BNP man has tea with her Maj

[davey]

oh dear werent the UAF invited?!happy!

[supsim96]

bet he went down a storm with old phil the greek!

[jj]

Well, the RF is supposed to be above politics : -)

[max_tranmere]

I've posted things about the BNP before as some people will be aware. I've never praised them, I've no time for them, I've only commented on them. What interests me is how everyone seems to think their mandate should be ignored - which is the equivilant to saying that boxes and boxes of votes, by people who voted for the BNP, should just have been pulped. Did you know that it is illegal, and a potentially jailable offence, to tamper with ONE voting form? Yet the 130,000 votes that the BNP guy on the London Assembly got last year, and the near one million that the BNP got at the recent Euro elections, people think should just be ignored and the BNP people who won seats as a result should be isolated and not allowed to have the representation, influence, and to do the things, that any other politican can do. If people have a mandate then that should be respected. If I was from Northern Ireland for example, and my close relative had been killed by the IRA, I would still respect and appreciate the legitimacy of a Sinn Fein MP in my constituency, who would have power over me, if that person had been elected and had a mandate from the people - even though their organisation had killed my relative. Like I say, if someone has been elected, has a mandate, then that has to be recognised - regardless of anything else. If the BNP are out of line with things they do or say, then there are other laws in place to deal with them on those things.

[Deano!]

Just curious - before the BNP, who was the closest to them politically in the UK?

[max_tranmere]

Deano, they claim to not have the views they had years ago but no one believes them, so there was no equivilant - to what they claim to be now - prevously, other than perhaps the right-wing of the Conservative Party. The fore runners to what everyone believes the BNP to be now, namely racist Nazi-like and so on, was the National Front, who became quite big in the 1970's and effectively hijacked the Union Jack flag. You couldn't wave a Union Jack for decades without people thinking you were a right-wing racist (how bizarre is that? How did we ever get to the extent of things being like that?). The flag was largely reclaimed by the centralists in the 1990's thanks mainly to Tony Blair's New Labour and the Britpop music scene.