Griffin is on the wrong side of history

The BNP leader's anti-Islamic rhetoric is out of step with events, such as Barack Obama's speech to Muslims in Cairo
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One of my kids' favourite books is called Fergus's Upside Down Day, in which events at a farm one day take a rather strange turn. This past week's events seem to me to have a similar "upside down" feel to them too.

On the one hand you had the British National party making a breakthrough into the European parliament and its leader Nick Griffin MEP making his customary contribution to good community relations, telling Sky News: "This is a Christian country and Islam is not welcome, because Islam and Christianity, Islam and democracy, Islam and women's rights do not mix."

Well, nothing new there, but in the same week we also witnessed two other events that utterly belied this unthinking prejudice: the first was the sight of an African-American US president speaking in Cairo addressing hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world and in the clearest terms possible renouncing the politics of confrontation and urging a more consensual approach based on shared values:



The second event occurred over the weekend with the appointment of Sadiq Khan, the MP for Tooting as the new transport minister and to the Privy Council, making him the first Muslim MP ever to attend cabinet meetings. Talking to the London Evening Standard – which is itself undergoing rebranding under new ownership after years of reactionary coverage under former editor Veronica Wadley – Sadiq Khan noted that:

My dad, when he first came to this country, he wouldn't have dreamed that his son would have gone to the cabinet. If he was alive now he'd pinch himself. When you're an immigrant and you're driving buses, working all the hours God sends, and when you live on the Henry Prince Estate, sometimes you can have limited dreams and expectations.

There has already been a lot of comment on Cif about the BNP victories and what they could mean. Given the events in Cairo and in our own parliament, I hope we can say that Griffin is standing firmly on the wrong side of history.

An essential part of being British is surely upholding prized shared values including the freedom of religion, the right to live our lives as we wish, subject only to our law, and to be free from being discriminated against based on one's race or religion.

These rights are matched by the responsibilities we owe to all our fellow citizens, to a common good. Our common bonds in humanity self-evidently demonstrate that there is more that unites us than divides us, as Obama so eloquently affirmed in Cairo.

Through seeking the scapegoating of minority groups, Griffin is betraying all that is good about modern Britain.

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