In Wood Green we’ve seen running battles in the streets between Albanian and Kurdish gangs. Mostly over drugs, but also over whores, the local police think. These guys don’t run unionised shops paying minimum wage.

Without voluntarily assuming the “puritan” label I’m uneasy about the massive spread of whorehouses and strip clubs which also engage in a little whoring on the side.
Hermione Eyre in the Indie caught my eye over it today. it looks like nowadays the response to “So, if you think it should be legal and respectable you wouldn’t mind your children doing it, and people having their dole stopped for refusing to work in it?” is “Yes, certainly”.

Which, irrationally or not, gives me the creeps.

I doubt that’s true, especially now that most of eastern Europe doesn’t have restrictions on migration to the UK and so slavery is a reasonably pointless option for all concerned. If any of the places advertised in the paper do actually involve forced prostitution, the police should be shot for not checking them out…

But I doubt they do to any serious degree. The conflation of consenting prostitution with enforced sex slavery is a deliberate tactic of the puritan lobby (like the current daft campaign against strip clubs, which appears to be based on the statistic that rape levels in Camden rose three years before a strip club opened combined with the inability to tell the difference between getting your kit off for cash and being sold into slavery.)

I’m don’t really support the current anti-terrorist legislation where even possession of documentation is a crime.

So in answer to your question:
a) The BNP or your theoretical organisation should be free to place adverts where they wish
b) Equally, however, I would support the right of any editor/ proprietor of a newspaper to accept or reject any advert as he/she wishes. I think that there is a clear line between a papers editorial policy and its advertising policy, and in an ideally both should be completely separate to ensure that everyone has freedom to advertise their views.

it makes it sound (though I know you don’t say this explicity) as though you’re talking about some kind of legal prohibition.

For the record, I think it would be disastrous if a law were to be passed invoking criminal sanctions upon those who advertise such repugnant opinions; but at the same time, there’s no way in hell I’d accept advertisements of those kind were I the editor of a publication.

The editor in this case has indeed made “a grave error of judgement” (in my view) but that’s a whole other kettle of fish from implying that perhaps the BNP should be legally prevented from advertising.

One other thing though; and this has already been mentioned above; is it possible that there’s some kind of legal requirement to allow legitimate (in the sense of ‘legal’) political parties to purchase advertising space?

Of course both parties are legally allowed to perform that transaction; under no circumstances would I ever give the BNP advertising space in any hypothetical paper anyone’s idiotic enough to let me run; it doesn’t matter how scathing your editorial is the fact that they’re prepared to display the advert itself reflects extremely badly on the paper and the editor.

Though, if they ran the advert with a big sign in the space above it saying “The BNP are a bunch of wankers, if my wife voted for them I would spank her” (Though probably be best to leave the rampant and inexcusable misogyny out of it and the rhyme too), then they might be excused.

The Ham and High’s decision to run the ad was not in itself bad (just naive, assuming they didn’t expect a backlash). But at a guess, they probably could have been done under electoral impartiality regulations if they refused the BNP ad space while selling it to other parties.

However, if it’s true that they’re now donating the BNP’s payment to charity, that effectively means they’ve just given the BNP free advertising, doesn’t it? Very odd.