Would the panel bring 'Your Choice Barnet' back in-house?

Yes, I'm still here, haven't shuffled off this mortal coil yet - sorry, is that in poor taste?

I'm in good health but I keep having flashbacks of West End doorways crammed with the bodies of the homeless - even as far as the door of the Ritz Hotel. Oh, I forget, that was the early 1990s and the logic of Margaret Thatcher's policies of decimating industry, removing Income Support from 16- and 17-year-olds and closing the old mental asylums was working itself through.

The world's nothing like that now, of course. We're many years further into the neoliberal reforms pursued by the erstwhile MP for Finchley. Reforms such as the financial "Big Bang" - liberalisation and deregulation of the City. See how well that worked out!

This evening a special edition of "Question Time" will be recorded in Finchley; I expect they always planned to come here when Margaret Thatcher died. Lucky she did it in the Easter hols, then, and they can take over Finchley Catholic High School for a couple of days.

Despite the best efforts of local newspaper journalists to find Barnet Tories who remembered Thatcher's days here, and had a kind word to say about her, the choice of Finchley for this special - if you like, "commemorative" - QT feels oddly beside-the-point. The world, including Finchley, has moved on. Never mind, here comes the caravan.

For the past couple of days we have been lost in a sort of misty blue nostalgia-fest where only the good side of being a hard-faced, ultra-right winger espousing rampant individualism has been considered. On a personal level it might have been depressing if I had watched the television or read a newspaper, but I've managed to avoid all of them.

I don't have a ticket for tomorrow night's QT either, although I did dutifully apply for one. I hope that some of my fellow campaigners have had more luck and that we will see one or two familiar faces in the audience. I can already predict some of the questions:

• Does the panel think that MT was the greatest PM of the 20th Century/ever?
• Does the panel think that the public should pay for MT's funeral?
• Does the panel think the Queen is wrong to attend MT's funeral?
• What does the panel think is MT's greatest contribution to politics?
• How many years does the panel think Glenda Jackson should spend incarcerated in the Tower of London for daring to say publicly what others have thought privately?

I have my own answers to these questions which you can probably guess at. I only hope that someone - on the panel or in the audience - has the guts to criticise Thatcher's works and her legacy, which we are well and truly living with and suffering from today, in Barnet as much as anywhere.

Indeed, tonight I'll be a few yards up the road from QT, in North Finchley at the Greek Cypriot Community Centre, Britannia Road, N12, where from 7-9pm the Barnet Alliance has a public meeting to explain why we want Barnet Council to bring 'Your Choice Barnet' back in-house.

This outsourced service providing support to disabled adults was supposed, believe it or not, to generate a surplus. It isn't, it is losing money and is having to be bailed out. Worse, in order to make the books balance, the management want to cut staff pay, and to reduce the quality of the service. All of this is a scandal and of a piece with the privatising, cutting agenda that Thatcher instigated and that her political heirs among the Barnet Tories are continuing.

Speakers at the meeting include John Sullivan, parent-carer of a user of the 'Your Choice' centre.

Please join us if you can at this important meeting, and please sign our petition on the Barnet Council website. You can find more details about the meeting here.

The BBC's Nick Griffin night

Last night's "Question Time", I fear, will have done the BNP more good than harm. All the people who already hated Nick Griffin will still hate him and will have enjoyed the majority of the audience giving him hell. He deserved it.

But he played his cards very close to his chest, denied all the worst things, mugged, smiled a lot, joshed with Bonnie Greer, and told the establishment politicans some uncomfortable home truths. Jack Straw had no answer when Griffin talked about the Iraq war - you could hear the audience sitting on their hands so as not to clap him.

Labour, Tory and Lib Dem all seemed to be in denial about the fact that a lot of people don't like seeing two men kissing - it's true. That fact is not the end of debate on that issue, but it's true. The vast majority of people in the UK are of white English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish descent; their ancestors have 'been here' for hundreds of years - what conclusions flow from that it's not clear, but it's a fact. The establishment seemed to be in denial.

