Stop. GriffinTime.

Special Guest Post Exclusive by Honorary SSY Member Jo Harvie….

So it’s the morning after Griffin got on Question Time. The Guardian and Independent have slammed the oxygen feed to the fascists, the Star has called him a nuttaaaah, and every single telly programme and radio phone-in, from GMTV to This Morning has discussed the merit of allowing ‘Dick’ to sweat, giggle and stutter through an hour of flagship political discussion.

There’s been a mixed bag of views shared. A few surprising celebrities have argued passionately that there should never have been a place for the BNP on a programme like Question Time. Everyone on Twitter loved Bonnie Greer’s intellectual wasting of Griffin’s idiotic view of history. All the panellists agree he looked stupid.

But from the people phoning in, there’s an overwhelming feeling that it was a sin for him, the poor kid who hadn’t done his homework being hounded by a whole gaggle of strict teachers. One phoner-upper to The Wright Stuff actually likened Griffin to “Joan of Arc tied to the stake”. Well, I suppose he insists he can trace his ancestors back to William the Conqueror, making him, by his own standards, French.

NIck Griffin is no victim. From the second it was announced that the BBC had invited him onto Question Time he couldn’t lose. He looked inarticulate. He looked nervous. The bloke who made the South Pole joke made him look a total tube. But he was there. He was on our tellies, sitting opposite the ‘political elite’ he purports to despise so much. He touched Bonnie Greer’s arm several times. I hope she’s burnt her jacket.

And again, and again, last night and across all channels this morning, it’s been repeated that none of the politicians could answer the question about ‘the problem of immigration’. Labour, LibDem and Tory argued it out last night about who it was who’d let too many people in, and who would let in less in the future.

The argument I’m hearing today is that the mainstream parties are ‘scared’ to debate immigration. That’s nonsense, they talk about immigration all the time. It’s just that they’re all saying the same thing – ‘we have to find ways to stop people getting in’. Between them, they have shifted the language on immigration so far to the right that they’re all living next door to the BNP.

Let’s hear the other side for a change. Britain is not ‘full up’. If the UK’s population is rising slightly (Scotland’s, on the whole, is not) it’s because middle class people are living longer.

The number of people making a new application for asylum in the UK rose, very slightly, this year, after dropping over the last five years. Not because people are looking to live comfortably on our benefits – our government forces people to live in absolute poverty, on £35 a week, while they wait for a decision on their asylum claim – but because Western armies have clattered through their countries spreading terror and chaos. People seeking asylum come, overwhelmingly, from Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.

Tory Baroness Warsi challenged Griffin’s use of the term ‘bogus asylum seeker’ – I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard the term challenged on TV – because it’s an invented slur. There are no bogus asylum seekers, every human on the planet has the right to ask for sanctuary. Yet her party would still seek to limit the number of people to whom we offer that sanctuary, would send families back to the killing fields of Sudan and Somalia, to the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.

They argued over the number of people who arrived from Eastern Europe. So what? People came, they worked, they paid taxes. And when rich white people screwed the whole world’s economy, lots of people went home to try to work and pay taxes there. Like the British young people who troop off to work their way round Australia, then come home when they’ve had enough adventure.

Britain’s unemployment rate is soaring – not because of Poles or Romanians or Somalians, or even Australians, who are in fact the most regular visa overstayers in the UK – but because of an economic system that bleeds every profit it can from working people of every race, then dumps them when it’s expedient.

Griffin is bleating today about his beating last night. And as very, very funny as it was – ‘he’s not in the violent Ku Klux Klan’, ‘I’m frightened of men kissing’ – until we get voices on Question Time who don’t just pay lip service to the bounties of immigration, ‘yay for curry and Dizzee Rascal!’, but who say clearly that all political parties must stop pushing fear of the other, and really tackle poverty, unemployment and exploitation of all people, then the fascists keep winning.