The public stoning of Nick Griffin

Griffin is clearly an inadequate man and to my mind fits the profile of wannabee politicians who can't or won't make their way in the mainstream parties. Better, they believe, to be a big fish in a small pond than to be a small one in an ocean.
Even so, last night's roasting on Question Time was hardly edifying. Dimbleby, all the panelists and the selected audience all lined up to take pot shots at Griffin and a kind of mob mentality prevailed. In a normal question time the news issues of the day (postal strike, Afghanistan) are the topics for questions and each panelist is invited to offer their views on the subject. In my view they should have stuck to that format. Instead all these issues were ignored so that the panelists and the audience could tell us what a venomous lot the BNP are.
Let's calmly take stock of the situation. The BNP are picking up votes from (probably white) working class labour voters who have got tired of being taken for granted. They have been patronized for a decade or more, patted on the head and told not to worry about immigration because it was good for the economy. In the mean time they read tabloid stories about illegal immigrants, lost records, the inability to deport criminals, queue jumping for council accommodation and so on. Even if none of this is true (as we are told by government) there is a perception that it is. And perception is everything in politics.
The BNP has the tiniest toe-hold in the body politic. It has taken the Liberal party 60 years to go from 6 seats to 60 and it took the labour Party a very long time to become the dominant party. British politics changes at a glacial pace.
I know there is the example of Nazi germany, but both Germany and Italy were barely 50 years old as countries in 1920 and the instability of the post WWI period made them ripe for a struggle between the communists and the fascists. Both were fighting for a totalitarian state. The fascists won that round, but in the end the totalitarian state could not survive in Europe - a didn't. However, we all had a nasty scare and a lot of blood was shed. Too much to ever want to go through that again.
I would agree that we need to be ever vigilant, but I am not sure that Nick Griffin is worth the effort that the establishment has expended in the last few days. he is nowhere near as powerful as Oswald Moseley was and is really a political pygmy, in my view.
Did this public stoning do any good? I suspect that the Question Time viewers were never likely to consider a vote for the BNP. I for one have not even bothered to find out what their policies are. They are not going to represent me. I am simply not interested. However, the ones who do vote for them are unlikely to be Question Time viewers and all they will get out of this isthe reporting prior to the event and today's news stories. Will this change their mind?