The only actual policy debated all night was immigration - and on that the three mainstream parties bickered and fell over themselves to compete on the BNP's territory.

Then there was the actual format of the programme. Having decided that the BNP has crossed the threshold whereby, playing by the usual rules, they must be invited onto the programme, the Beeb then tore up the rule book and geared the whole show around exposing - it looked more like ritually humiliating - one of the panellists.

All in all, I think it was a gift to Griffin and the BNP. Anyone who might have been wooed by him, probably was.

Why I'll join the protest at Television Centre tomorrow

This evening BBC director general Mark Thompson is defending the decision to invite Nick Griffin onto "Question Time" tomorrow night. I think it was a bad decision - made in the first place not by him but by the editors of the programme.

They had the discretion whether to invite Griffin on or not and they chose to invite him on out of some mistaken sense that since he gets x% of the vote he therefore has earned the right to x% of airtime. The simple fact is that going on "Question Time" normalises Nick Griffin and his politics and we can't afford to normalise him.

Nick Griffin will be answering whatever questions are put to him on the night; they could be on anything - climate change, the postal strike, "The X Factor" - on some level, appearing on this show helps to normalise Nick Griffin.

There's nothing normal about a party that won't allow non-whites to join it, has violent thugs among its leadership, preaches hatred of a whole religion (just one for now) - Islam - hates trade unions and socialists, gay people, the European Union, foreigners, glorifies a mythical white race and its supposedly spotless past. A fascist party, that offers only reactionary answers to social problems.

In late teenage I finally cottoned on to the fact that most people on TV are middle-class and probably went to public schools. There's nothing wrong with that as such, but it isn't normal. The people who populate our television screens, on the whole, and commission and schedule the programmes, etc, are not, collectively, normal. I think a lot of them live in a cocoon. Their values are skewiff. On this occasion they think they are opposing censorship and standing up for free speech. I think they are dangerously out of touch.

Censorship: however "establishment", the BBC is not the state. "Question Time" is a programme, not a national election, and certainly not a party political broadcast. I would be against the British state censoring the BNP - I'm against the state censoring political expression. But, to repeat, the BBC is not the state.

Free speech: the right to free speech does not oblige people to give the BNP a platform. In a Guardian article Lib Dem Chris Huhne makes a reasonable fist of explaining why he will debate Griffin, including this:

I would not appear at a meeting organised by the BNP, and nor would I extend an invitation to them. It is no part of the business of an elected liberal to drum up larger audiences for our most reviled opponents. They are welcome to their freedom of speech, but they can choose their own street corner and their own soapbox without my help.

He sounds as though he has a much sounder grasp of what's at stake here than Mark Thompson.

Complacency

The simple fact is, I think, a lot of middle-class people, and especially at the BBC - who also gave the BNP a soft ride in a "Newsbeat" interview recently, of all things - are complacent about what the BNP and other far-right or racist groups, like the English Defence League, represent.

If it is a defence to say that the BNP gets 6% in elections, what is the establishment going to let them do if they start getting bigger votes? I don't trust the establishment or the state to save us from fascism. The BBC, on the current showing, will just roll over and say "well, a lot of people like them, you know".

On 10 October about 500 English Defence League racists and fellow-travellers and - alas - people they picked up on the day, had the run of Manchester city centre while an anti-racist counter-demonstration was corralled by the police in Piccadilly Gardens. The fascists are audacious and the only thing that can persuade them to back down now is large mobilisations of people who oppose them. That happened in Harrow a few weeks ago, although I fear that the fascists have learned lessons from that day and might come back for a second try. In any case, they are currently on a tour of the UK, with Scottish and Welsh Defence Leagues also being set up.

Free speech is not the issue. Stopping the fascists from growing is the issue and the more of us that show up when they show up, the easier that will be.