Reach for your notebook, not an eggbox

I WAS delighted when the anti-fascists broke up BNP leader Nick Griffin’s presser outside Parliament the day after Euro polling day and someone threw an egg at him. That’s what people should do with fascists. Block their meetings, shout them down.

But not as journalists, because we have better means to hand to deal with them and a different job to do: to expose them, rigorously, with all the information we can get our hands on.

If you were a doctor and Nick Griffin had a heart attack what would you do? You would treat him. And we must report him.

This does not imply any kind of approval; it is because of our professional duty in a democracy. If you refuse to, it is disenfranchising the people who voted for him — as if they weren’t disenfranchised enough already.

If you are a democrat you can’t infringe democratic rights. That brings you down to the fascists’ level. But there has to be a right for it not to be infringed, and there is no democratic right, for instance, to advertise in a newspaper or on a website. It’s a commercial matter.

So NUJ chapels should do all they can to stop their papers taking ads from the BNP. Go and tell the editor and take it from there. In the 1970s, when the threat was from the National Front, chapels went as far as to take strike action to stop their ads — and to stop the uncritical use of their press releases.

These things are creeping back. In the Euro election campaign some local papers, mostly in the Newsquest group, put BNP banner ads on their sites. One Newsquest paper actually refused an anti-BNP ad, supposedly on the grounds it wasn’t true. Are the BNP’s proclamations true?

But what matters is the reporting. Research by the doughty anti-BNP journalist Pete Lazenby on the Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds five years ago — published in the Journalist — showed that the BNP vote in West Yorkshire local elections was directly related to the way it was reported in the local papers. In the YEP’s Leeds it was low. In towns like Dewsbury and Halifax where the papers were relatively favourable it was higher.

Every policy should be questioned and every statement challenged and balanced by the true facts. There are plenty of good sources. Here are a couple: the long-running anti-fascist magazine Searchlight at www.searchlightmagazine.com, and United Against Fascism at www.uaf.org.uk

What’s the point in being a journalist if all you want to do is throw eggs, when you have such better weapons to hand?

The Journalist is published by the National Union of Journalists