Human rights groups and free speech campaigners reacted differently to a call to cut or censor far-right British National Party (BNP) election broadcasts scheduled for nationwide broadcast from 21 April, one group calling for straight censorship “in the interests of the viewer”, another urging close review of the broadcast, while Index on Censorship expressed outright opposition to any ban.
The party, whose leader Nick Griffin is currently on trial charged with inciting racial hatred, says it is fielding about 120 candidates for the 5 May poll, just above the legal threshold required for the right to broadcast election material.
Lester Holloway of equal rights campaigners the 1990 Trust said broadcasters should censor their promotional films. “They have a responsibility not just to consider whether something is strictly legal or not, they have a responsibility to the viewer,” Holloway said before the broadcast.
“The BNP simply cannot be trusted to not put out material which runs the risk of inciting racial hatred and possibly causing public disorder.”
Editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship, Ursula Owen, said she was disturbed by the calls. “We have laws against race hatred but the law also requires that a party election manifesto is broadcast if the party meets the qualifying requirement — which the BNP does.
“We have to rely on the good sense of the British viewer to see through the BNP’s racist agenda, to answer with alternative agendas. Otherwise, if we can silence them, who knows who, one day, will silence us?”
A spokesman for human rights group Liberty expressed caution in calling for censorship, but voiced the organisation’s concern about any broadcast that could “inflame” racial tensions in Britain. Parties that qualify for election airtime are still bound by laws prohibiting libel and race hate laws.
However Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti did criticise the BNP’s past “abuse” of national images from Britain’s World War II struggle against Nazi Germany. The BNP’s founders and core membership are rooted in neo-fascist and neo-Nazi activities.
“In his last broadcast (in 2004), Mr Griffin had the audacity to stand in front of a Spitfire and rail against the decent values that the pilots fought and died for. We should all be outraged at any repetition of this,” Chakrabarti said before the new broadcasts were aired.
But Owen added: “The question that must always be asked about censorship is – who decides? We have to allow even those with appalling views to participate in our democratic debate.”
The BBC was the first UK network to screen the new BNP election broadcast on 21 April, despite calls for a ban from anti-racism groups and a public protest outside BBC HQ. Other networks followed suit and rebroadcast the BNP film later.
Set to a folk music lament, the new campaign film showed an ex-soldier wandering homeless in London while statistics for asylum seekers allowed into Britain by Labour and Conservative governments flashed up on the screen.
