The more you try to crush the BNP, the stronger they become
Dear Chris Keates,
As leader of the NASUWT, one of the biggest teaching unions in the UK, I would have thought that you understood the importance of showing judgement and approaching topics with a certain level of common sense. Unfortunately, you lack both judgement and common sense on the evidence of your comments today. After the disgraceful leaking of the personal details of all BNP members (as of last year) you decided that this was wonderful opportunity to call for a ban on the BNP working in school classrooms and any public service. You, sir, are an idiot.
Before I go any further, I should point out that I detest the BNP. I find their racist opinions abhorrent and their economic policies such as nationalising just about everything you can think of to be nothing short of lunacy. However, unlike you, I think that freedom of speech and freedom of expression are rather important. The disclosure of the BNP membership list containing the full details for 12,000 members was totally unacceptable and breaches goodness knows how many laws, and rightly so. I don’t care what political party someone is affiliated with - their details should remain safe at all times. The fact that some people on the list have received death threats is awful and I would never condone such behaviour. I got even more angry when the likes of Nigel Farage made cheap remarks yesterday such as “it says it all about the BNP that so many of those on their database seem to be worried about being revealed as members. Who would join a party where membership is a social and professional embarrassment?” Not only is everyone entitled to have their personal data kept away from the media, names and addresses are extremely sensitive political information that opposition parties have no right to get their hands on. The fact that many people appeared on the list without being full members of the party is also worth keeping in mind.
Back to the matter in hand. The BNP list contained the names of 15 teachers, four nurses, members of the armed forces, civil servants and a police officer. Membership of the BNP is forbidden under the contract signed by police and prison officers and I think that’s fair enough. The police must be respected by all members of the community and they must deal with everyone equally, even in dangerous situations. Being a member of the BNP is not compatible, in my opinion, with such expectations. Having said that, your suggestion that the BNP should be banned from every public service is absolutely ridiculous. Why would being in the BNP affect your ability to teach, or make you an incompetent nurse, or affect your ability to waste taxpayers’ money while working in a quango? The DCSF pointed out that teachers can be disciplined or sacked if they aired racist views in the classroom and I would expect nothing less, but unless someone actually behaves in an inappropriate or grossly unprofessional manner then why should they be forced to declare their membership of the BNP? If a teacher does not treat pupils equally or if a nurse does not treat a patient correctly, they can presumably be disciplined for failing to carry out their duties without the need for banning political parties.
The danger that you have highlighted is that idiots like yourself want to enforce wholly subjective stances on political allegiances. Personally, I think having rabid lefties in the school classroom is potentially dangerous yet as far as I understand, being a communist and airing communist views is perfectly acceptable according to the DCSF. How can this be? I would find such behaviour, particularly in the school classroom with impressionable teenagers, almost as repulsive as someone being a racist. What you don’t seem to have grasped is that everyone is perfectly entitled to become a member of the BNP, just like any other party. The fact that you don’t like the BNP is irrelevant and if the BNP are increasing in strength and number then I suggest we start taking them on in political debates instead of trying to bury them beneath political prejudices.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
UPDATE: It seems as though Sunny over at Liberal Conspiracy finds the BNP membership list story hilarious, to the point where he is actively encouraging people to trawl the list via links on his post. I have just sent him the following email (sunnyh@liberalconspiracy.org):
Sunny, seeing as you clearly find the BNP’s breach of data protection laws so very amusing, I would be very grateful if could send me your name, address, phone number and personal email address so that I can publish it on my blog and send it to all the bloggers in my email address book.
You clearly don’t mind people’s private details being passed round the internet – in fact, you actively encourage it – so I think it’s only fair that you show you don’t mind people contacting you either.
Regards
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
“As leader of the NASUWT, one of the biggest teaching unions in the UK, I would have thought that you understood the importance of showing judgement and approaching topics with a certain level of common sense.”
Really…? Why?
Errrrrr….. good question. In hindsight, maybe I was being a little optimistic. It is a teaching union, after all.
As I have said on my blog, this is counter-productive and another form of intolerance. Academics should stick to teaching, and equipping people with the tools to formulate their own views on subjects such as Israel and the BNP. Academics should not be engaging in censorship and boycotts based on their own viewpoints. That sort of closed thinking and overt effort to influence students’ thinking is contrary to the educational objective of encouraging people to take an open minded and evaluative approach to things.
“Academics should stick to teaching, and equipping people with the tools to formulate their own views on subjects such as Israel and the BNP.”
Yes, they should. But increasingly, they are doing thisinstead…
Why is that, do you think…?
Unfortunately Labour and the unions have come to realise that if you let people make up their own minds then they might disagree with you. Shock horror. This cannot be tolerated and therefore censorship under the guise of ‘providing information’ and ‘debate’ is their best method of controlling the minds of children in our schools, universities and elsewhere.
People react very badly to being told what to think and the BNP get stronger every time the government tries to suppress them.
“Why would being in the BNP … affect your ability to waste taxpayers’ money while working in a quango? ”
This call, though, is an example of the type of intellectual cleansing that is prevalent among socialists. Instead of sacking someone because they are incompetent, or unable/unwilling to do the job properly, they sack because of an intellectual stance taken by the person concerned which, in the socialist’s opinion, is incompatible with an ability to do the job.
In other words, they look not at actual ability but at their prediction that someone with the “wrong” mindset will eventually prove to be unable to do the job. Not only is this highly insulting to the person concerned, it also enables them to ignore the manifest incompetence of their fellow lefties while ensuring that all dissenting voices are silenced.
