What Really Underlies the “No Platform” Policy?

The recent cancellation of hustings in the Wanstead by-election thanks to the refusal of the Labour candidate to share a platform with the BNP candidate once again brings to the fore the “no platform” policy that has been adopted towards the BNP. Although Labour candidates are the most likely to adopt this stance, representatives of the other two mainstream political parties frequently advocate and use this tactic. The “no platform” policy has also been officially adopted by the National Union of Students (NUS). Furthermore, whenever and wherever a public platform is afforded to BNP members, organisations such as Searchlight and UAF turn up in an attempt to prevent their views from gaining a public hearing.

The justification adopted by all of the aforementioned advocates of the “no platform” policy is that they object to the BNP as a fascist organisation that denies the historicity of the Holocaust and incites hatred of ethnic minority groups and homosexuals. If indeed it were the case that the BNP possesses this set of beliefs, it would get nowhere, as very few sane members of the electorate would support such a party. Contrary to the seemingly Anglophobic sentiments of the “no platformists”, the English electorate (for it is the English specifically whom they appear to fear) is not imbued with latent genocidal urges which can be activated to catastrophic effect by the simple act of exposing them to the ideas of the BNP. What they are really afraid of is affording the public the opportunity of discovering that the BNP are not as they are portrayed. What the “no platformists” truly fear is the potential popularity of what the BNP actually say, rather than that which they are said to say.

The BNP is the only political party in the UK with potentially broad appeal that unequivocally rejects globalism, free-market fundamentalism, multiculturalism, Islamisation and EU membership. It is the only party that opposes untrammelled mass immigration. Contrary to the mainstream media’s negative propaganda about the BNP, it is a party that possesses a broad range of policies that put to the fore the interests that should be at the forefront in any true democracy: the well-being of the people and the representation of their stated interests and concerns. When a political system purporting to be a democracy actively works against the interests and wishes of its native electorate in favour of a narrow political class acting in tandem with a transnational financial oligarchy, it ceases to be a democracy, and becomes a sham.

Today, the mainstream compass of permissible political debate is so narrowly defined that large swathes of the indigenous population feel alienated from the political process. The BNP can provide a solution to this alienation through acting to ensure that the core concerns of electors are finally acknowledged and acted upon. Just as the advent of the printing press generated intellectual ferment and liberated early modern society from the ideological diktat of the Church, so the internet is affording ordinary people the opportunity to access alternative viewpoints which are not controlled by the dominant media and economic interests within society. Despite the increasing powers of surveillance employed by our Government to police cyberspace, we are still currently free to debate alternatives to an increasingly discredited ideological hegemony which is beginning to crumble in the face of an increasingly ugly reality.