Thursday 22 October 2009

A Mirthful Spectacle?

I'm afraid, as usual, I'll be tuning tonight into Question Time. I have great sympathy for the view that we should exclude people such as Griffin from such mainstream shows. The arguments for such a belief are cogent and coherent. Yet, I tend to take the opposite view that, such a party has gained representation, it does have a level of support, and so the best way to marginalise such parties are to engage them with argument because, as will become apparent tonight, I'm sure, their beliefs are based on a flimsy, cobbled together philosophy that have always been baseless and empty and useless and this current machination of such ideas are as hollow as those who held them before Griffin.

The one thing that such a party thrives upon is to be taken seriously, though, because they need it, and so they will take tonight as a victory, as a challenge to the mainstream, and as a sign of another small step toward their dystopia (for it is a dystopia to them also, because they believe in conflict and violence). Therefore, I do hope that their big night becomes a mirthful spectacle. I hope Dimbleby takes his designer glasses into his hand, smiling benignly, and looks around at the other guests, who are also smiling benignly, mockingly almost. You don't defeat such people by taking them seriously, you defeat them by laughing at their cobbled-together ideas, their fast-forward cassette-tape rhetoric.

These guys are the school-bullys of the political world; there aren't many of them, most of us will be fortunate never having to meet them, but they linger around on the edges, looking for weakness and playing the occasional game for their own self-satisfaction. Tonight is just such a game, and we should treat them in the manner befitting.

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