Stop talking up the **P

We said it before. Stop talking about them! It's actually a miracle that with levels of press coverage that put Cheryl Cole to shame, the nasty party only managed 6% of the popular vote.

Do not underestimate our contrarian nature. You tell people that something is nasty, evil, unacceptable and anti-mainstream and some will grow fond of it by default. Add "anti-politics" to the mix and, in 2009 in particular, you're sending the message out that this something is actually "cool".

Simplistic? Well, welcome to the point of the far-right. Superficial slogans dressed up as solutions for the slow-witted. "Yeah fuck'em all, I'm voting B*P, we need a bit of a cleanup, don't we" is the consequence of industrial levels of free publicity handed over to Griffin's party in the last few months, a marketing campaign that would put Saatchi & Saatchi to shame without having spent a single penny for it.

Just imagine. If every single edition of the Guardian & co and if every single political debate had been centred around how nasty, dangerous, toxic and evil Bob Crowe's NO2EU was, the far-left group would have netted three times its actual share of the vote. Imagine Dispatches and Undercover building up an aura of intrigue and naughtiness around the shady underworld of "commie unionists". Imagine Lord Whatsit live on Question Time making a public call to boycott them and the papers writing about it the following day. No such thing as bad publicity, right?

Today, that acronym, beginning with B and ending with P is possibly one of the few known to the entire British population. For the past month no paper, tabloid or news broadcast was to be found without any reference to it. The Guardian is even running a feature to show you where the B*P is in your area and an endless succession of columns and articles that explain how evil they are from each angle. Rockstars have "rallied" against them. Archbishops have called for their "boycott".

Even Alistair Campbell, universally identified as the most rotten and devious side of politics since Tony Blair, penned a piece for the Independent about the importance of stopping the B*P.

Smeared politicians from all 'mainstream' parties are lecturing people that they'd better not put the cross on you know who and the right-wing tabloids, in the meantime, while routinely calling the B*P "vile", keep doing the groundwork for them with their daily "Illegal asylum seeker lesbian gets dog to maul blonde baby" headlines.

Griffin egged at a press conference grabs the front page news. The 'blogosphere', whatever that means, is having a collective seizure as they remind people to vote whoever but.

So, really, the fact that the B*P only managed 2 MEPs is actually a miracle.

Still, look at the post-electoral miles of ink wasted on the subject. 2 MEPs and 6% of the popular vote and look at the disproportionate publicity. What's this patronising crap that each and every politician and professional columnist are saying: that the B*P is successfully intercepting votes of disaffected white working class voters (see here, here, here, here, here, and here just to get an idea). What, 2 out of 72 MEPs? Is that it? What about the overwhelming majority i.e. the millions of working class votes that did not go to the B*P?

So let's drop the hysterics and put things into perspective. 94 per cent of those who bothered to vote did not vote for the 'nasty' party. Millions more did not vote at all. If they wanted to channel their protests via Griffin & co they'd have done so. They didn't.

Like historian Joanna Burke said: "Don't censor or oppress the BNP. Marginalise and ridicule them. Ridicule is an underestimated weapon". Now let's pull the plug on them.