This entry was posted on
Friday, March 12th, 2010 at
9:47 am and is filed
under Tories! Tories! Tories!.

Though Cowards Flinch – We’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow their house down: It has come to our attention that the magazine ‘Total Politics’ is planning to publish an interview with Nick Griffin, the racist leader of the British National Party. Before we forget, therefore, we thought we should announce that, in the event of the publication of this interview, TCF will withdraw from the annual voting process to rank the popularity of UK blogs, run by Total Politics magazine, which once we welcomed and which made itself relevant to the internet through the annual UK blogging guide (pictured)

Though Cowards Flinch – Boycott; the saga continues: But what really matters is not whether Griffin flounders on Dale’s questions or not. It’s about the long-run effect of having Griffin feature in a mainstream publication. Long after the specific questions that Dale asks are forgotten, people will remember that Griffin was interviewed by an (allegedly) respectable, mainstream publication. It will help to normalise Griffin and his party. It will encourage him to be seen as a legitimate politician with legitimate views to be considered a reasonable political option by reasonable people.

Iain Dale has a clearly stated (and quite notorious) policy of not linking to blogs/bloggers that are critical of him. He has stated quite clearly in the past that he refuses to do so because he does not wish to legitimise them.

But he will give a platform to Nick Griffin, a known racist and fascist, and now appears to be claiming that this doesn’t legitimise him or his party.

(Nick Griffin may hate people who are coloured/foreign/different, but at least he hasn’t criticised Iain; that would be beyond the pale!)

All we’re left with is the depressing situation of Iain Dale doing this for political reasons, or (far more likely in my honestly-held opinion) to sell more copies of Total Politics, because shoving it down the throats of elected representatives as junk mail and counting this as ‘circulation’ isn’t making enough money or shifting enough units to please advertisers.

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UPDATE – I should point out that I already boycott the Total Politics poll of weblogs, because it is flawed from the ground up (the two main points being it is rigged in favour of Iain Dale and his mates to begin with, and the votes are counted by a known cheat).