Four hours before BNP leader Nick Griffin appeared on BBC’s Question Time I was standing in a room within Leicester’s impressive Curve building, delivering a talk based on my latest book, ‘Soul Traders’.

The audience comprised of marketers curious to learn about the darker side of marketing – in other words, propaganda and the history of hype and spin.  Most of all, they wanted to understand what could be learnt from past mistakes to build better futures.

Aware of the imminent British National Party broadcast, during the talk I warned the audience that, based on BNP’s insidious attempts to rewrite history by miss-representing the significance of the World War II Spitfire and intent of Winston Churchill, there was every likelihood that Griffin would hijack the iconic poppy badge symbol as a way to demonstrate his racist party’s allegiance to the men and women who defended the British against foreign enemies.

After all, what with all the hype around the Question Time broadcast, and lucky timing of Poppy day being just a few weeks away, from a spin and propaganda point of view, this was one opportunity that Griffin and his cohorts would surely not want to miss.

However, I over-estimated how Griffin would position the odious BNP brand.  I had assumed that in addition to ‘number-one’ haircut bodyguards, nowadays he would be surrounded by slick spin-doctors.

From a ‘Soul Traders’ point of view he could have called upon classic propaganda arguments and approaches that have been adopted for many years by extremists and especially dicatorships.  (The 28 most used arguments are featured and exposed in full in the Soul Traders book itself – see www.soultraderstruth.com).

At the very least, I expected Griffin’s PR advisers to encourage him to spin this week’s news regarding UK’s heaving over-population which is expected to swell to over seventy million  - thanks in no small part to immigration.

Ignoring recent reports in the Guardian that suggest half of the recent Polish immigrants have already gone home, surely his advisors would have advised him to look solemnly at the camera as he slipped in something along the lines of, “The facts – not the racist rhetoric – are that Great Britain, an island, is only so big and can accommodate only so many…“ etc…

If he would have plucked that line he may have won the attention of the openly quiet middle-classes who are publicly ‘PC’ and do business with anyone of any creed or colour, yet privately deeply despair at the lightening-fast demographic shifts affecting the UK, rationalising their feelings not on race but the real perceived threat of being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people having to be accommodated and supported by the country.

Incredibly his spin-doctors didn’t even draw capital from the very long held British tradition that  ”an Englishman’s home is his castle”.  By doing so he could have played the immigration card to its full potential – pointing to overcrowding  encroaching on the sacred grounds of such middle-class ‘ two-up, two-down castles’.

Or he could have appealed to the poor and recession crunched classes, pointing to local jobs going to foreign workers – putting forward a ‘considered argument’, rather than reckless racist rant addressing an all too real and practical issue that the other parties were failing to fully and properly address.

Pointing to sovereignty rather than preaching hegemony, he could have even tried to win over swing voters from the UK Independence Party – making his brand appear even more legitimate.

However, Griffin botched it up yet again by failing to read his own Ministry of Truth guidelines.  This firebrand dragon was coming across as just a lot of hot air. He was clearly neither an accomplished politician nor even a B- grade graduate from the ‘blitzkrieg school of would-be propagandist dictators’.  Instead he chose to insult the intelligence of precisely the potential swing voters that he needed.

Anti-war protesters deface poppy poster for political gain

Repeat after me – “I must repeat”

Two of the basic tenets of getting your propaganda message across is firstly take the advice of one of the people that Griffin undoubtedly admires – Goebbels.  He said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”   In other words, keep it simple and keep saying it.  Secondly to always have a kernel of truth or logic in your policies.  However, rather than sticking to his spurious argument about the importance of being 100% British, he compared the Brits to Maoris – presumably just the sort of people that Griffin’s intended swing voters would definitely prefer not to be likened to.

To clarify his definition of who exactly fitted the bill as being authentically ‘British’ he explained that such a person’s descendents would have remained within the British Isles for literally thousands of years. (At one point, 17,000 years was mentioned).  Bad move Griffin – how could even the most eager swing voter qualify for that?

Griffin also claimed that any gay or lesbian was ‘creepy’ – yet another vote seeking mistake as studies in the last few months suggest that even on a mild note, one in four ‘straight people’ in the UK would be more than happy to confide in a gay best friend.  Moreover civil partnerships are becoming very much the norm. (Although he did manage to score some points with certain people by suggesting that sex education should not be taught in class to the very young and then pointing to his albeit totally misunderstood understanding of Islamic traditions, suggesting that certain Islamic sects treat women as second-class citizens and  following up with a warning against Shahriar law coming to the UK – that  line won a ripple of applause with the audience).

However he then yet again lost his credibility  with the audience by going from plausible arguments to extreme  suggestions such as that the Klu Klux Klan were essentially a friendly and passive lot.

