Question Time was an early Christmas present for the turkey. The public is way better at humiliating Nick Griffin than politicians or playwright museum directors. Jack Straw, Lady Warsi and the other one were compromised by agreeing on tougher immigration controls while Bonnie Greer defaulted to an apolitical “but I know some basic history” mode. While Greer's face was a picture when Griffin talked about a non-violent Ku Klux Klan, the members of the public, the people in the audience having a go, were priceless.

The frank disbelief that audience members displayed when nervous Nick came up with such stupid and unbelievable answers to their questions should convince anyone that this guy is not leading a resurgence of fascism in Britain. They took him apart.

BBC iPlayer will carry the repeat. Clips of this TV show will be dissected throughout the media. The public event, re-witnessed by media commentary, will quite likely be defined by the offence Nick Griffin has caused in various ways. We might find ourselves arguing over the consensus about what is most offensive about him. In George Orwell’s 1984, the people assembled to ritually hate Goldstein. The live Question Time audience assembled to grill Griffin had none of that character - they just ritually humiliated him.

Meanwhile, immigration, the race card in British politics, got played by all the politicians, guaranteeing that immigrants themselves will continue to be blamed for social problems. Since the National Front in the mid to late 1970s, initial electoral success of far-right parties in Britain has been followed by their decline as governments adopted tough stances on the numbers of people coming to work or live here. Here we go again. All the political panellists collaborated with the nonsense that controlling the numbers of foreigners in Britain will contribute to improvements in housing, employment and social order. Fight the BNP by adopting tough immigration controls?*

The Brighton Salon will present The Myth of Racist Kids next month and one of the things I have learned from the author of that report, Adrian Hart, is that there are just so many people whose families are neither exclusively white nor non-white. The concept of biological race looks pretty stupid when you compare family members of different complexions, but these are the only people who are still racially defined – as mixed race!

The tiny minority of disaffected white working class people who vote BNP are clearly outnumbered by the disaffected white working class people whose spouses, children, and other family members are not white. The disaffected white working class people who hate everything the BNP stands for vastly outnumber every other social group of any kind in Britain.

* Phillipe Legraine argued for the removal of all immigration controls except on grounds of security. The thought-provoking and radical case he presented for this policy at The Brighton Salon is summarised at http://thebrightonsalon.com/Past-Talks/open-the-borders-allow-free-movement-of-the-people.html