Reporting the BNP

Calderdale branch member Helen Gavaghan attended the NUJ's meeting on reporting the BNP, held in Manchester on 25 July. The following is the full version of the report she filed for Journalist magazine.


Journalists must challenge the British National Party, Jeremy Dear, president of the National Union of Journalists, told a regional meeting of the Union at The Mechanics Institute in Manchester.

"The important thing is that the Union is not neutral [on this subject], and not neutral on groups that disrupt the cohesion of local communities," he said.

Although the meeting was an internal one, northern regional organiser Chris Morley accepted that all present were journalists and said that the speakers would declare if anything they said was off the record. None did.

The first speaker was Paul Scarrat, secretary of Yorkshire & Humberside Unite Against Fascism, who emphasised that the BNP is a white supremacist group. That view was underlined by Ian Wood, assistant editor of the Manchester Evening News. That newspaper accepts no advertising from the BNP.

Delegates and speakers alike were united that, in the words of NUJ vice chair Pete Murray, "not giving them coverage will not exclude them from elected office".

What makes the BNP different from other political parties, said Wood, is that they are not honest about their views and intent and do not believe in equality.

But BNP clarity about its views is what most angered the ethics chair, Chris Frost. Exploring their website, he said, left him feeling like he wanted to take a bath. Members struggling with how to report the BNP could call the NUJ’s ethics council, he said.

Duffy made less of a blanket condemnation of the BNP’s elected representatives, saying that many she had spoken with did not know their own manifesto. The observation drew ribaldry from the floor and a rebuke to delegates from Morley, speaking from the podium. He noted that the meeting was about exchanging views, knowhow and experience.

Veteran Yorkshire Evening Post reporter, Peter Lazenby, had another side of the story, recalling that he had met aggression from the BNP when reporting them in Court. Dear also said he has been pilloried by the BNP.

Dear’s take-home message was that journalists have a responsibility to challenge the BNP, especially on issues where they have sought influence, such as on national policy toward asylum seekers.

What was clear from the meeting is that journalists face the dilemma that they have faced since the BNP’s inception - whether to give voice in political debate to views built around the crackpot notion of excluding from the British Isles anyone who cannot trace their ancestry here back for millennia, or whether to threaten freedom of speech by starving the party of the oxygen of publicity.

By advocating that NUJ members always challenge the BNP to explain their views, Dear is opening the way for the BNP to, in Murray’s words, "sound its own death knell".