The fascist British National Party boasts: “BNP Head of Publicity and co-defendant in the famous Free Speech Trial, Mark Collett was last week invited to participate in a studio debate at BBC Radio Leicester about multiculturalism in the city. Mark was born and went to school in Leicester so is well acquainted with life there. The most striking aspect of the debate was that Muslims, and opposition MPs sat in the same studio with Mark giving a lie to the ‘No Platform for the BNP’ stance.”
BNP news article, 13 February 2007
It is of course absolute disgrace that Collett should be given a platform by a publicly funded radio station. This is the man who called asylum seekers “cockroaches” and urged cheering BNP supporters to “show ethnics the door in 2004”. A couple of years earlier he stated his admiration for Nazi Germany:
“National Socialism was the best solution for German people in the 1930s…. When people say ‘Do you take any inspiration from that?’, I mean, I honestly can’t understand how a man who’s seen the inner city hell of Britain today can’t look back on that era with a certain nostalgia and think, yeah, those people marching through the streets and all those happy people out in the streets, you know, saluting and everything, was a bad thing … would you prefer your kid growing up in Oldham and Burnley or 1930s Germany?”
The BBC’s own report illustrates how the racist propaganda of the fascists is given legitimacy by the anti-Muslim comments of mainstream politicians, with Collett echoing Jack Straw’s comments on the niqab and David Cameron’s warnings about the threat of Sharia law: “The BNP’s Mark Collett condemned the wearing of the veil by some islamic women, and said that wearing a full veil was ‘a powerful statement against integration’. He also claimed a high proportion of young Muslims want Sharia law in the UK.”