bnp

Members of the United Kingdom Independence Party must be rubbing their hands with glee today. They're the subject of the day's leading news story. The Education Secretary has described them as “a mainstream party”. The Leader of the Opposition has effectively defended them. They are being portrayed as victims of discrimination, despite their own discriminatory policies.

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at a conference on racism, religion and public policy and so I thought I would do a quick blog on why the Alternative Vote (AV) will help to tackle extremist politics. (Ekklesia has been examining/exposing the links between religion and the BNP/extremism in politics/public policy, since 2004. For a list of articles, reports etc... see here ).

The BBC is not doing well on its reporting of religion this election. Firstly it wrote a highly speculative article about the role of religion in influencing the election - completely ignoring the substantial evidence on the subject.

Now it is reporting the 'news': 'BNP banned from Lichfield Diocese church hustings'.

The BBC headline is misleading for two reasons. As the BBC article itself makes it clear, the diocese has not in fact "banned" the BNP. Rather the diocese has just issued 'guidance' to its churches. It is up to individual churches to decide whether to act on the guidance.

Secondly, the headline should really be 'Diocese follows Church of England guidance'. The C of E issued this guidance through the Archbishops’ Council Mission and Public Affairs Division on 1st February. This advised churches not to invite extremist candidates to their hustings.

Gavin Drake, the diocesan communications officer quoted in the article, doesn't seem to have realised this, or, if he has, told this to the BBC. That or the message just didn't get through to the Beeb.

Anyway, this is neither a 'ban'. Nor is it news.