I’ve never said it before and I doubt I’ll say it again but, despite the initial hilarity of the situation, I do have some sympathy with the British National Party over the leaking of its membership list.
Few things wind the Minister up as much as unsolicited telephone sales calls that interrupt his dinner. I have reported a few organisations to the Information Commissioner for disturbing my lobster thermador/cheese-on-toast for using my personal data without my consent.
While I am currently unaffiliated I have been, variously, a member of the Student Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party and Socialist Alliance. I am not ashamed of any of that – unlike, I suspect, many of the 10,000 on the BNP list. But nor was it up to a disaffected member of any of those organisations to declare my affiliation to the world without my permission.
Whether we like it or not the British National Party is a legitimate political party. It is not proscribed; membership is not illegal. I won’t be so crass as to quote Evelyn Beatrice Hall but, despite the efforts of a succession of idiotic Home Secretaries, it still remains lawful in 2008 Britain to subscribe to views that are abhorrent to anybody with half-an-inch of brain.
It remained lawful to be a member of the National Front throughout the 1970s.
It remained lawful to be a member of Sinn Fein throughout the 1980s.
It remained lawful to be a member of the Conservative Party throughout the 1990s.
Some people may have found some or all of those memberships to be embarrassing and/or difficult to explain away, but they nevertheless had the right to exercise their political freedom.
The only justification for the leak is in respect of those people performing public-facing roles that are incompatible with membership of a racist organisation. So if the police force has deemed it unacceptable for an officer to be a member of the BNP, then the disclosure of the names of serving police officers who are paid-up BNP members in contravention of their terms and conditions of employment arguably has some merit on the grounds of public interest. The same is potentially true for teachers, doctors, those involved in the criminal justice system and so on.
It is, however, stretching credulity for the same to be said to be true of graphic designers in Poole, Dorset (or whatever) or the children of simpletons who took out ‘family’ membership.
It is interesting (and heartening) to know just how few members the BNP actually has, though it would probably be equally interesting to learn just how few individual members the Labour and Tory parties have were their books laid open to similar public scrutiny.
That in itself, however, does not justify the mass invasion of the privacy and legal rights of the majority of people in the membership database – ordinary citizens.
I am a hypocrite. I posted yesterday morning’s entry in the giddy rush of knee-jerk excitement at seeing the nasty racists get what is coming to them and without giving the matter due consideration. In retrospect I should not have linked to the database and I am removing that link now (though the database itself remains accessible).
The initial reaction of most of the media has been similar to mine and, I contend, similarly ill-considered.
Save for those in public-facing roles, it does not matter whether you are or ever have been a member of the British National Party. What matters is what you say, what you do and how you live your life: for that, the BNP 10,000 may warrant vilification – simply for carrying a membership card, they do not.
Whatever “we” are, we are not Salem and the Ministry is not the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
If I were a card-carrying member of a political party, I probably would want the public at large to know about it. There is nothing either legally or morally secret about membership of a democratic political party. On the contrary we have freedom of political affiliation enshrined in our constitution. Shouldn’t membership of a political party entail shouting it from the rooftops anyway? I’m not sure why there is some sort of assumption that members of a political party have a given need to keep their membership a secret, particularly if they have joined a party which is an extreme pressure group which requires maximum publicity. Why all the secrecy? How are you going to publicise your beliefs if no-one knows what you believe?
What?
Really?
Oh…sorry, you’re thoroughly ashamed of your appalling disgusting racist party that you’ve joined and you’d rather die than anyone find out.
Oh sorry, yes you have all my sympathy.
You cunt.
Sorry but I vehemently disagree (while openly admitting I laughed my arse off when I first heard about this).
First, while membership of a legitimate political party is not mandatory, neither is disclosing that fact. There are good reasons why one might wish to keep that fact quiet, even with parties rather more mainstream than the BNP.
