A replacement BNP could be much worse.

WELL, that should be it. With Nick Griffin having stumbled and dissembled before nine million viewers, the BNP will disappear.

That won't happen and we know it. The large majority of the British, while recognising that the BNP is unreasoning in its colour preoccupation, still believe we are in danger of being swamped by immigration.

Indeed, Labour created the BNP by giving the nod to open borders: foreign entry has leapt by 50 per cent in six years. The Tories, scenting power, promise to "set a limit" to newcomers, but refuse us details.

Meanwhile, we read of 400,000 "illegals" who have disappeared in our island. We read of planes chartered to return immigrants being refused permission to disembark their passengers, so flying them back to Britain. Let me be honest. I believe that Britain has space and, in many cases, a moral obligation to accept immigrants from war-torn lands. I rejoice in the racial melting-pot on my very doorstep.

Nor do I believe that specious myth along the lines of those who try to reach Britain wanting an easy life. Can you think of any exercise harder than leaving your homeland, your loved ones, to start afresh among strangers? What concerns me, though, is that were the BNP to disappear, it would leave a vacuum in our political spectrum.

Right now, we can look back to Question Time, recall the outflanked and squirming Griffin, and tell ourselves the BNP presents no difficulties. That it's finished.

Yet what would happen in Britain, were a wiser, more creditable, party to emerge demanding an unequivocal closure of our borders to all non-EU passport holders? That party would, I suspect, sweep to power, leaving Labour and the Tories terminally wounded.

The Asians, say, and the Africans settled here, their businesses up and running, their children on the professional ladders, don't want newcomers either.

They're as prone now to prejudice as white Britons - I'll long remember the dismay of an old Muslim lady I love, when she realised a Chinese family had bought the house beside her own. She'd been a girl in Kashmir, a young bride in Birmingham, and she couldn't envisage the "strangeness", of the Chinese over the fence.

Now she sweeps her front step, garden path and the patch of pavement outside her home in that traditional Asian village way, but studiously avoids her new neighbours' eyes.

She fears them in the same way millions of white Britons fear Asians, Africans and African-Caribbeans. This is ignorant, not necessarily ill-will, the unease between groups nervous of each other. But imagine if that were to be stirred subtly. Imagine if another, with Enoch Powell's eloquence, were to arise. We know the BNP for its barely-educated and bruiser-like followers, its childish belief that skin-tones define.

What we must fear is a possible, more beguiling, successor.

CAPTION(S):

Controversy: British National Party leader Nick Griffin on the BBC's flagship political programme, Question Time.