Finally he insulted even the most shallowly educated voter by suggesting that the only evidence of the holocaust during the second world war was based on a spurious radio intercepted message that suggested the numbers of dead were millions short of the reported six million souls. This from the man who in 1997 published a booklet entitled ‘Who are the Mind Benders?’ which outlined a Jewish conspiracy to brainwash the British people in their own “homeland”. (In 1988 Griffin told a court that despite orthodox opinion that six million Jews were gassed, in fact… “orthodox opinion also once held that the Earth is flat”).  Indeed, speaking of annihilation, according the Griffin, the incumbent Labour party was apparently conducting genocide as he spoke throughout the UK.

The other panellists

Equally his fellow panellists missed out on their own party-line chances.  Whilst their arguments were sound and insightful, they insisted on immediately shouting down any possible retort from Griffin to their opinions.  Through doing so they prevented Griffin from publicly exposing even deeper holes in his claims.  Constant out-bursts suppressing Griffin – however well meaning – potentially left the casual TV viewer who may not have been that enamoured anyway with current politics, with the feeling of witnessing a biased shouting match.

Talking over Griffin, allowed him to offer the press countless picture and video clip opportunities of a forlorn – vilified as the “most misunderstood man in the country”.  To his propagandist credit, he seized the moment, painting the image of a courageous chap who, whilst being publicly silenced and humiliated, in reality simply wanted to ‘reform’ his party from being neo-Nazi thugs to open minded patriots. (Glossing over the facts that firstly Griffin was convicted in 1998 of inciting racial hatred for articles that praised the Waffen-SS, and secondly in terms of being silenced, in Britain, holocaust denial is not illegal).  He went on to say his party supported Israel during the recent Gaza conflict.  (Although I am not convinced that Israel really needs the support of a holocaust denier, fund raiser with Libya and platform sharer with Abu Hamsa).

The longer threat and lasting perceptions

The morning following the broadcast I was lecturing in a small traditional Labour voter town near Derby called Alfreton.  The town had been affected particularly badly by the recession. Factories were closed and new immigrants had taken remaining local jobs at reduced wages.  For the first time, the long-held Labour ward that had even survived the 1970s closures of mines and subsequent feuds between families, fell to the Tories.  If anywhere was ripe for swing-voter pickings, this place was it.

I asked some people if they had seen last night’s Question Time?   They hadn’t but had heard from others in town that Griffin was continuously ‘shouted-down’ by the other parties.  “It was just the same old party politics – everyone at each other’s necks and no-one listening to the ordinary people.”

Similar reported stories from other parts of the country started to emerge.  From Dagenham, East London, the BBC reported that even those who did not share his political views felt he had been victimized

“I felt sorry for the guy really,” said Bill, 64, an out-of-work electrician, who said he had never voted for the BNP. “The trouble with this country is they don’t like the truth. If you don’t join the club and say what you think is right you are a bad influence They were just after slaughtering him. He was just maybe not educated enough to take on that many people…. “ [Actually he was educated in Cambridge] ….  “He did show Jack Straw up a bit though.”

A 42 year old NHS health worker commented, “He has a right to display his position.”

All this was followed up by a YouGov opinion poll taken hours after the programme that said, more than a fifth of voters would consider backing the British National Party in a future election.

Some 22% of those questioned said they would “seriously consider” voting BNP in a local, European or general election – including 4% who said they would “definitely” consider backing the party, 3% who would “probably” consider it, and 15% who said they were “possible” BNP voters.

A News of the World’s ICM poll of 504 adults on October 23 and 24, 2009 across the country revealed that when it came to immigration issues, 54 per cent of UK voters said there were too many immigrants in the country, 44 per cent said the white working class had been abandoned by the mainstream parties and 65 per cent believed foreign arrivals received favourable treatment on housing and other benefits.

A notable one third of voters supported the BNP policy that people from ethnic minorities should lose all state benefits, including NHS treatment.  Little over one in 20 people, thought that the BNP had the right policies to sort out the problem Twenty six per cent said the Tories had the best immigration policy and 21 per cent backed Labour.

However only 10 per cent said there should be a stop on all future immigration.

The BBC announced that this probably would not be the last time that Griffin would be invited to speak on TV.

Just as fields of poppies grow on the wastelands of war and the fallen, propaganda flourishes on hearsay, and these days not just sound bites alone, but video-blips, blogs, tweets and especially framed looks and expressions caught in a moment and sometimes interpreted out of sequence and context.

Far too often in history, hearsay somehow transforms into reported fact. Underlying, unaddressed fears get ignored and brushed under the carpet so often that eventually such anxieties become tumours demanding attention.  Once that happens, even the dourest gryphon can spread his wings on a flight of fancy – however ludicrously fanciful such a flight may have at first appeared on telly.

Jonathan Gabay

www.brandforensics.co.uk

www.soultraderstruth.com

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