Fat Hitler

So, the BNP membership list has leaked online again. It contains not only the names of all members, but also their addresses and phone numbers. There is something vaguely depressing about this.

Yes, the BNP wants to be taken seriously as a political party and they cannot be allowed to do this with such a cloak-and-dagger approach to membership. If they feel they are doing nothing wrong, their membership list should be in the public domain. Anyone who's in the police force as well as the BNP should be held to account.

But I can't help thinking that the list has been leaked with the intention of a strangely left-wing vigilante campaign (or at least an impolite phonecall or two), and as soon as this happens we lose the moral high ground. This happened last week with Jan Moir's Daily Mail article too: no sooner had Twitter been flooded with complaints, it had also been flooded with Moir's home address. Did your mothers never tell you that this makes you as bad as them, eh?

Of course, there's also something depressing about the fact that the BNP membership list contains thousands of names. Thousands. *Puke*.

When Nick Griffin appears on Question Time this week, there will be extra security at the BBC, to protect him from the wrath of protesters. I'd love it if they all just stood perfectly still, cross-armed, frowning and tutting loudly, rather than reinforcing Griffin's view that we're all the same angry bastards underneath it all.

Guardian article: Twenty questions for the BNP.