Nick Griffin, Denis MacShane & The Guardian

How very odd. Despite resigning from the Total Politics Editorial Board over our decision to interview Nick Griffin, Labour MP Denis MacShane seems very happy to grace the pages of The Guardian with his prose today. Why is that odd? Because The Guardian had a long interview with Griffin on Saturday. One rule for The Guardian...

Though Cowards Flinch has a short interview with Denis in which he explains his decision.

If you would like to read the interview with Nick Griffin, the new issue of Total Politics goes on sale on Saturday. But here's short section from the interview which didn't make the final edit. It concerns the incident recently when Times journalist Dominic Kennedy was violently ejected from a BNP meeting...

ID: What does it say about the BNP when violence is used to throw a reputable journalist out of a press conference?
NG: Well, if I came to your house as your invited guest, or even worse, if I walked through your front door uninvited and just sat down, you would ask me to leave.

It was a press conference
It wasn’t a press conference
Well what was it then?
It was an AGM and at the end of it, we allowed certain journalists to enter. But the Times has established quite recently such a shocking record of unfair treatment of our events and our people and when reporting on us that we exercise the right to say to the Times, no, we don’t want you there. He got in and then we found someone asked him to leave. He was asked to leave more than half a dozen times and he wouldn’t go, so he was escorted out of the premises, which is unfortunate.
But all that achieved was pictures of BNP heavies throwing a journalist who has a national reputation out of a meeting. What benefit did that bring the BNP?
It didn’t.
So why do it?
Because we’d already made a decision not to co-operate with the Times, because when you co-operate with a newspaper, with a journalist, the moment you start speaking about the issue, you give them more of a right and more credibility.
But on that basis, you can say ‘I’m not co-operating with any newspaper’ because you don’t get any positive coverage.
We’re not asking for positive coverage, we’re asking for the truth. And if someone says ‘we threw a Times journalist out because he was struggling, his nose was pulled, that was rather rough and that made the BNP look thugs’, that’s fact and opinion. That’s fair, that’s legitimate. But the Times has repeatedly lied in recent months about us to our people’s detriment about what’s going on so why should we allow a group of journalists and a newspaper who make money about lying.
I’ll tell you why, because you’re a national political party with elected representatives in the same way that the Conservative Party is. Should the Conservatives not allow Times journalists into their press conferences because of what they said about Lord Ashcroft?
They have the right, but as far as I know, what they’re saying about Lord Ashcroft is true. But I know what they were saying about us were the most outrageous lies.
But every political party has that, and they don’t go around banning journalists from press conferences.
They do, or they simply don’t hold them. If you look at the Labour Party’s spin machine, in terms of manipulating journalists, yeah, they’re more sophisticated and more experienced, and if they had a journalist they wanted to throw out, they’d get the police to do it. We haven’t got that.
The point I’m trying to make, is that if you want to be treated as a mature political party looking to get more electoral representation, you collectively are behaving in that instance, in a way that no other political party would.
But no other political party has journalists who work with Searchlight to put lies and smears out on the scale that try to get our members thrown out of their jobs.
Look at the Daily Mirror, every few months they try and infiltrate Conservative Central Office, but the Conservatives still allow Kevin Maguire to go to their press conferences, in the full knowledge he will never write anything positive about them.
Well that’s rather up to them, it’s not a matter of positive, it’s a matter of the most outrageous lies. When they lie about the Conservative Party, it doesn’t increase the chances of Conservative members having their houses petrol bombed and their children burned to death. For us it’s much more serious, the lies are much worse and because of the climate this creates and all the rest of it, it actually puts our people at risk for their lives and their livelihoods.
How do you react to being called a fascist? And what would you say are the three things that differentiate the BNP from being a fascist party? It’s the word that is most often used to describe the BNP- that or racist.
We’re not fascist. If fascism is defined in its proper sense, it’s about worship of the state or of a man that personifies the state and our tradition is very much in the British tradition of limited government with checks and balances and so on.
You could have fooled me. Half your policy programme envisions a larger state.
We’re not fascist in that regard. It’s about a close, almost incestuous relationship, between the state and the corporations. Its corporate fascism. The Thatcherite, Blairite PFI − that’s fascist. We believe in a mixed economy where the state or the big capitalist bits should only be there because economies of scale make it necessary, or control makes it necessary. Where possible it should be done by small businesses , family farms or workers’ co-operatives. So completely unfascist. The final defining factor of fascism is the use of political violence as a political weapon against you’re opponents. And we’re the victims of a Marxist fascism – we do not either practice or want to practice violence against anyone else.
Apart from throwing journalists out of press conferences...
Apart from throwing out lying journalists when they’re asked. He was breaking the law. He’d been asked to leave a private premises and he refused. He’s breaking the law. So you’re entitled to use the minimum force necessary to break the law. I’ve been instructed that the fellow that quite gleefully grabbed his nose and twisted it, shouldn’t be put on duties like that anymore because that was over the top. But he was still breaking the law and he was removed with the minimum force necessary.
In which year did you stop denying the Holocaust?

You'll have to read the magazine to find out the answer to that question!