Why on earth are Labour MPs resurrecting Nick Griffin from the political dead?

Within a decade of his heyday in 2009 the former BNP leader Nick Griffin has disappeared into political obscurity after UKIP and then the Tories cannibalised the BNP propaganda tactics and their supporter base, but he's still hanging around on Twitter, spreading his bile.

One of his recent Tweets involved sharing a Daily Mail smear-job on Jeremy Corbyn that misrepresents Corbyn's criticism of 'a specific group of fanatical Zionists who turned up to a conference to berate and abuse the Palestinian speaker' with criticism of 'all Jews'.

Anyone with a few brain cells to rub together can see that the latest attempted smear actually reveals anti-Semitism on the part of the accusers, because to equate 'fanatical Zionist activists' with 'all Jews' involves the misrepresentation of all Jewish people as being the kind of blindly biased people who turn up to pro-Palestine events to abuse the speakers.

In his comment on the Daily Mail hatchet-job he shared, Nick Griffin attempted to turn this Daily Mail smear into a means of promoting extreme-right politics, by speculating that the mainstream media attacks on Corbyn are "red-pilling" Labour supporters.

For those who are not in the know, the concept of "red-pilling normies" is an extreme-right meme about the supremacy of extreme-right ideas that derives from the Matrix film where Morpheus offers Neo the choice between a blue pill and a red pill, with the blue pill returning him to normality and the red pill offering him the chance to be shown "how deep the rabbit hole goes".

The fact that the extreme-right have nicked this red-pill meme out of a film directed by two transgender Bernie Sanders-supporting social liberals tells you all you need to know about their cynical opportunism!

Two of the people who actively helped Griffin to spread his extreme-right interpretation of this Daily Mail smear-job were the Labour MPs Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle (a man so right-wing he's actually giving a speech at the 'Tory Glastonbury' festival!).

Both of these right-wing Labour MPs helped to increase Griffin's profile by retweeting him (prompting a significant boost in Griffin's Twitter following), and for what? To attack their own party!

Just consider the fact that during the Labour Party purge in 2016 thousands of ordinary left-leaning Labour members were instantly expelled for 'crimes' like once retweeting a Green party politician, admitting that they voted for another political party long before they joined Labour, and even liking the Foo Fighters too much!

But now we have two right-wing Labour MPs actually retweeting an extreme-right fanatic with no other purpose than damaging their own party, and they're getting away with it!

This contrast in the treatment of ordinary Labour members and right-wing Labour MPs who consider themselves so untouchable they can retweet fascists and speak at rival political party events with impunity is absolutely damning.

There's clearly one set of extremely harsh rules for ordinary Labour members that result in instant expulsion for the most trivial of matters, and another completely different set of rules for the party elitists that allow them to scream abuse at fellow Labour members, promote rival parties, and even retweet fascists without fear of sanction!

Returning to Griffin's Tweet,  a quick scroll through his Twitter timeline reveals the fact that he absolutely detests Labour and their democratic socialist agenda (see Tweets). So it's obvious that Griffin's motivation for praising Jeremy Corbyn is to create divisions within the Labour movement as a way of supporting the Tory party that is currently experiencing an overt take-over by the extreme-right.

Griffin might be a horrible extreme-right, anti-Semitic, white supremacist bastard, but he's clearly no idiot. He can see as easily as everyone else that when he attacks Labour he gets ignored completely, but when he pretends to support Jeremy Corbyn he gets thousands of column inches of publicity in the mainstream press, and even retweeted by Labour MPs!

Why wouldn't he praise Corbyn if he knows that he's going to get scores of newspaper articles mentioning him, and thousands more Twitter followers thanks to the free publicity that people like Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle are willing to throw at him.

But instead of ignoring the horrible fascist and his cynical little games, these two Labour MPs have actively helped to give Griffin the enormous boost of publicity that he craves, simply in order to undermine the leadership of their own damned party!

How anyone believe's that resurrecting fascists is an acceptable thing for Labour MPs to be doing is absolutely beyond me.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Look which way the praise is going

Nick Griffin is the forgotten man of extreme-right politics. Not only was he deposed as the leader of the BNP, that whole party has now completely collapsed into oblivion after UKIP nicked all their support. But despite the UK political landscape being better off without him, mainstream media hacks have suddenly propelled him back in the limelight after he said he supports Jeremy Corbyn's opposition to airstrikes in Syria.

Interestingly just the day before Griffin's comments, it was revealed that actual members of the Tory party youth organisation Activate had been praising the likes of Britain first and the former EDL leader Tommy Robinson, and plotting to use their divisive hate-mongering tactics to win votes for the Tory party.

Any idiot can see that in the case of Activate the praise was coming from inside the Tory party, and being given to disgusting neo-fascist hatemongers who have inspired at least two deadly extreme-right terrorist attacks, and that Nick Griffin's praise was coming from outside the Labour Party.

But somehow one of these things was splashed all over the mainstream news, and the other was only covered on a couple of independent left-wing blogs.

Aside from the fact that it's grotesque for mainstream media hacks to resurrect Nick Griffin from the politically dead solely for the purpose of smearing Labour, there's a massive hypocrisy at play here.

The mainstream media are absolutely fine with actual Tory members praising extreme-right hatemongers, and plotting to use their disgusting tactics in their own Tory propaganda operation. In fact they're so absolutely fine with it that not a single mainstream news organisation even covered this remarkable story.

