The Brexiter was shown the door after comparing Black Lives Matter
protesters to the
Taliban. But he’s far from the radio station’s only problem
It’s Tina I feel sorry for. This week she rang LBC’s breakfast show to tell host Nick
Ferrari what toppling statues of racist Britons means to her as a
British woman of African-Caribbean ancestry. Could she get her point across? Not a chance. Every time she tried to air her views, Ferrari’s voice cut through hers. “Tina, Tina, Tina,” Ferrari said in his trademark oleaginously patronising simper as if speaking to a dim child. Tina complained about him interrupting her, but Ferrari wouldn’t be silenced. Taking down statues is illegal. End of. “I can’t breathe” is a Black Lives Matter slogan. “I can’t get airtime” might be Tina’s.
“Tina, Tina, Tina”, for me, had Thatcherite resonance. There was no alternative to her neoliberal ruin of
Britain – and on the
London radio station, there is no alternative to the stale pale male discourse, no airtime for BAME women’s voices to be heard. There is one female presenter, the superbly intelligent Shelagh Fogarty, and one person of colour, the former Islamist who became David Cameron’s anti-extremism adviser Maajid Nawaz, now the station’s eviscerator-in-chief of dimwit callers.