It's not been picked up in the news but yesterday in the European Parliament we had the rather distasteful sight of UKIP and the BNP representatives united together to attack the idea of tackling climate change.
Nick Griffin (BNP) described the whole thing as 'an elite scam' and then Godfrey Bloom (UKIP) backed him up saying 'the whole thing is a sham... a bogus hypothesis'. You can watch the edited highlights here.
As Will Straw says;
"The BNP claim on their website to be, “this nation’s only true Green party which has policies that will actually save the environment.”And while consistency was never their strong point (see, for example, this picture of Griffin standing in front a No. 303 Polish Squadron spitfire), their own environment policy appears to contradict Griffin’s views on renewables: "A BNP government will… develop renewable energy sources such as off-shore wind farms, wave, tidal and solar energy.”Congratulations to Tory MEP Sajjad Karim for responding with;
"These two parties crave acceptance into the political mainstream, but their cloud cuckoo land views are repeatedly being exposed. I would like to think that after such ridiculous views have been aired in such a public environment that the public will see through their carefully crafted public image and consign them to the looney fringes where they belong."I hope that's not my bit of the looney fringe, I've only just made it comfortable.
(h/t Ellee and Will Straw)
Annie Leonard and co. (
Adrienne Mayor (
Ed Howker and Shiv Malik
Floella Benjamin (
Mark Watson (
Tim Jackson (
David Wilson (
Clive Lord (
Nickie Roberts
3 comments:
you can kind of see where the BNP get their support from.
There's a postal strike tomorrow and Fri and the makings of the sort of dispute not seen since 1984-85 and virtually none of the back-slapping middle class 'political' blogs even mention it.
I'm not sure why you think the two things are connected - the BNP get support because some bloggers haven't blogged about the postal strike? Do you think the posties will be voting BNP? I suppose some will...
Quite a few of the left blogs I read have mentioned the postal dispute (not that it's going to be on the scale of 84-85, that's obviously stupid, although if it escalates it might be on the scale of the FBU's dispute a few years ago), maybe they aren't backslapping and middle class though - who knows.
What I do know is that bloggers are not newspapers and aren't obliged to cover every topic under the sun - even very important ones. If you lack places to find information on the dispute why not subscribe to my news rss where I've been highlighting a number of interesting and useful pieces on the coming strike.
I'm implying that no-one seems to be looking out for the working class.
Hence the lack of real airing of the issues behind the strike and what it all means as part of the bigger picture. And sorry, but I do find a large number of political blogs obsessed with personalities and issues that are only of interest to their little clique of readers rather than to a large subset of the working population. Though that's their prerogative of course.
Everyone is up in arms at the BNP being on television tonight but no-one seems to be asking why their vote is rising. And as the son of a World War Two veteran who spent time in Stalag Luft III and saw the Nazis doing terrible things first-hand, I'm a bit miffed.
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