National Party, and Irving - convicted Holocaust denier, arrived at Oxford University to lead in a debate on free speech.
David Irving was sentenced to three years in an Austrian prison for denying that the Nazis sent Jews to gas chambers; Nick Griffin was tried but cleared of inciting racial hatred. Griffin today marched his thugs into a North Wales court, where Conwy Council is seeking an order banning a BNP councillor from “behaving in a threatening, abusive or insulting way towards officers and members”.
Mr Howard, the former leader of the Conservative Party and former Home Secretary, said, "The Oxford debating union should not have given these people that platform. Obviously, they are entitled to their views - everybody has a right to free speech - but there is a separate question as to whether you give people like that a platform, and that is undesirable."
Griffin lists race relations laws dating back to the 1960s and 1970s among the threats to free speech; BNP policies include an end to all immigration to the UK and the forced removal of more than two million immigrants already here.
Michael Howard resigned from the Cambridge University Conservative Club in 1964 when Oswald Mosley was invited as a speaker.
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