Free speech*

*Some terms and conditions apply.

This is weird. I don't like the BNP, racist fuckwits that they are, but I was under the impression that 'valid political parties' had gotten themselves excempt from laws such as this, on the grounds that suppressing or controlling political groups is tantamount to censorship: you can't form a group to politically discuss X.

A common argument against censorship is that what starts off to, say, prevent child-porn, will then be 'expanded' to prevent bestiality and other 'obscenities' before then being expanded further to suppress terrorism, then racism, then glorification of crime.

Sounds natural, until you realize just how much that covers: according to the people who censor the telly, glorification of crime, for example, includes anything that condones or glamorises violent, dangerous, seriously antisocial behaviour, or crime; anything explaining how to commit a crime^[1].

The problem there is that as 'crime' includes, say, refusal to pay tax, attempting to overthrow the gov', organized civil disobedience (smoking in pubs, maybe), and so on, then the law essentially is that you can't use the telly to suggest/co-ordinate civil resistance to the government: the government is in charge, challenging that is illegal, and thus it is illegal to publicly discuss ways to challenge it (excepting via the non-functional Electoral System). Hell, it sounds like it forbids mentioning WikiLeaks on the telly, as that explains how to break the censorship laws.

Or broadcast child porn, which is the reason touted out whenever the TV censors need justification.

Anyway, in order to safeguard at least themselves against totalitarianism, I was under the impression that political parties were excempt from certain laws, such as censorship and racism. After all, if the political parties of the 60's were subject to public decency or corruption of minors (e.g., 17-year-old's) acts, then they wouldn't have been able to discuss the decriminalization of homosexuality.

So it's odd seeing the BNP, who, for all that they're assholes, are a political party, being held to the race-relations laws, given that that would kinda destroy them.

You may form a political party for the decriminalization of gays, but, by jove, you can't do so in such a way that condones homosexuality for that is illegal.

You may form a racist political party, but, by jove, you may not do so in a racist way.

Hmm... I wonder if you could get "you may form a political party to actually give power to the people, but, if our broken electoral system doesn't work, you may not suggest that people take power, for that is illegal. By jove."?

(Oh look, apparently you can: for all their genuine political complaints, and for all the political cheating by the UK government, for a while some separatist Irish political parties were censored within the UK.)

On the other hand, given that their proposed change is to omit the whites-only requirement but have a requirement that every member "bona fide supports and agrees with each of the Principles of the Party", I'm not sure how that'll work: