It has been quite some time since I had a political rant, and, like the London busses of cliché fame, two subjects arrive for me to discuss. The first is obvious: The Butler Report.

‘Rant’ might be too strong a word for me to use here, as, unlike Hutton, which was so blatantly one-sided that one couldn’t help but cry “whitewash!”, Butler seems more balanced. Granted, it did not openly blame Blair, or any cabinet or intelligence official, as many expected, but nor did it exonerate them. Blair will receive much flack over this, especially from the conservatives (who, as any fool can point out, supported the war in the first place) but he will not loose his premiership over this. At least, not just yet, anyway.

The question, therefore, is “How?” Yesterday in parliament, when I half expected him to announce his resignation, he came out fighting: he eloquently accepted the findings of the report but strongly justified the war. Indeed, his prohibition could now be stronger, as Butler accounted for the lack of WMD in Iraq by citing muddled intelligence, not a lie on the part of the prime minister. Butler also dismissed claims that this war was all about oil. Thus, because this is a document that we all can respect due to it’s balance, Blair can stay to fight on. While he has certainly lost respect in some quarters, he may yesterday have gained some in others.

Nevertheless, I still do not trust him: the fact remains that, as Lord Butler noted yesterday, the September Dossier missed out several qualifying phrases from the intelligence it was based upon, and we would therefore lied to by omission. Blair’s forward was also disproportionately strong. I would feel very uneasy about voting for a man who would go to war on such loose ground, and, what’s more, one that would follow a blatant homophobic bigot so loyally. Butler dismissed the supposed links between Hussein and Al Qa’ida, making bush’s position barely tenable too, especially after Ashcroft.

However, although one can sigh at Blair (to say the least) and scream one’s head off at bush, both have a modicum of respectability. Neither, for example, denounce whole swathes of people. Bush may be a red-neck, but he is not a fascist.

In other words, there a set of people, here in Britain, who worry me more than Bush. People who I have no respect for, yet pretend to be a political party: the BNP. There is a documentary due out tonight about these people. To be fair, one must question, as an impartial viewer, whether the BBC is biased on this front: it has a somewhat leftist-liberal stance, but as all major political parties of both sides of the spectrum dismiss the BNP as little more as a pack of barely potty-trained hooligans, we can accept the BBC’s judgement. Indeed, I might point out, as an aside, that Butler seemed to confirm the BBC’s pre-Hutton claim that the government did indeed ‘sex up’ the dossier, if just by omission.

Thus, if we can take the bbc as not having any innate bias on this – and I believe we can – then, small as they may be, I am very worried about the BNP. They espouse the most abhorrent of views, it’s leader, Nick Griffin, denouncing Islam as a “vicious wicked faith”, while trying – and failing – to project a veneer of respectability.

Thus, just as I hold Butler to be the pinnacle of political refinement – the hefty report presenting both sides of the argument, before coming to a well-rounded conclusion, I hold the BNP to be the antithesis of this: neither balanced or respectable. I find it interesting that we are to see these two faces of politics within 48 hours.