BRITISH NATIONAL Party leader Nick Griffin has accused the BBC of organising a lynch mob against him on BBC's Question Timeand says he will not come again to London because it "is no longer British".
Mr Griffin is to lodge a formal complaint to the BBC about his treatment on the flagship current affairs programme, which attracted eight million viewers – three times its usual audience.
In Thurrock, Essex, yesterday, Mr Griffin, wounded by sharp criticism of his performance on the programme, said: "That Question Time– it was a lynch mob. That audience was taken from a city that is no longer British.That was not my country any more. Why not come down and do it in Thurrock, do it in Stoke, do it in Burnley?
“Do it somewhere where there are still significant numbers of English and British people living and they haven’t been ethnically cleansed from their own country.
“London is no longer a city my grandparents would recognise. It is changed beyond all recognition. There’s not much support for me there because the place is dominated by ethnic minorities.
“There is an ethnic minority that supports me: the English, but there’s not many of them left. Many of the ancestral Londoners have left over the last 20 years because they can no longer call it home,” he said furiously.
However, the Conservative Party’s mayor of London, Boris Johnson, rounded on the British National Party leader, saying that London had “no place” for his “extremist and offensive views”.
So far, more than 300 complaints have been lodged with the BBC about Question Time, with two-thirds coming from people who claim that presenter David Dimbleby and the other panellists had “ganged up” on Mr Griffin.
However, Mark Byford, the BBC’s deputy director general, said: “This very large audience clearly demonstrates the public’s interest in seeing elected politicians being scrutinised by the public themselves.
“The BBC is firm in its belief that it was appropriate for Mr Griffin to appear as a member of the panel and the BBC fulfilled its duty to uphold due impartiality by inviting him on the programme.”
Meanwhile, one of the other panellists, American playwright, poet and academic Bonnie Greer, who sat beside Mr Griffin, told the Daily Mailshe had "to restrain" herself from "slapping" him.
Relations between the two are strained because he once claimed she was “a black history fabricator”, but Ms Greer claimed he had repeatedly tried to “ingratiate” himself with her before the programme began.
“When he saw me, he turned and smiled his greasy smile and clumsily half extended a hand. I ignored it and thought to myself: ‘What are you about? Are you forgetting I’m black? Are you trying to show me you aren’t racist?”
Meanwhile, Mr Griffin’s assertion that the “indigenous” British people have a 17,000-year history on the island was dismissed by a number of leading academics, including Prof Chris Stringer of the National History Museum.
The Neanderthal inhabitants on the island before the Ice Age all died out, said Prof Stringer. “But people kept on coming. You have gene-flow from Celts, Picts, Romans, Saxons and so on, even gene-flow from the Middle East with the advent of agriculture.
“The idea that there’s any such thing as a pure, white British race is just not scientifically verifiable. All of us are hybrids in some sense. My Y chromosome seems to come from Ireland; my mitochondrial DNA seems to be European.
"It would be interesting to see if he's had his DNA done. He says he wants only indigenous Britons, but who are we? The reality is messy," said Prof Stringer, the author of Homo Britannicus.
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