One Week with John Gulliver: MP and Junior Minister Margaret Hodge on the BNP challenge facing her in Barking

 

'The political challenge of my life' for Margaret

 

SOUNDS of a fierce battle echoed through the hall at TUC Congress House in Bloomsbury on Saturday.

The battlefield is in Barking – and facing each other in the coming election scrap are Margaret Hodge, the sitting MP, and Nick Griffin, leader of the far right British National Party.

Normally, I wouldn’t be tempted to report something so far from these borough’s boundaries. But in today’s apathetic political climate, is Barking too far? Are there not links between east London and Camden?

It may sound far fetched but isn’t it possible that there’s a link between the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the parliamentary scandal engulfing MPs, the growing indifference to politics, and the emergence of a populist far right confident it can capture its first seats in the Commons? 

It was almost as if Margaret Hodge – a former leader of Islington Council – had read my mind when she began her speech.

Speaking with passion before a packed audience, she said: “This is the biggest political challenge of my life. I have been in politics for 40 years and I believe this is, by far, the most important political question facing us.”

She exhorted the audience to imagine what it would be like if there were BNP MPs in the Commons.

By “us” she didn’t just mean the Labour party in Barking but, I think, the people of Britain, faced, as she saw it, with the possible rise of the British National Party.

As an immigrant who had come to Britain at the age of five, she said she had fought racism and fascism since the 1970s, but there were differences between the far right of 30 years ago and those of today – then they could be identified as skinheads and by their tattoos. Today, her BNP opponents in Barking wear suits, she warned.

At first they appear respectable on the “knocker”, and it takes time before their real outlook on life emerges, almost by stealth.  

More than a year ago Hodge had become a bête noir among lefties annoyed by what they saw as her exaggeration of the rise of the British National Party, and her challenge to debate real fears people had about immigration.

Occasionally, one or two people heckled Hodge, almost politely during her speech on Saturday, but you could feel the  audience were seized by her passion and exhortation.

Was it that or were they anxious about the growth of the BNP?

Pleading with the audience to help her leafleting campaign in Barking, she said: “I know some of you have differences with me and with the government, but whatever they are I plead with you to help defeat this threat of fascism in Barking.”

If she had gone down on bended knees she couldn’t have made a more telling plea.

Another speaker, Weyman Bennett, leader of the anti-far right organisation that had organised the conference, also warned of the rise of the English Defence League who he claimed were, in effect, street fighters for the BNP – and he had photographs to prove it, he said.

He described a barely reported “rampage” by more than 1,000 EDL supporters through the streets of Stoke recently where shop windows had been smashed and members of the public attacked. 

At the end of the conference, while the whiff of political gunpowder still hung over the hall, an organiser, Martin Smith, warned police had been called because 25 EDL supporters had gathered near Congress Hall, and that one man had been attacked. Is the Barking question such an abstract one?

• DOES Margaret Hodge, a junior minister, know something we should know? In her plea on Saturday for volunteers to help leaflet her constituency, she made it clear there were only ‘twelve weeks’ before the election. This would mean the election is scheduled for the first week in May.

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Switched-on lawyer’s dramatic deeds worthy of TV

DID I see too many episodes of my favourite TV series, Judge Deeds?

The more I read about the Binyam Mohamed torture case this week the more I thought about the maverick judge and the plots to influence the judiciary.

It wasn’t so much the unprecedented way David Miliband’s counsel Jonathan Sumption QC had complained in a letter to Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger – Rabbi Julia Neuberger’s brother-in-law – about his critical judgment of the government, but what happened afterwards.

The world wouldn’t have known about the letter if both Sumption and Neuberger MR hadn’t referred to it in court a few days later.

Reporters didn’t know what they were talking about, but because it had been referred to in court, this allowed Binyam’s barrister Dinah Rose QC and Richard Stein, an Islington solicitor, to hand out copies of it to the press.

Later, in court, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge questioned Rose’s conduct, to which she replied: “There’s a time when advocates need to take a stand.” 

What a line this would have made in an episode of Judge Deeds, which stars Martin Shaw.

The LCJ said he was “astonished”, according to the publication The Lawyer, and added: “You’ve apologised to the court and the less said about this matter  the better.”

I have always understood that if a document is referred to in a court, it becomes fair game for that to be reported by the press.

So, Sumption, eager to shut down coverage of the case, mentioned the letter – and opened the door to Stein and Rose.

You could say this is just a bit of a spat among lawyers.

But the Binyam Mohamed case, alleging MI5 knew about torture of British citizens, is a ticking timebomb for the government.

All parties now wait to hear what MR Neuberger will say in the next few days in a new judgment.  

Will he reinstate seven paragraphs, withdrawn following Sumption’s intervention? Paragraphs that could be damning of MI5. Or will he keep them out of the public domain?   

This is as good as any Judge Deeds storyline!

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Hit for six by playwrights’ love of cricket

 
HAROLD Pinter could often be a bit of a shouter on public platforms.

Even so I remember how I warmed to his booming voice at a protest meeting at Conway Hall in the 90s.

But even if he hadn’t been a daring dramatist I would have admired him for our shared love...of cricket.

What I didn’t know was that most of the time Pinter and Samuel Beckett got together they talked about cricket. Pinter, of course, played with passion, but so did Beckett. He was so good that he toured England as a member of the Irish team in the mid-1920s.

This gem came from that enfant terrible of the publishing world in the 1960s, John Calder, still beavering away on poetry in his 80s.

John, who introduced Beckett to London, told me how once, while watching a game at Lords, a friend of Beckett’s remarked: “What a beautiful day. It makes you happy to be alive.” To which the dramatist replied: “I wouldn’t go that far.”

Antonia Fraser, who gave a talk on her great love affair with Pinter at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon last week, shared a similar incident. “Harold said to Beckett: ‘I’m feeling awfully gloomy today, Sam.’ And Beckett said, ‘Well you can’t feel more gloomy about the world than I am’.”

She added: “I remember writing my diary that this was exactly the kind of conversation that the world always thinks Beckett and Pinter have. Of course, most of the time they talked about cricket.”