Much has been said about the BBC’s dilemma over whether to invite the BNP on to QT:

The BBC has confirmed it may invite British National Party leader Nick Griffin to appear on a future edition of the Question Time programme.

A spokesman said the BBC was bound by the rules to treat all political parties with “due impartiality”.

As it happens I have tended toward the view that we have to debate the issues and show the BNP for the racists that they are, as Mark Reckons’:

I have always in principle been against the “No Platform” policy whereby some opponents of the BNP have refused to share the same debating platform as them. The argument is that even being seen on the same platform as mainstream parties lends the BNP a legitimacy that they do not deserve. My view is that you win debates and arguments by taking on your opponents, not by banning them from the debating arena.

However Paul Sagar at Liberal Conspiracy takes a different view:

Taking the prudential point, one could go further and argue that the best way to tackle the BNP is to debate them: putting them on a platform makes them easier to shoot at. On this point, I’m convinced of the classic liberal arguments espoused by Mill in On Liberty: the best way to destroy a pernicious opinion is to publicly expose it; the most counterproductive way of tackling such an opinion is to try and stifle it.

OK, so far so good but … there has to be a but otherwise this post is dead!:

Except – and here’s the irony – QT is highly unlikely to achieve that, for the simple reason that QT is not a platform for debate. It’s an opportunity for political figures to sound-off their own prejudices without being subjected to scrutiny. And its format necessarily makes this so.

He has a point here and it is one* reason why I stopped watching QT. Another being the audience, as Stumbling and Mumbling puts it:

that QT is not a platform for debate but merely a zoo in which soundbites are vomited into an audience who clap like hyperactive seals.

I like that, it made me laugh.

Anyway, back to Paul’s post:

Except – and here’s the irony – QT is highly unlikely to achieve that, for the simple reason that QT is not a platform for debate. It’s an opportunity for political figures to sound-off their own prejudices without being subjected to scrutiny. And its format necessarily makes this so.

For debate to take place, what is required are a limited – ideally two or three – number of participants, who use reasoned arguments and verifiably facts to offer point and counter-point in order to expose and abandon bad arguments, all in an effort to strive towards the most intellectually tenable position.

To be fair he makes some good points and the whole post is worth reading, but he misses the obvious conclusion – QT needs to change. It needs to return to a serious debating program at a sensible time.  And that means a smaller audience who should be told to keep their gobs shut, if we want to hear their opinions they should go out and start a blog, not bollocks up one of the few opportunities there is for serious political debate on the TV.

I’ll go further, surely the BBC is in dereliction of its duty by not having a decent weekly debate on the TV?

Belle Gerens, on the other hand, thinks that Peter Hain, (and by extension,  I suspect, the rest of Labour), who will boycott the program is a coward:

Perhaps Hain sees, as do the rest of us who are not blinded by polemic, that the only thing that separates the BNP from its more traditional rivals is its racism. And if the BNP refuse to be engaged on their racism, and want to talk about their platform of social justice instead, Hain and everybody else are going to find themselves in the unenviable position of agreeing with the BNP but not wishing to admit it. And so the BNP will come across as being quite firm in their ideas, whilst the three main parties flail about trying to show that their sort of social justice is somehow demonstrably different from the BNP’s.

So, lets hope that the BBC sort out  QT and we do get some good debate, it should be very interesting. Perhaps a campaign is in order?

*Its also a bit late for me when I’m working and I’m not sure I could watch a whole program without smashing the telly