Mr Griffin's party will amend its rules on memberhip to avoid racial and religious discrimination Photo: PA  How Nick Griffin must hope the anti-fascist demonstrations outside BBC Television Centre on Thursday turn ugly. The more invective and eggs hurled at him, the happier the leader of the British National Party will be.  Mr Griffin, due to take part in this week's Question Time, is the beneficiary of chattering-class furore. Many viewers of the BBC's leading current affairs talk show can imagine no greater sacrilege than his inclusion, short of fantasising about Hitler doing Desert Island Discs.  Despite legitimate questions about Mr Griffin's right to a public platform, it is hard to argue that a party that won 6 per cent of the ballot and two seats in the European elections should be consigned to broadcast purdah. While he will be lucky to extract a single extra vote from Question Time viewers, their outrage has handed him a PR coup.  Those deploring his inclusion on the panel include government ministers who should be more worried about Labour failures permitting him to evolve from swivel-eyed zealot to a democratic stakeholder. Mr Griffin is not a mainstream leader. No one is yet soliciting his view on the fiscal stimulus or asking him to name his favourite biscuit. Even so, his ascent strikes many middle-class voters as almost incomprehensible.  In my home town of Boston, Lincolnshire, no one is surprised. Last year, a BNP candidate, David Owens, won a seat on the borough council, trouncing all other parties. This month he just failed, by 16 votes, to get elected to the county council, on a turnout of 21 per cent. Mr Owens's earlier victory was marked by a reader's letter to the local paper. "Welcome to Boston, where only tolerance has been bypassed," he wrote.  Prejudice against the outsider was unleashed when EU workers arrived to staff the agri-industries of the isolated Fens. Although almost no locals wanted to dig potatoes, resentment and exploitation were rife. A Portuguese woman and her baby had their home torched, landlords packed up to 20 tenants into over-priced rooms, and gangmasters paid as little as £25 for a week's work. One councillor reported seeing a Kurdish café under siege from a mob chanting: "I'd rather be a Paki than a Kurd."  Church leaders and council workers trying to integrate the newcomers met resistance from an insular community who regarded Polish sprout-pickers with the fondness the Romans might have extended to Visigoth invaders. But despite real problems for the local community, such as pressure on schools and GPs, a dying town has been resurrected by its visiting workers.  Even in recession, Boston's unemployment rate is 3 per cent, compared with the national average of about 8 per cent. Its retail sales, down by 2.1 per cent, are out-performing the rest of Britain by 6 per cent, and its fusty streets have been transformed by new shops and restaurants. Yet myth, fear and prejudice always trump reality, which is why the BNP is on the rise.  The story of my home town is that of 21st-century Britain. The BNP has established such a cancerous grip on white working-class enclaves that, as John Denham, the communities secretary, told The Daily Telegraph yesterday, it may be far too late to swing heartland voters back this side of a general election.  Labour has been crucified by its own complacency. Jon Cruddas, the MP for Dagenham, has long warned that the BNP would reap the whirlwind of government neglect. Almost a million people duly voted for it in the European elections, disproving the assumption that the Labour core vote had nowhere else to go.  That exodus, potentially catastrophic for Gordon Brown and for Britain, reflects not only voter discontent but the sinuous salesmanship of Mr Griffin. Diehard socialists worried about being homeless or jobless can tune out the rants on "Third World scroungers" and tell themselves the BNP is heir to the Labour Party for which their grandparents voted. Meanwhile, racists who wish that fascism was less furtive can glory in the belief that hatred, wrapped in the Union flag, is coming home.  Belatedly, Labour has reacted. Last week, it identified 27 hotspots of white working-class discontent and promised £12 million to placate unhappy voters. That programme may be extended to more than 100 other potential BNP power bases.  This new approach is fraught with danger. If the Government panders to the baseless complaint that "foreigners" are jumping housing lists, it will simply make Mr Griffin's case for him. If it endorses the more justifiable grievance that incoming workers are sometimes hired because they are cheaper, it risks echoing the mantra of "British jobs for British workers", while doing nothing to protect job-seekers of any nationality.  Labour has to start listening if it wants its core vote back, but emollience will hand another triumph to the BNP unless government acknowledges that extremism is enmeshed with deprivation. First, ministers should do as Mr Cruddas has suggested, and begin a massive building programme for social housing. Second, they should stop the use of cheap, unregulated foreign labour for public projects.  And third, they should start talking about immigration. The Government should – though almost certainly won't – declare an amnesty for the unlawful migrants who have lived in Britain for many years and helped it thrive. Then it should assess how many non-EU incomers post-recession Britain needs and set its (already stringent) points system accordingly.  But it should also resist being cowed by Mr Griffin's loathsome message and by those who, however understandably or mistakenly, have swallowed it. Ministers were never going to eradicate the BNP by dismissing its leaders as vile racists, but that doesn't mean the label was wrong.  Government should champion the transformation wrought by incomers and uphold the British tradition of welcoming, from the Huguenots onwards, those fleeing persecution. It should applaud Europe's open borders while stressing that EU migrants, many of whom do not stay long, have boosted the economy. In 2008-9, new arrivals paid 37 per cent more in taxes than they cost in welfare payments and public services.  Migrants are not the enemy of community cohesion. That role is occupied by the far Right, aided and abetted by Goldman Sachs bankers and other City parasites whose profiteering condemns less well-off people of every race, colour and creed to fears for their own and their children's futures.  In that climate, Mr Griffin's snakeoil politics are powerful. Anyone hoping that Question Time will expose him as a pedlar of hatred is likely to be disappointed. Mr Griffin, who is not stupid, will most probably seem no more sinister than an Avon lady.  The far Right, which blossomed in obscurity, will now flourish in the limelight until government builds more houses, ensures fair pay and tells the truth about immigration. If that lesson is learnt, then Mr Griffin, the most obnoxious figure in British politics, will have performed a useful service after all.
Only a shake-up of immigration and employment policies can stem the rise of    the far Right, says Mary Riddell