Petty and not-so-petty authoritarianism has been a part of the Blair/Brown project for so long that this sleazy little development comes as no surprise:

The government is to single out Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, the British National party’s two newly elected representatives in the European parliament, for special treatment, denying them some of the access and information afforded to all the other 70 UK MEPs.
Under new guidelines drafted in Whitehall and in the Foreign Office following the June elections to the European parliament, the two BNP leaders will be kept at arms’ length from the kind of routine contacts and socialising that take place between British civil servants and MEPs in Brussels and Strasbourg.

And if the authoritarianism is nothing new, neither is the boneheadedness. Measures like this play into the hands of the BNP by allowing these distinctly unlikeable figures to portray themselves as victims, outsiders, and the only authentic representatives of a Britain that is despised by the country’s arrogant, out-of-touch, and bullying elite. Idiotic move, idiotic government.