Rightist on BBC Panel Draws Protests and Viewers
LONDON — In a usual week, “Question Time” is a worthy but largely unexciting television production, a late-night panel discussion on the BBC that for 30 years has attracted a modest, pre-bedtime audience.
But on Thursday, it was transformed into the forum for Britain’s most widely anticipated political showdown in decades, drawing 8.2 million viewers, more than three times the program’s usual audience, on a par with the World Cup games played by England’s soccer team and more than the number of viewers for such weekly prime time hit shows as “Strictly Come Dancing.”
The occasion was the appearance on the program, the BBC’s flagship politics show, of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, whose goal to “take back Britain” includes incentives that encourage the mass repatriation of Britain’s nonwhite immigrants, coupled with a deep hostility to Islam, which Mr. Griffin has described as “a wicked and vicious faith.” He has also spoken of his “repugnance” for lesbians and gay men, and advocated the end of civil contracts for same-sex relationships.
His record includes having denied the Holocaust, suggesting that some of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were built after World War II for the purposes of Jewish propaganda, and conceding, under questioning by a biographer, that Hitler, whom Mr. Griffin invoked in the past as a model, may have made mistakes. “Yes,” he said, according to the biographer, Dominic Carman, “Adolf went a bit too far.”...
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But on Thursday, it was transformed into the forum for Britain’s most widely anticipated political showdown in decades, drawing 8.2 million viewers, more than three times the program’s usual audience, on a par with the World Cup games played by England’s soccer team and more than the number of viewers for such weekly prime time hit shows as “Strictly Come Dancing.”
The occasion was the appearance on the program, the BBC’s flagship politics show, of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, whose goal to “take back Britain” includes incentives that encourage the mass repatriation of Britain’s nonwhite immigrants, coupled with a deep hostility to Islam, which Mr. Griffin has described as “a wicked and vicious faith.” He has also spoken of his “repugnance” for lesbians and gay men, and advocated the end of civil contracts for same-sex relationships.
His record includes having denied the Holocaust, suggesting that some of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were built after World War II for the purposes of Jewish propaganda, and conceding, under questioning by a biographer, that Hitler, whom Mr. Griffin invoked in the past as a model, may have made mistakes. “Yes,” he said, according to the biographer, Dominic Carman, “Adolf went a bit too far.”...