

Admittedly, opposing fascism is not just a question of reasoned debate. The far right also has a grubby hand in violence and intimidation. But, elsewhere in Britain, politicians who endorse the bullet as well as the ballot box have been welcomed into the democratic process.

It could be argued that allowing the BNP space on the letters page begins the process of legitimising it, and makes it harder to argue against giving them party political broadcasts, even columns in newspapers. But having a letter published is not the same kind of endorsement as having a column put into print. A letters page must give a voice to a whole variety of opinions; even if that indulgence leads to the occasional dose of cruelty or stupidity. It is for the reader to judge the letter-writer.

There is an embarrassing possibility that this article will end up being cited on the BNP's website as an endorsement by the Guardian, a paper it would undoubtedly have little hesitation in closing down if it ever achieved power. Defending the BNP to the death is a distasteful job, but Voltaire was right; free speech does not just belong to our friends. 

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