For example, as you may recall, we both used to work as solicitors for a City law firm. During part of that time I was a card carrying member of the Labour Party. It was not a secret, I was not ashamed of it and if any friends or colleagues engaged me in political discussion it became fairly clear where my sympathies lay. However, I am not sure I would have wanted my political affiliation to have been common knowledge to the firm at the point I was applying to work there, or for my clients to have access to that information. Corporate lawyers as a species and their merchant banker clients don’t naturally dress to the left and I didn’t see the point of making that unpleasant part of my life any more unpleasant by turning up to the office wearing a Labour lapel badge.
Second, the information available on this database is not just a bald list of members’ names. It is also – in many, if not most, cases – members’ home addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, professions and other personal information.
As a solicitor I have professionally upset people from time to time. I professionally upset someone in 2003 to the extent that he made the professional personal. He felt compelled to turn a professional dispute, in which I was simply representing my client’s interests (which diverged from his interests), into a personal vendetta. In fact, he tracked down my mother, tricked her into disclosing my ex-directory telephone number and phoned my home telephone number 40+ times a day for a few days until BT agreed it was probably sensible for them to change my number.
For reasons like that I don’t want my personal contact information to be in the public domain as a consequence of being a member of a political party any more than I want my personal information published by Nectar or my bank, or to be tricked out of my mother, or to be on a memory stick, laptop or CD-ROM left on a train by a civil servant.
It’s fine to say that membership of a political party should theoretically involve an element of activism but the two things are very different.
While they are not political parties I am a member of Amnesty International, Liberty, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. (Some people would consider Greenpeace in particular to be “an extreme pressure group”.)
While I pay my monthly dues, write occasional letters, sign a few petitions, buy some raffle tickets, rant on this website and generally support those organisations’ aims, I am not an activist insofar as I don’t rattle tins outside Sainsbury’s, I don’t go on marches, I don’t knock on doors and I don’t spend my live communing with dolphins. This may make me lazy, complacent and/or pathetic but that’s the way the vast majority of people feel about political matters.
There is nothing wrong with being a supporter without being an activist. If there were, Old Trafford would have to hold 3,000,000, not 72,000.
Ultimately, we can’t have one rule for members of one legitimate political party with which we disagree, and another rule for every other party. If we want to do that, we should proscribe the BNP using due process. Successive governments have chosen not to do that.
That decision may be open to criticism, but until they do, BNP members – however abhorrent their views – are subject to the same legal rights and protections as the rest of us.
If we allow people to victimise BNP members today, what’s to stop those people from victimising us tomorrow?
Not being sufficiently inquisitive, I had not sought out the list myself, so had not appreciated the ‘personal details’ bit. That is an invasion of privacy. I still don’t sympathise, naturally, but I recognise it as fundamentally wrong.
I am less sure about the need for/approach to secrecy over political affiliation. I don’t think we should victimise people for their views (any more than I think BNP members should encourage us to victimise asylum seekers or left-wing politicians) but given that I can’t accept that anyone should be discriminated against for their political beliefs, I can’t accept an institutionalised approach based on secrecy – this enshrines discrimination.
The fact is, we as a country are deeply embarrassed by our politicians and embarrassed to ally ourselves to ideology. We live in a world without politics. Only once in a blue moon – Mandela, Obama, Blair? – does someone come along that it’s not embarrassing to support…and even then.
I am torn therefore, between an acknowledgement that in a democracy, people of all political persuasions should be treated equally, and a recognition that if you join the BNP it serves you jolly well right if your family, friends and employers get to hear about it. If you’ve something to be ashamed of, don’t fcuking join that organisation.
For the record, I don’t think your being a card-carrying member of the Labour party should or would have harmed your prospects in your job as a City solicitor. It might have made you slightly more unpopular with Jamie Dykes (who freely admitted he was a card-carrying member and activist for the Tory party and had been a member of the Young Conservatives) but on balance I think you could have lived with that (and it probably wouldn’t have done – at least you could have had someone to debate with). In particular because as you say, people would have found out anyway and you weren’t ashamed to let them know.