If you have twenty-five minutes to spare over the next couple of days, please take a look at this BBC i-player replay of yesterday morning’s The Big Questions.  I don’t watch much TV, and the Sunday religious hour is not required viewing.  But when I read Simon Darby’s blog this morning I had to take a look at the cause of his ire.

The Big Questions is a pretty poor quality studio-audience product.  It sits in the BBC’s Ethics and Religion genre, meaning “difficult issues” are supposed to be debated.  The debating point this time was: does the BNP have the right to be heard?  Apparently, by no means a no-brainer for the democratic and freedom-loving people of Birmingham.

We are all very used to the media nose-holding that goes on when the BNP is debated.  But the behaviour on display here, particularly from the three panellists and the host Nicky Campbell, goes far beyond that.  In fact, beyond anything I have seen before and into the realms of Salem.  Here is what Simon Darby had to say about it:-

Before I review today’s The Big Questions, which you can see by clicking on the image below, I want to tell you something that you will not know. Originally this debate had been set up behind my back with two local BNP councillors. Knowing that this was just going to be an ambush orchestrated by the wise-cracking wannabe left-wing comedian and TV presenter Nicky Campbell, I immediately pulled the plug on it.

Not that our two guys they had lined up would have been a push over, it simply wasn’t fair to put them through what was tantamount to a criminal trial. Talking to the two girls from the show, who I will not name, even at a late stage they were begging me to go ahead with the original plan trying to convince me that the programme would need local politicians in order to work. However, I was adamant that if it was going ahead at all it would not be loaded against us and as a consequence Andrew [Brons] and Rev West found themselves in the hot seats.

Fittingly, on a day when the Sunday papers were quite literally dripping with hate, lies and hysteria towards the BNP, this programme, at least initially, typified the mood. I found myself at first angry, frustrated and towards the end enormously proud of our representatives. Throughout their childish, emotive and almost ritual baiting they kept their dignity and made their points concisely and articulately.

Hate, lies and, now, hysteria sums it up.  It all has the ring of a morbid psychological condition about it.  It is plain that for all who speak the BNP has been built up as some spectre of immanent evil.  Even with war psychosis at its height I doubt if my parents’ generation experienced such feelings about genuine National Socialists.  But these folks have lost all touch with reality.  One wonders in the case of the whites whether it is a consequence of sublimated anger, as David Hamilton maintains.  Are they merely striking out to ward off their own exposure?

The panellists, by the way, are Benjamin Zephaniah, a Rastafarian dub poet and, apparently, a great man, Louise Bagshawe, an author and Conservative Party candidate at the next election, and Jonathan Bartley, who runs the Ekklesia think tank and who is a pacifist and advocate for “the full participation of gay and lesbian people in the church as an outworking of the Christian gospel”.