I resent giving the BNP more air-time than they deserve, but I was so amused by a great post on a ‘Comment is Free’ debate, which was brilliantly reminiscent of Jonathan Swift, that I feel moved to acknowledge and reproduce it.
The post was in response to a terribly earnest article, which set out a list of 20 questions which David Dimbleby or the audience might pose to Nick Griffin on BBC’s Question Time. Writing under an assumed pseudonym, CourtneyLove suggested the following question: “How hard would you stab a grey squirrel in the face, on a scale of one to ten?”.
This reminds me of Swift’s A Modest Proposal, in which – as I’m sure most people know – the poet and essayist suggested that an appropriate response to the famine in Ireland would be for people to eat their children.
I’m not suggesting any correlation between squirrels and babies, or indeed BNP members with the British establishment (which was the intended object of Swift’s critique). But, in the context of literally hundreds of posts in response to the original article, I was struck by the sheer power and force of satirical humour.
Swift would eat Griffin for breakfast.
Graham Hitchen 