One of the reasons why the British National Party put forward 32 candidates in the regional list elections for the Scottish Parliament was to get a free television broadcast. Come the big day, Friday 13 April, when the 4 minute 40 second broadcast went out on five Scottish TV channels, and most people wondered why the BNP had bothered.There was Kenny Smith, the BNP's Scotland organiser, outside the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood spouting about how the other parties had failed Scotland and only the BNP offered a real alternative for "local people", which in BNP-speak means white people. Here is a man who can make even a Scottish lilt sound monotonic. To relieve the boredom a hyperactive director had put in ultra-short snatches of film which flitted about all over the shop. Couldn't the camera operator occasionally have kept the fingers off the zoom button? Shots of the outside walls of Holyrood hinted at desperation over the BNP's prospects of getting in.
Some bits, however, were truly inspired, though perhaps not in the way the BNP had intended.
While Smith was claiming that the BNP's opponents were "pro-immigration", viewers' eyes were drawn to a graphic at the top left corner of the screen in which several black figures danced about. It brought to mind the scene in the television series Roots, based on the novel by Alex Haley, in which the slave traders on the ship crossing the Atlantic bring the African slaves out of the cramped hold to exercise them so that not too many would die on the way to America.
But it is Smith holding the globe in the palm of his hand that has to take the prize. Some may remember that Smith is the man who used to sign off his letters "Kaz C18", C18 being Combat 18, the openly nazi terror group. And it was Smith who disgusted his neighbours when he lived on the Isle of Lewis by flying a swastika banner on 20 April, Hitler's birthday.
Perhaps in a subtle attempt to convey his true politics behind the back of the BNP's "respectable image" leader Nick Griffin, Smith may have been trying to emulate an image of his hero Hitler holding a globe in his hand, ambitious to spread the wonders of his Third Reich. But it was not Hitler. It was Charlie Chaplin in his fearless anti-Nazi satire The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin's Adenoid Hynkel, the ruthless dictator of Tomania, obsessed with world domination and wearing his double cross symbol, dances with a large inflatable globe to a theme from Wagner's Lohengrin.
No anti-fascist could have dreamt up such an exquisite scene for a BNP broadcast. Can Smith ever live it down? One wonders whether it is BNP supporters or opponents looking for a laugh who have been viewing the broadcast on the BNP TV website in such large numbers that the site went down within two days of the broadcast for exceeding its bandwidth.
The BNP may yet regret putting up its 32 Scottish Parliament candidates. At least 14 of them live south of the border after Smith, unable to find 32 people in Scotland mug enough to stand for the party, appealed in a BNP membership bulletin for English activists with Scottish sounding names to help out. Scotland on Sunday was quick to expose this and the BNP's other devious methods of pretending it has a presence in Scotland.
The party stands to lose £4,000 in election deposits as none of the regions is likely to return the 5% vote for the BNP needed to retain a deposit, let alone the over 6% required to get a candidate elected.
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