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  1. Politics
14 October 2009

This morning, I’m in love with the Tories . . .

Sayeeda Warsi joins Question Time's "BNP panel"

By Mehdi Hasan

Hooray! Thank God for the Conservative Party.

Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.

According to the Times, the Tories will be putting up Baroness Warsi, the shadow minister for community cohesion, to represent them next week on BBC1’s Question Time against nasty Nick Griffin from the BNP — as I advocated they should in a post more than a month ago. Yesterday I had been full of despair upon hearing the news that Bonnie Greer would be on the panel, along with the boring, uninspiring, middle-aged, middle-class, white duo, Jack Straw (from Labour) and Chris Huhne (from the Lib Dems), and wondered why the BBC bosses and the three main parties seemed so unconcerned about the lack of a British-born ethnic-minority panellist or a British Muslim panellist to face off against the racist, Islamophobic Griffin. In picking the Dewsbury-born Muslim lawyer, Sayeeda Warsi, the Tories — and, to be fair, the BBC — have played a blinder and killed two birds with one stone.

The shadow community cohesion minister is ferociously feisty and combative, and will (I hope!) give Griffin a verbal kicking on the night. She also happens to be from Yorkshire where the BNP have made such inroads in recent months, winning 10 per cent of the vote and a seat in June’s European elections, and so she will have an opportunity to expose the Holocaust-denying, Muslim-baiting, hate-inciting Griffin to her fellow Yorkshiremen on national television.

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Good on the Tories! And good on the BBC! There’s two things you don’t often here me say on this blog. Makes a change, eh?

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