INTOLERANT BRITAIN

Protesters delay debate by David Irving and BNP leader Nick Griffin at Oxford

A group of protesters broke through the security cordon and forced their way into the Oxford Union last night, throwing a planned talk by BNP leader Nick Griffin and controversial historian David Irving into disarray. After pushing and shoving their way through the doors into the hall at 8.45pm they staged a sit down protest at the debating table. Scuffles erupted as the protesters tried to get into the building which had been surrounded by tight security ahead of the event.

Earlier, hundreds of noisy protesters surrounded the Oxford Union. The Oxford Union has been under significant pressure to cancel the freedom of speech event at which the two are guest speakers. Chanting, waving placards and singing, the crowd that gathered to object to their presence at the debating society was considerably larger than the handful of students inside the Union.

The rally organisers, including Unite Against Fascism and Oxford-based community groups, had hoped at least 1,000 people would turn up in their support. But estimates put the crowd numbers at closer to 500.

Those arriving for the event had to get past heavy security and faced jeers of "shame on you". The debate was "temporarily postponed" when police moved in to remove the protestors, before it finally started at 10pm, with speakers split into two groups for safety.

It was considered by university authorities to be too dangerous to walk Mr Griffin and Mr Irving across the quadrangle between the main Union building and the debating hall. Instead Mr Irving spoke alongside broadcaster and author Anne Atkins and Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris in the debating hall while Mr Griffin was among debaters speaking in the main Union building.

The decision to invite Griffin and Irving, made after a vote among members of the debating society, has outraged equalities watchdog chief Trevor Phillips and prompted a senior Tory MP to resign his life membership of the Union. Shadow defence minister Julian Lewis said the students should be "ashamed" of themselves. In a letter to the Union's officers and standing committee, Dr Lewis, MP for New Forest East, said he was resigning his life membership "with great sadness". In his resignation letter, he said: "Nothing which happens in the debate can possibly offset the boost you are giving to a couple of scoundrels who can put up with anything except being ignored."

The presence of the pair on the list of speakers prompted a series of high profile withdrawals from the platform, including Defence Secretary Des Browne. Martin McCluskey, president of the Oxford Student Union, said it was "disgraceful" the pair were being given the same platform as past speakers who include Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama. Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, who is billed to speak at the event, said banning Mr Griffin and Mr Irving would risk turning "bigots into martyrs".

The Oxford Union Debating Society is a separate body from the Oxford University Student's Union and the university. It has said it was important to give people of all views a platform. Mr Griffin, who was convicted in 1998 for incitement to racial hatred for material denying the Holocaust, has repeatedly insisted the BNP is not a racist group. Mr Irving has insisted he was not a Holocaust denier - despite spending three years in prison in Austria for the crime.

On Monday, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she "thoroughly deplores" their views. But Ms Smith, an Oxford graduate, said it was up to the debating society to make its own decision about allowing Irving and Griffin to attend the freedom of speech event. "They have been exposed and discredited time and again by people vastly more qualified than you in arenas hugely more suited to the task than an undergraduate talking-shop, however venerable."

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Chris Brand has more links about the events above





We are set on a course of 'planet saving' madness

Christopher Booker comments from Britain

The scare over global warming, and our politicians' response to it, is becoming ever more bizarre. On the one hand we have the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet another of its notoriously politicised reports, hyping up the scare by claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.

This carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.

On the other hand, we had Gordon Brown last week, in his "first major speech on climate change", airily committing his own and future governments to achieving a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 - which is rather like prime minister Salisbury at the end of Queen Victoria's reign trying to commit Winston Churchill's government to achieving some wholly impossible goal in the middle of the Second World War. Mr Brown's only concrete proposal for reaching this absurd target seems to be his plan to ban plastic bags, whatever they have to do with global warming (while his government also plans a near-doubling of flights out of Heathrow).

But of course he is no longer his own master in such fantasy exercises. Few people have yet really taken on board the mind-blowing scale of all the "planet-saving" measures to which we are now committed by the European Union. By 2020 we will have to generate 20 per cent of our electricity from "renewables". At present the figure is four per cent (most of it generated by hydro-electric schemes and methane gas from landfill). As Whitehall officials privately briefed ministers in August, there is no way Britain can begin to meet such a fanciful target (even if the Government manages to ram through another 30,000 largely useless wind turbines).

Another EU directive commits us to deriving 10 per cent of our transport fuel from "biofuels" by 2020. This would take up pretty well all the farmland we currently use to grow food (at a time when world grain prices have doubled in six months and we are already face a global food shortage). Then by 2009, thanks to a mad gesture by Mr Blair and his EU colleagues last March, we also face the prospect of a total ban on incandescent light bulbs. This compulsory switch to low-energy bulbs, apart from condemning us to live in uglier homes under eye-straining light, is in practice completely out of the question, because, according to our Government's own figures, more than half Britain's domestic light fittings cannot take them.

This year will be remembered for two things. First, it was the year when the scientific data showed that the cosmic scare over global warming may well turn out to be just that - yet another vastly inflated scare. Second, it was the year when the hysteria generated by all the bogus science behind this scare finally drove those who rule over us, including Gordon "Plastic Bags" Brown, wholly out of their wits.

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Britain: Schools minister neglects homework

Desmond Swayne, MP for New Forest West, tells me of a fearful problem affecting Hampshire schools, which have been told by the county education officer, Ian Beacham, that under new rules teachers must no longer drive pupils in mini-buses unless they have a full "passenger vehicle licence" - "a huge and expensive undertaking which entitles them to drive a coach or bus".

Threatening many extra-curricular activities, such as away sporting fixtures, this is causing such grief that Mr Swayne has asked in Parliament whether it is right that teachers should be forbidden to drive children in this way.

Schools minister Jim Knight didn't know the answer but said he would look into it. Harriet Harman, Leader of the House, suggested that Mr Swayne should move for a debate on the issue.

Had those ministers or Hampshire's education officer learned to use Google, they might have found in seconds that this is all a fuss about nothing. The two relevant EU directives on driving licences, 91/439 and 2003/59, make clear that teachers are exempted from the licensing requirements, as does a leaflet available at the click of a mouse on the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency website.

But does it not say something about the way we now allow our laws to be made in Brussels that neither ministers nor a council official responsible for enforcing them appear to know what those laws say?

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Maker of Undercover Mosque documentary considers suing police: "The documentary maker cleared by regulators of misleadingly editing a Channel 4 programme about extreme Islamic preachers is considering legal action. David Henshaw, the managing director of Hardcash Productions which made the Dispatches film Undercover Mosque, said he was still "very, very angry". With the backing of Channel 4 he hoped to launch a libel action against the West Midlands police and a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer who was quoted in a joint press release accusing Hardcash Productions of "completely distorting" what some of the preachers were saying. The media regulator dismissed the complaint saying it was a legitimate investigation. "I really don't like the libel courts and believe in a world of free comment. I don't mind abuse, but Hardcash's reputation has been severely damaged and it was a good reputation," Henshaw said. "The Ofcom judgment is great and if anyone bothers to read it they'll realise this was a bloody good programme. But damage was done that day in August, huge damage."