That said, the current panic among BNP supporters is hilarious (although it will cease to be if any of the threats are carried out).
I tend to agree with the thrust of this Letters to be honest. Like you say keeping the BNP out of the police and the prison service is fair enough especially when people who join are breaking their contracts.
Patently, much as seeing the BNP suffer is normally something I welcome, this time I simply can’t enjoy it.
People’s lives can be made a misery even if they don’t get a brick through their window. Colleagues at work could really make things nasty for a member of the BNP yet I consider someone’s political views to be completely private unless they choose otherwise.
I think that’s essentially true; as bloggers we are ‘out there’ wearing our respective colours but it would be wrong to forget that some people do not want things to be that way….
Incidentally, don’t you think this raises wider issues about the difficulty of data protection on the internet??
I’m not sure I understand why you feel that membership of the BNP is OK for a teacher or nurse, but not for a police or prison officer.
You say a teacher or nurse can be disciplined for treating people differently based on race, but surely that applies to the police also?
Shouldn’t anybody be free to join them, or nobody? Isn’t that fairer than saying you can join if you work in this job; you can’t if you work in that job?
I suppose I should add that I’m not a member of the BNP, don’t support their views and don’t wish them any success. But I would like this to be a free country.
The internet has certainly made data protection more difficult, but the information must have originated from somewhere (as it always used to) and the internet merely speeds up the dissemination of the info.
The police put themselves in danger and are faced with a wide variety of situations, some of which may involve dealing with people of different social, ethnic and religious backgrounds. The police must be extremely careful because they have powers to enforce the law, arrest people or defend themselves by physical means if necessary. It is therefore essential that their judgement in difficult situations is not biased and I think being a member of the BNP shows that someone is incapable of carrying out these duties. Teachers and nurses do not have a choice about what they do or the way that they do it with regard to communicating with pupils or patients – the nature of the job is fixed. Yes, they interact with people on a daily basis but their role and how they go about it is not open to conjecture – so I consider that to be very different from the police. Besides, as was pointed out above, the police sign a contract saying they are not a member of the BNP which (rightly or wrongly) removes any doubt about the police’s stance.
Thank you for responding, I take your point about the police contract.
I think my biggest concern is that having drawn a line and said these people can join, these people can’t, you then have to think about other jobs where something like this might be necessary: the judiciary, perhaps, or even (God help us) politicians!
And you then have to think about whether other organisations should be proscribed, for similar or wildly different reasons.
Or maybe it’s better not to draw that line in the first place.
Political parties would be different because a party can employ whoever they want. The judiciary is an interesting point, because my argument for why the police cannot be members of the BNP translates perfectly to the judiciary.
You have argued that police officers should not be members of the BNP. Fair enough. But why then would it be OK for them to be members of the Socialist Workers Party or the Workers Revolutionary Party, or even the Communist Party of Great Britain?
There is no logic to the argument unless you ban police officers from belonging to ANY party whatsoever, even Labour or Conservative.
As I recall this is a democracy and unless the Great Helmsman has changed things overnight, membership of any political party is a matter for one’s conscience and is not, nor should be, the concern or affair of the state!
I see where you’re coming from, but none of the organisations discriminate on the basis of the colour of your skin (happy to be corrected, though) so there is no reason why their political affiliation would interfere with their job. That said, I suppose you could argue that a member of the SWP might be more lenient when dealing with rowdy protestors at an SWP march or something similar.
Being a member of the BNP means that you believe certain things about race and skin colour, hence the ban on police officers joining.
If you carry that argument to its logical conclusion, you could say that being a member of the SWP means you believe Stalin was a lovely person and that the deaths in the Gulags were a mere bagatelle.
Perhaps you should read the credo of the WRP who were every bit as racist, in their own little way, as the BNP or NF ever were.
I wonder why it’s so fine to have extreme left wing views when right wing views are so bad.
I see the discussion about which groups should or shouldn’t be proscribed has started. There’s an argument that membership of any organisation that posits different treatment for a group of people based on their race, religion, or nationality should be forbidden to a police officer.
So (for example) the Black Police Association, any church, or the Scottish or Welsh Nationalists: should they be included in the list?
And then we go back to the argument that it shouldn’t be just the police, or prison officers. The judiciary (as I’ve mentioned), maybe social workers, DSS officials, tax inspectors, the list goes on.
Or how about we accept that there is no such thing as a thought crime; anyone can hold whatever opinions they want, belong to whatever groups they want? But what they cannot do is act on those prejudices, or without fear or favour.
” There’s an argument that membership of any organisation that posits different treatment for a group of people based on their race, religion, or nationality should be forbidden to a police officer.
So (for example) the Black Police Association, any church, or the Scottish or Welsh Nationalists: should they be included in the list?”
Or indeed Jews who have certain qualifications to be declared a jew worthy of education at the Jewish Free School.
I’d certainly not proscribe the BNP as ultimate I believe that in the free market of ideas, they will lose. But I would certainly work to screw them over and the fact that swathes of the blogosphere think this leak may have been MI5 inspired warms the cockles of my heart!
“…the fact that swathes of the blogosphere think this leak may have been MI5 inspired warms the cockles of my heart!”
I’d prefer the Security Services in my country to act within the law, personally.
And certainly concentrate on far, far more dangerous threats than police, teachers, vicars, etc with what the State regarded as ‘the wrong views’.
If they act on those views in ways that break the law, go get ‘em! But not like this…
Just to lighten the thread slightly, I stumbled upon this earlier today:
YouTube – Hitler’s BNP membership gets leaked …
Warning: Not home or work safe, contains swearing.
… but it is very funny.
Lol!