Today’s a very important day to me. It’s the first time since I started seriously studying the British political system that the country is having a general election.

At this point, roughly five hours before actual results start coming in, I have no idea what party is going to win. That’s what makes it so exciting and so nerve-wracking. As someone planning to move (legally, thank you) to the UK in September for school, I like to think I have some small stake in this election, even though I’m not a citizen.

The British system is also interesting to follow because of how different it is from our U.S. system. In Britain, a parliamentary democracy, you vote for the party, not the candidate. The party that wins the majority of seats gets to form a government (what we in the U.S. would refer to as an administration). Districts have MPs like we have congressmen in the U.S., but you can’t, say, vote for an MP of one party and a prime minister of another. It’s straight-ticket voting.

It’s been fascinating to read people’s complaints and comments on the BBC for the past few days. There’s talk of tactical voting — voting AGAINST one party, just to keep them out, but not necessarily voting for a party that has a legitimate chance of winning. There are complaints of the “first past the post” system, which disallows run-offs and makes it so a party could theoretically get a smaller popular vote percentage and still win. And, just like in the U.S., people are worried about immigration (don’t worry guys, I speak English), their pensions (“I don’t have enough to retire on!”), council taxes (they’re really too high) and the national debt (which they seem to equally blame Labour and the Conservatives for — Labour for being in power, the Conservatives for being pro-business).

As to who I’d vote for given the chance, I really can’t say (and not even sure that I should). I just know that this is high political drama at its best and that everyone should be paying attention, even if you don’t know who on earth Nick Clegg is (he’s the leader of the possibly king-making Liberal Democrats).

Auntie Beeb has a nifty little election section on its site. If you go to the main BBC News site, you’ll see the election coverage relegated to the upper right-hand corner, with major international news getting front-and-center play. It’s such a British thing to do — “Move on, nothing to see here! Oh, right then, suppose there’s an election today of some sort…”

No later than June 2010, the UK will have a general election. In Britain, there are three major parties. Labour, led by current Prime Minister Gordon Brown; David Cameron’s Conservatives; and the third-wheel Liberal Democrats, headed by Nick Clegg.

While these three parties dominate Parliament, some fringe parties have taken hold, mostly because of voter apathy and general discontent with Labour and Conservative policies in particular. One of these is the British National Party, or the BNP. The BNP doesn’t hold any seats in Parliament, but has a seat in the London Assembly, seats in smaller councils and two seats in the European Union Parliament. One of these seats went to BNP leader Nick Griffin.

To say the BNP is controversial is putting it mildly. For one thing, its membership is limited to “indigenous Caucasians.” Party members, including Griffin, have a history of Holocaust denial. Its early anti-Semitic views have been replaced with anti-Muslim sentiment. The party is strongly anti-immigration. Its economic policies are protectionist, and reject free-market capitalism. It is, however, gaining ground with white Britons who are gravitating toward the BNP out of either desperation or protest against mainstream parties.

Given the recent electoral success of the BNP, the BBC invited Griffin to be a panelist on Question Time on Thursday. For my American audience, it’s a mix of Meet the Press and a Q&A-style town hall meeting. Some highlights are in the video below.

While I find the BNP’s platform repugnant, equally repugnant — nay, more repugnant — was the protest that stuffed up West London. People carried signs calling Griffin a “fascist” and said the BBC shouldn’t have had him on. I find it ironic that people try to fight “fascism” by engaging in the very fascist-like practice of trying to silence speech they don’t like. If the guy’s ideas are that godawful, that’s bound to come out during the program (er, programme). No one needs them to protect society from big, bad Nick Griffin. The British electorate can watch him and decide for themselves what to think.

If you’re opposed to Griffin and the BNP’s policies, you should want those ideas to come to light and for people to see in the harsh light of day how offensive they are. Keeping people like Griffin from stating their platforms only makes them free-speech martyrs and gives them a mystique they don’t deserve.