I’m going to be out this evening so I won’t be able watch question time live. That said – here’s a prediction, Nick Griffin, odious little bigot that he is, will come off better than everyone expects. (In 1984 a similar TV appearance sparked JM le Penn’s rise to being, at one point, a serious candidate for president.)

The problem is – Question time, with its heated atmosphere and high pressure time constraints is exactly the kind of arena where people like Griffin thrive. The macho debate, the 10 word answer, this is Griffin’s bread and butter, it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know the next 10 words because he’ll get shouted down by Jack Straw in Demon Headmaster mode or an indignant Sayeeda Warsi before they ever become necessary.

My feeling is that we are only beginning to see the rise of the BNP and that tonight will be a big step up for them. I also think this is a good thing for British Politics.

I’ve said before on this blog that the hubris of campaigns like Hope not Hate and Nothing British (apart from the million Britons who voted for them?) doesn’t help. The more the mainstream parties try to exclude them, the more they get to play the victim, they thrive on hysteria.

The simple fact is that the dumber our politics is, the more people like the BNP will get elected. If they start to become an electoral force then the two main parties will be forced to respond and by far the best way to tackle the BNP is by improving the quality of political debate in this country. To steal a phrase from TV, make them say “the next 10 words and the next, and the next.”

Competition is good, and we could all do with a kick up the proverbial.

so… my homage to those who do it much, much better than me.

at 5… from the end of Madame Bovary (originally in french but the translation is equally brilliant)

"Everyone must have adored her, he thought.  Every man who saw her must certainly have coveted her.  This made her the lovelier in his mind; and he conceived a furious desire for her that never stopped; it fed the flames of his despair, and it grew stronger and stronger because now it could never be satisfied."

at 4… from the beginning of Ha’nacker Mill by Hilaire Belloc (another ethnically french writer but this time writing in english)

“Sally has gone who was so kindly, sally has gone from from ha’nackermill, and the briar grows ever since then so blindly, and ever since then the clapper is still, and the sweeps have fallen from ha’nacker mill.”

at 3… from Love in a Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez,

"He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past." 

at 2… the whole of Giles Coren’s rant about his missing “a” but in particular this paragraph

“Right,
Sorry to go on. Anger, real steaming fucking anger can make a man verbose.
All the best
Giles”

at 1… difficult one this one but I’m going with St John the divine and his revelations, it’s a bit funereal but it’s bloody brilliant.

“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

I’d be interested to see what the rest of you think… jed?

Perhaps a better way to put it is to say this, if you ostracise someone from a system, then trash the system, don’t be surprised if some people start to think that the enemy of their enemy is their friend. We built up a sense of hysteria around the BNP then drove everyone hysterical and when our worst fears were realised we wrung our collective hands and tutted about the state of the nation.

Don’t get me wrong, I fundamentally disagree with the kind of drivel espoused by the BNP, but is photoshoping Hitler’s head onto Nick Griffin really the best way to go about explaining that? It might be a good way for the hardcore youtubians to have a laugh but how many potential BNP voters do you think it will influence?

The only way to deal with the BNP is to go back to basics. This country protects our right to free thought, free speech and free association and that right doesn’t end just because the things you are saying or thinking, and the people you associate with are distasteful.

I suppose what I’m saying is this - the BNP thrive in hubris and hysteria, under calm scrutiny their flimsy pretence at rationalising their irrational hatred of non-white Britons withers. So we need to demand more of the mainstream parties, political hysteria is product of politicians treating the electorate as if they are too stupid understand the real issues. If we make our politicians talk to us like grownups, then the BNP will have to do the same.

They won’t be able to do it.

I agree with Stuart when he says the row has on on too long, in fact I thought it had gone on too long by Tuesday and was fast descending into the kind of Westminster gossip that nobody outside of parliament and the lobby correspondents gives a flying foxtrot about. I think this, not because it wasn’t serious, it was, but because I am looking at it from a party political point of view.

If Cameron really wants to stick it to Brown he should publicly forgive him and focus on getting back to the serious business of government. It’s his trump card – he gets to end the scandal, play the statesman and counter the most damaging attack against him, namely that he lacks gravitas. Despite the obvious temptation to twist the knife, he risks losing that trump card if it goes on much longer and the media start to lose interest.

That’s all… I’m going home now.

As a first foray into making this blog useful for aspirant PRs I thought I’d share some of the most common mistakes made by those applicants, a top 5 “do not do” list if you will.

1. Send email to generic email addresses – our personal addresses are all over the website, it isn’t hard. Even if it is hard, press releases are a good place to get contact details from.

2. Have no reason other than that we’re a PR company for applying. You should want to work somewhere for a reason. Wolfstar has a blog and a social media newsroom, it’s very very easy to find out a bit about what we’ve been up to.

3. Bad spellign, bad grammar  and typos– You won’t get a look in if an employer thinks you are going  to make them look amateurish. Ask a friend to be uber-critical and pick you up on every clumsy sentence.

4. “I have good communication skills and work well in a team or on my own.” It is a phrase that is (in some form or other,) in almost every CV I get and it MEANS NOTHING. firstly, your approach and writing style will tell the employer whether you have good communication skills or not, and working well “in a team or on my own”  just means you work well…

5. Have stuff you aren’t willing to defend anywhere online. I’m not saying don’t use facebook (employers are human and recognise that you have a private life,) but if your approach and CV get past anything more than a cursory glance, the next move will be to find out what isn’t in the CV, and that will involve Googling you.

That’s it for now – if anyone wants to add anything feel free…

I could very easily site the long hours at work, or that fact that I’m doing some more political stuff in my spare time as reasons for this but the truth is that I got bored. Well… perhaps boredom is wrong, the French have this word “ennui,” it means more than boredom, it’s boredom and apathy and lethargy and the general sucking of any kind of will right out of whichever poor b*stard gets it. The PR blogosphere just got so far removed from anything that affected my life that it started to feel like one of those interminable dinner parties with friends of a friend, the kind where if you had a gun you’d shoot yourself in the foot just to get invalided out.

Anyway, the blog got pointless so I stopped blogging until I could think of a point. And now I’ve thought of one.

It struck me that I’m now three (and a bit) years into what might be becoming at least a semi-decent career and, having made most of the mistakes possible during those three years, I could blog about how not to make them. So that’s what I’m going to do.

From now on, every post on this blog will be about one of two topics 1:how to get a good job in PR, 2:how to be a good junior PR person. I’m wiping my blogroll clean and splitting it into two lists – firstly, people aspirant PRs should be reading and secondly, a list of student / young PR people who I’d recommend to potential employers.

Obviously blogging and social media will remain a major theme so to kick off, I’m looking for single best student run blog I can find – Philip Young and Richard Bailey any thoughts?