On Monday, Lord Michael Grade, the former chair of Ofcom, declared that the populist GB News had given the “white majority” a voice in public debates. No evidence was provided to prove that the majority of white Britons support the views on immigration, identity, belonging, citizenship rights and entitlements promulgated by several GB News presenters, including Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.
The grandee surfed the waves of disinformation and racist fury and projected himself as a heroic man of the people. Alarmingly, other mainstream media outlets, various institutions and non-white players like Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, Reform MP Suella Braverman and Reform home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf, are also competing in the extreme sport of jingoism. The Oxford Union has invited Tommy Robinson to speak; a white supremacy summit has allegedly taken place in this country.
Not since the early 1970s have I seen racism out there and proud. Back then, multi-racial, anti-racist movements came out in force. Today, racial hate is justified as an “understandable” response to diversity. We are made to believe by Reform and others on the right that public opinion is now irredeemably hostile to immigrant “invaders” – undocumented and legal, new, settled and even third-generation British citizens.
