The BBC normalised racism last night, pure and simple
This is how racism and rightwing extremism is normalised. Thursday night’s Question Time featured a lengthy racist rant by an audience member: “Close the borders, completely close the borders,” she frothed with hateful rage, adding in lies about foreigners being showered with never-ending freebies while destroying the education system and the NHS. It took the commentator Ash Sarkar to challenge her unabashed bigotry with truth, pointing to research that migrants pay in more to the state than they get back. In a cheeky recycling of a quote popularised by the rightwing US pundit Ben Shapiro, Sarkar silenced the bigot: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
We are ruled by a prime minister who has a history of racism and bigotry, and who is idolised by far-right figures
Yet Question Time then saw fit to clip the 82 seconds of hate, accompanied by a succinct summary of the audience member’s rant. Lies and hatred, uncorrected and unchallenged, rippled across social media from the account of the BBC’s self-described “flagship political debate programme”. At the time of writing, the video had been viewed more than 2 million times. By sharing the video, the BBC seemed to imply that this wasn’t racism – it was simply someone’s opinion for us to agree or disagree with, in much the same way that we might debate the top rate of tax, or whether the railways should be renationalised. Who’s to say who is right and who is wrong? This was just another valid perspective to roam free in the marketplace of ideas – or such was the implication.
Much responsibility lies with a press that systematically incites bigotry against migrants, refugees, Muslims, benefit claimants and trans people: indeed, mainstream newspapers print bile that is not strikingly dissimilar from the Question Time rant. This includes “respectable” broadsheets such as the Times, which was belatedly forced to correct misleading coverage claiming a Christian child was “forced into Muslim foster care”. By the time the corrections were made, the damage had already been done.
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Does the BBC not perhaps consider its responsibilities in a society in which hate crimes have doubled over the space of half a decade? As a public broadcaster, the BBC should surely be a bulwark against racism, not an amplifier of its message. The broadcaster may defend itself by claiming that interviewing the likes of Tommy Robinson, a racist thug and convicted fraudster, allows his views to be challenged. Yet it has only helped build up such monsters, seemingly oblivious to the fact that giving a platform to racism legitimises it, or that racism cannot be defeated by the Socratic method.
We are ruled by a prime minister who has a history of racism and bigotry and who – quite unlike previous Conservative leaders – is idolised by far-right figures and movements, trashing the demarcation between centre-right and what lies beyond. Our national broadcaster uncritically pumping out racist rants is just another legitimisation of such bigotry. If we remain silent, the dial will shift further – and we may find that such beliefs become even more mainstream than they already are.
• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
