TMP columnist Tim Caswell contemplates BNP leader, Nick Griffin, and Holocaust denier, David Irving’s controversial appearance at the Oxford Union tonight.

“I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the world is flat … I have reached the conclusion that the “extermination” tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie and latter witch-hysteria.”

By these words, spoken from the dock, in his own defence in 1998, British National Party leader Nick Griffin will be eternally damned in the court of decent public opinion everywhere.

Should your area ever have the misfortune to be afflicted by the cancer inside the body politic that is the BNP, his words are reproduced by anti fascist magazine, “Searchlight” in an affordable postcard format to distribute to anyone gullible enough to mistake Holocaust denying scum for acceptable members of the human race.

Tonight the Oxford educated Griffin will return to his alma Mater as the guest of the Oxford Union with fellow Holocaust denier David Irving whose diary entry for September 17 1994 was given in evidence against him in a 2000 libel trial :

“I am a baby Aryan
Not Jewish or sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian”

Unsurprisingly, he lost, and was branded a Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathiser by a High Court Judge; a charge which I had seen him deny when he was invited to speak at Bradford University in the early eighties.

Tonight, the gruesome twosome will propose the motion, “This House believes in freedom of speech.”  I don’t know if Griffin or Irving has ever stood in a gas chamber. While still an undergraduate and with Irving’s already sinister revisionism fresh in my mind I boarded a bus in Munich marked, “Concentration Camp” and visited Dachau. I recorded my reaction then:

“To stand in a gas chamber is to realise the priceless value of freedom tolerance and democracy.”

Personally I would not invite either man to address an envelope and wonder at the judgement of the hooray Henrys and Henriettas who choose to afford them free publicity. Many will think this is the Oxford Union’s worst hour since they refused to fight fascism first time round by passing the infamous motion, “This House will not fight for King and Country.” At least Dave “one is an ordinary chap” Cameron only wasted his time at Oxford getting legless and smashing up restaurants with other chinless wonders as a member of the Bullingham Club.

George Galloway, a man who describes the end of the Soviet Union as the “saddest day of my life” despite the fact that Stalin killed as many people as Hitler, is travelling to Oxford to try and stop them speaking. Listeners to his “Mother of all talk Shows” on Talk Sport last weekend heard a torrent of righteous indignation from the man who famously stood up to the United States Senate and grovelled to Saddam Hussein. In doing so, friends and enemies amongst his eight million listeners will agree, he demonstrated that he possesses the historical knowledge, rhetorical skills and political courage to destroy support for fascists by force of argument.

He maintains that the BNP would pose less of a threat to Black, Asian and Jewish people if the BNP were denied an outlet for its views. Apparently, if Hitler had been stamped on sooner he could have been stopped, notwithstanding that he wrote Mein Kampf in prison!

Tactics are always complex but the strategy for dealing with the ideas behind racism and fascism in a liberal democracy should be crystal clear. Better that they had never existed, but they do, and their political party is legal and allowed to organise and contest elections. Where they are challenged by evidence, argument and morally superior ideas they are defeated and the forces of freedom tolerance and democracy are strengthened. Where they are suppressed they become martyrs.

Griffin and Irving defend the indefensible every day of their wasted lives, but tonight, thanks to the ineptness of the Oxford Union they will be defending a principle that is sacrosanct, freedom of speech under the law. Their victory will be a hollow one. They are wielding a sword that will be surer to kill their creed the sharper it is kept and the more securely it is held.

Tim Caswell is a Labour Party member of over 30 years standing and a writer.  If you would like to write an article in response to Tim’s piece please email info@tmponline.org.