Mark Collett with Nick Griffin in 2006
Last October Nothing British wrote to the BBC’s Director General and the head of BBC News to complain about the shoddy interview with the BNP’s head of publicity and the managing director of its white nationalist record label.
Today, the BBC’s editorial complaints unit has conceded that it did not provide sufficient information about the BNP’s Collett and Smith when it called them “young BNP” members. It also admitted that it had failed to properly challenge them when they referred to Ashley Cole as not being “ethnically British”.
In our letter we explicitly said that we supported the BBC’s decision to allow BNP leader Nick Griffin MEP on to Question Time: as he was part of the democratic process and an elected official. We also believed that it was right for them to interview the relatively young BNP duo on BBC Radio 1’s Newsbeat radio show.
We hope that if other BNP members and supporters are allowed on to future BBC programmes that they are denied the opportunity to propagate their neo-racist ethnopluralist theories on primetime radio without being challenged.
Furthermore, as an interviewer would do with a member of a mainstream party, we hope that more context is provided about the subjects being interviewed.
