A suitably depressing conclusion to the longest by-election

"The voters are never wrong," mused BBC Scotland's political editor Brian Taylor last night, referring to the near-breakthrough by the BNP in Glasgow North-east. Perhaps it would have been closer to the mark to say "the will of the voters must always be respected". After all, if the electorate is literally never wrong, it's a touch hard to rationalise away Adolf Hitler's elevation to the office of German Chancellor in 1933 on the back of a legitimate democratic victory. Setting off a chain of events that led directly to the most catastrophic war in human history, 60 million deaths and a genocide would appear to be something of a blunder by most standards.

Opinion seemed to be evenly split last night on whether Nick Griffin's Question Time appearance had played a pivotal role in very nearly taking the BNP to third place in the by-election. My strong feeling is that it must have done, but it does not follow from there that Griffin should not have been invited onto the programme. The issue at the time had been incorrectly framed - everyone seemed to be asking "how can the broadcasters help to defeat the BNP?". Some felt that the answer was to deny the party the oxygen of publicity, others suggested that the objective could best be achieved by subjecting Griffin's policies and fairytale assertions to open and intense scrutiny. But in truth it isn't a public service broadcaster's job to fathom a way of extinguishing the threat from a perfectly legal - if odious - political party. All that should have mattered was that the party in question had demonstrated sufficient electoral strength to justify an invitation, and therefore that invitation should have been forthcoming without any consideration of the consequences. Irresponsible? No, it's the very essence of democracy. At first glance Griffin's invitation appeared to suggest the BBC agreed with that interpretation of their role - but clearly they didn't. If they had, Griffin would simply have been asked to comment on the fairly dull issues of the day like any other panellist would have been on any other Question Time edition. Probably he would have given some fairly dull answers, while being suitably frustrated that he wasn't being given a platform to talk about race. Instead, the BBC appeared to take the schizophrenic view that Griffin's democratic mandate was legitimate enough to demand that he be included on the show, but not legitimate enough to demand that he be treated on the same basis as everyone else once he was there. Paradoxically, it was this approach that gave Griffin a platform he could scarcely have dreamed of, bestowing upon him a status that was effectively greater than his fellow panellists. It was, as others have noted, "An Audience with Nick Griffin". The complacent view of many afterwards was that the strategy had paid off handsomely with Griffin making an utter fool of himself - but the electoral evidence of Glasgow NE would appear to paint a somewhat different picture. For extremist fringe parties starting from a very low base of support, there's not really such a thing as bad publicity.

A name can tell a thousand lies

Interesting (not to mention dismaying) that Jeff has anecdotal evidence that the recent surge of publicity for the BNP could lead recent arrivals to these shores to wrongly conclude that the politics of the similarly-named SNP are similar. I used to know a Chilean man who had been frightened by a documentary on the BNP, and was completely convinced that not only was the SNP a similar sort of party, but was in actual fact the Scottish branch of the BNP! I was particularly surprised by this given that he had lived in Scotland ever since fleeing from the Pincohet regime in the mid-1970s, and therefore must have been here during at least part of the SNP's 70s heyday. But perhaps the language barrier had at that stage prevented him from following local political developments.

Unfortunately it's difficult to see in practical terms what the SNP can do about such confusion, although it does give all of us sympathetic to the party another reason (not that we need one) to hope that the BNP publicity circus dies away very soon. I do seem to recall a few years ago that Alex Salmond remarked in an interview that if he'd been starting from scratch, he'd have preferred to christen his party the 'Scottish Independence Party'. However, it is of course a complete non-starter for a large, mainstream party that's been around for seventy-five years to consider changing its name just because the Brit Fascists in the latest of their many guises have decided to part-copy it.

'Others' up 3% in Populus poll

More potentially good news for the SNP in the latest UK-wide Populus survey - the combined figure for parties other than Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats (which is all we have to go on for the moment) now stands at 12%, a three-point increase from the last survey. There is of course no way of telling yet whether this is due to increasing support for the SNP and Plaid Cymru or for UK-wide minor parties like UKIP, the Greens and the BNP, but at the very least it is in line with Saturday's ICM poll in suggesting that the squeeze on the non-Labour/Tory parties we saw in the autumn is now well and truly over. As in ICM, the Liberal Democrats see an increase in their share of the vote, while Labour is down a full five points to 28%.

Full figures -

Conservatives 42% (-1)
Labour 28% (-5)
Liberal Democrats 18% (+3)
Others 12% (+3)

So now begins the interminable wait to see what the Scottish breakdown is - but at least we know there'll be one eventually, which is not the case with ICM. I did have a quick peek at the Populus website on the off chance, but their 'latest poll' link directed me to a 'Fabulous Sex' survey for the News of the World, the fieldwork for which was supposedly carried out between the 23rd and 26th of February 2009. I know that polling is getting quicker, but that's impressive by any standards. Has someone at Populus invented a TARDIS?