The BNP do not deserve a place in this debate

BNP leader Nick Griffin will appear on Question Time next week alongside Justice Secretary Jack Straw, Lib-Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne and black playwright Bonnie Greer. The Conservatives have yet to nominate a politician to appear.

This is a thousand times worse than racist spats set up by the wily producers of Big Brother to attract prurient interest.

Even in our lax world, where right and wrong are but canapés on a tray of many choices, this decision should produce revulsion.

The excuse used is that more than 900,000 people voted for the party during June's European elections and the bulldoggish Griffin is now an MEP.

True, the party now cleverly wears the disguise of patriotism and insinuates itself into the hearts and minds of depressed and credulous citizens who want to blame immigrants for their ills. That doesn't make it acceptable or respectable.

BNP leaders may not any more talk or walk like the Gestapo but where we can't see them, they affirm white supremacy and reveal hatred for Jews, Muslims, black, Arab and Asian Britons, mixed-race couples and children and dark-skinned immigrants.

Those of us in the public eye have experienced dark terror when targeted by such extremists.

Yet this week two young BNP officials - who were allowed by the BBC to remain anonymous and unidentified as such - were brought on to Radio 1 to racially insult the footballer Ashley Cole - and they were not challenged once.

What is behind this sordid affair between the corporation and the sicko party? Maybe the BBC wants to be seen as valiantly un-PC.

If so, it shows itself to be criminally irresponsible and lacking in any sense of history.

Democracy, is it? To open the most respected TV programme in the land to those who would deny millions of us our democratic rights? Throw the BNP to John Humphrys or Nicky Campbell if you must, but this honour stains the good name of Question Time.

Jack Straw, Chris Huhne and Bonnie Greer should not have agreed to appear with any BNP representative on the show.

We all want to get on to Question Time - but there are limits. These panellists will help to normalise those who should be pariahs.

For rational and reasonable arguments with bigots are wasted breath. I tried last Friday to argue passionately on BBC Radio 2 with UKIP's Godfrey Bloom, who cheerfully calls his Asian contacts "Pakis" and couldn't understand the fuss about Anton Du Beke calling Laila Rouass that name on Strictly Come Dancing.

Many decent people were appalled - but most of my mail after that encounter came from racists heaping abuse on me.

Former Cabinet minister Peter Hain, to his credit, has lambasted the Question Time decision. He, like me, grew up in Africa, where the BBC was and is a symbol of truth and integrity.

Today it abandons its priceless reputation. Who next to debate with the great and good? A Ku Klux Klan leader? Holocaust denier David Irving? It would make a terrifically edgy programme.

Stuff morality: ratings, my dear, are all that matter nowadays.