Somehow the appearance of BNP leader, Nick Grifffin, on a political talk show caused a huge uproar. However, people are forgetting that we have had a very extremist party in power for at least the last 12 years.

New Labour, like Thatcher's Tories, have enthusiastically supported the extremist economic policies of Milton Freidman and the IMF. These policies dictate that every aspect of life should be left for the market to decide. Whether it is healthcare, roads, education, food production and just about anything else you can think of. The New Labour extremists have even gone even further than Friedman by privatising aspects of the military. This is one area that Friedman said shouldn't be touched. The gap between rich and poor in the UK is at its worst for almost 40 years. Real wages have been declining for at least 20 years. It is also official that most of the population were better off economically under Margaret Thatcher than right now. And that is saying something.

Then there is the extremist foreign policies. Was Bill Clinton an extremist when during his Presidency the CIA said that it was now official policy to have the right to use force to defend the United States' markets and interests? Does anyone, anywhere refer to the US as a rogue state as it was convicted of terrorism in the World Court for its actions in Nicaragua? The US reacted to the judgement by increasing the terrorism and adopting it as official policy when they ordered forces under their control to attack "soft targets" such as schools and hospitals. Back in the UK was Tony Blair an extremist for willingly cooperating with the US in the legal invasion of Iraq which has directly led to the deaths of over 250 000 Iraqis?

The BNP is not a political party. It is a racist lobby group without the white sheets. However, a sign of a civilized society is to judge ourselves the way we judge others. It is a sign of our intellectual culture that we cannot bring ourselves to do that. That was certainly true on Question Time the other night. The so-called 'mainstream' parties are no less extreme than the BNP, they are just extreme in a different way.