A long shot

I see that in the light of the historic decision by a special elections court to strip erstwhile Labour MP Phil Woolas of his seat in Oldham East and Saddleworth on the grounds that he knowingly lied about an opponent and to re-run the contest Nick Griffin, Leader of the British National Party, has announced his intention to bring Barking Labour MP Margaret Hodge down under the same legislation, namely Section 106 of the Representation of the People Act.

Apparently at a meeting of black Christians in the run-up to the general election in May Hodge told her audience that the BNP would drop immigrants from aeroplanes if ever it was elected to power.

He seems to have overlooked a few minor considerations:

1. In order to challenge the outcome of an election a petition has to be submitted within 21 days of the result having been declared. As I write 211 days have passed since the general election and thus far no petition has been forthcoming.

2. The legislation requires deliberate falsehoods to have been levelled at a specific individual. Hodge's comments were directed at the BNP in general.

3. Woolas held onto his parliamentary seat by 103 votes. It is not unreasonable to suggest that in the absence of his smear campaign against his Liberal Democrat opponent the outcome could quite possibly have been different. Hodge on the other hand beat Griffin by 18,000 votes. He didn't even come second. The chances of there having been more than 18,000 black Christians at said private meeting who might have voted BNP had it not been for Hodge's remarks are remote to say the least.

4. Griffin is on record as having said that boats carrying immigrants into Europe should be sunk in the water. Now a boat is not an aeroplane, granted, but I suspect the sentiment is similar enough to present something of an obstacle to Griffin should he attempt to plead that Hodge's comments were an unfair reflection of his views.

I dare say this rather tacky publicity stunt/fund-raising gimmick will be treated with the contempt it deserves.

More readily fall victims to the Big Lie than to the Small Lie - unless you get caught

We all know that what Churchill might have described as "terminological inexactitudes" are prevalent in our politics. In my borough one party publicly proclaims its acceptance of untruthful campaigning as a fact of political life without any suggestion that it rues the fact.

However, whilst not accepting the inevitability of deceit in political life I do reluctantly accept that there is in politics, as everywhere else, a question of degree. Put another way, there is a world of difference between the sometimes irritating ways of the mainstream politician and the persistent and quite deliberate efforts of the far-right to destabilise our multi-ethnic community by resort to shameless scaremongering and often quite outrageous lies.

This week we witnessed the suspension of Barking & Dagenham councillor and BNP Greater London Authority (GLA) member Richard Barnbrook after he admitted that claims he had made about three alleged murders having taken place is his borough were completely untrue. The disgraced councillor claimed that "dyslexia" had led his extraordinary claims to "come out wrong" (and also, presumably, inspired him to repeat the claims on his blog and to refuse to remove them when it was pointed out to him that there was no factual basis for them).

Although Mr. Barnbrook is of a similar age to myself I never knew him in my far-right days. He clearly arrived on the scene after my time. I can offer no personal insight into the man nor into what makes him tick. However as I write I have heard no word of any impending censure or disciplinary action to be taken against him by his superiors in the BNP, many of whom I did know personally.

What I can say is that it has been a typical tactic of the far-right down through the years to try to whip up the fear and mistrust that it simultaneously claims to be protecting us from. Despite claiming no longer to be a racist party, the BNP is content to allow one of its very most senior members to fabricate three serious crimes in the borough he has been elected to represent and then to try to associate those non-existent crimes in the public mind with the presence of immigrants in our community.

This is not a normal political party we are dealing with here, and institutions such as the BBC should not be treating it as such by attempting to ease it into the mainstream through such devices as its Question Time programme. Democratic politicians from across the board should be doing everything they can to highlight the moral chasm that exists between the likes of the BNP and themselves. And the best way to achieve that, apart from denying fascists the oxygen of publicity, is not to act like them ourselves. To any degree.