On the other hand this unwanted praise from the forgotten man of extreme-right politics was exactly the kind of stuff anti-Labour hacks in the mainstream press needed to push their transparent anti-Corbyn propaganda.

If we look at mainstream political parties attracting support from the extreme-right, then who could forget the Britain First leader threatening to attack and intimidate anyone who dares criticise the Tory Brextremist in chief Jacob Rees Mogg?

The mainstream media absolutely refused to cover this story because it didn't fit with their anti-Corbyn agenda, and no pressure was put on Rees-Mogg to condemn Britain First and refuse their offer to serve as his personal storm troopers.

Then there's the fact that the Tories nicked the BNP's propaganda tactics wholesale for their own use in the 2016 London Mayoral election.

Then there's the fact that the Tories had to bribe the sectarian bigots in the DUP with £1 billion in taxpayers' money to cling onto political power after Theresa May threw their parliamentary majority away in her vanity election.

Then there's the fact that the Tory party is absolutely dependent on retaining the support of the extreme-right ultranationalist Blue-kip demographic in order to cling to power. 

Any idiot can see that the Tories have shifted off into the bonkers extreme-right territory, and that any effort by them to move slightly back towards the centre-right territory would drive away the blue-kip demographic and collapse their vote.

Not only do the Tories actively praise the extreme-right and blatantly pinch their propaganda tactics, they know perfectly well that without the extreme-right ultranationalist demographic they nicked from UKIP (who previously pinched it from the BNP) then they're going to get trounced at the next general Election.

Whether the praise is flowing from the Tory party to the extreme-right, or from the extreme-right to the Tory party, the mainstream media ignore it because this growing co-dependency between the Tories and the extreme-right doesn't suit their anti-Corbyn agenda.

Nobody in Labour has ever praised the extreme right or considered using their vile, divisive hate-mongering tactics to promote Labour, but the one time a (near forgotten) fascist agrees with one of Labour's policies, suddenly the press are absolutely up in arms about it.

The reason is absolutely obvious. They desperately want to drive progressive people away from Labour by associating them with right-wing extremism, while they simultaneously give the Tories a total free ride on their ever growing dependency on the extreme-right.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Normalising extreme-right hate-mongers is a disgusting new low point for the BBC

One the day that the extreme-right fanatic Daren Osborne was convicted over the Finsbury Park terrorist attack, the BBC Newsnight team took the outrageous decision to invite one of the extreme-right hate preachers who radicalised and inspired him for an interview about the attack.

The prosecution presented Osborne's web browsing history as evidence in the Finsbury Park trial, and that evidence showed his fixation with the extreme-right hate group Britain First, and with the former EDL leader Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Christopher Yaxley Lennon). It also turned out that Osborne had copied out 'Tommy Robinson' tweets and left them on the dashboard of the van he used in the terrorist attack.

The BBC Newsnight team then decided to invite Tommy Robinson onto the show to make excuses, distance himself from the extreme-right fanatic he helped to radicalise, and spread even more of his extreme-right propaganda.

The interviewer Kirsty Wark was so weak that she even allowed Robinson to go completely unchallenged when he grossly misrepresented the peaceful Al Quds Palastinian Solidarity march as "a terrorist march", claim some kind of BBC conspiracy to cover up this so-called "terrorist march", and use this conspiracy as justification for Osborne's terrorist atrocity.

Wark and the Newsnight team were so shockingly unprepared for the interview that they allowed Robinson to deny being a hate preacher without countering his claim with anything from the mountain of evidence that he is (with this horrific hate-inciting video for example).

Anyone who thinks that this move was editorially justifiable should have a think about how Tommy Robinson and his ilk would have reacted had Newsnight invited an Islamist hate preacher onto the show on the the very same day one of the people they had radicalised was convicted for carrying out a deadly terrorist attack.

Just imagine the wave of outrage if the BBC had used the conviction of an Islamist terrorist as an opportunity to give a fanatical Islamist hate preacher a platform to spread even more Islamist propaganda, and even actually make excuses for the attack.

Amazingly the BBC's decision to hand Tommy Robinson a massive platform to make excuses and spread even more of his vile extreme-right views and conspiracies has elicited hardly any outrage at all.

It's just somehow taken for granted that the BBC would use the conviction of an extreme-right terrorist to actually help to promote one of the extreme-right hate preachers who radicalised him!

Newspaper columnists are not writing outraged pieces about it because to them it's perfectly normal that the BBC would actively promote a man who inspired an extreme-right terrorist attack.

If we think back a few years to that time the BBC invited the BNP leader Nick Griffin onto Question Time and the massive controversy that caused, it's clear that something has changed dramatically over the last decade.

Only a few years ago it was a highly controversial move to invite the leader of a far-right political party onto the BBC, even though Griffin was the leader of a political party that had bagged almost a million votes at the 2009 European Parliament elections, and he had no proven connections with deadly terrorist attacks at all.

But now things have changed so much that it's considered completely fine and uncontroversial to invite an extreme-right hate preacher onto the BBC on the very day one of his followers was convicted for carrying out a deadly terrorist attack!

If we look at the appalling decision to invite Tommy Robinson onto the BBC to spread extreme-right propaganda in the context of what was considered highly controversial less than a decade ago, it's beyond doubt that extreme-right politics has been embraced by the mainstream media to such an extent that people have become thoroughly normalised to it.

The only conclusion to draw from this horrific editorial decision is that the BBC is now actively working to promote and normalise extreme-right fanaticism.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR