[Ever in favour of presenting an alternative take on events, here is a very different view on the exposure of the BNP’s membership list by the Wiki posse. As Mick Hume of Spiked says, there was a time when it was us lefties who were the subject of witch-hunts. Oh, and reprinted without permission, so sue me. Ed.]
19 November 2008
The furore over the leak of the British National Party’s membership lists ‘reveals’ some home truths about democracy as well as the far right.
The leaked publication of the details of 12,000 members of the British National Party (BNP) appears to have created almost as much fuss and front-page news as the British state’s recent losses of data on millions of people. This confirms the misplaced political obsession with the BNP, and the peculiar place that this small far-right party occupies in public life today. Many of those who were outraged by the authorities’ loss of disks containing personal data seem almost gleeful about the way that this leak has ‘exposed’ the BNP’s membership.