 So Nigel Farage, ex-UKIP leader and now head of the Brexit party, has been stoking racial hatred in this country for decades from blaming HIV rates on immigration to standing in front of that infamous poster of refugees with the header, breaking points Farage is a man more responsible than anyone for the amplification and mainstreaming of far right narratives in this country. Yet for the last three years, LBC have provided Farage with a primetime platform five days a week. It's a huge platform, a huge reason he has so much influence in this country still. However, that was only until this Thursday. So let's look at the outburst which sparked Farage's downfall. So this is a tweet from Nigel Farage, a new form of the Taliban was born in the UK today unless we get moral leadership quickly, our cities won't be worth living in. In case you missed the context, the Taliban or who he's referring to as the Taliban is the Black Lives Matter movement. On Tuesday he was asked about this on Good Morning Britain. This was his defense. Just to clarify, why did you compare Black Lives Matter protesters to the Taliban? You know, the BBC have consistently over the last week refused to tell people the truth about Black Lives Matter. The slogan Black Lives Matter and the wanting to end injustice and inequality is an laudable aim. The organization Black Lives Matter is a far left Marxist organization whose chief fame is to defund and close down police forces so that we would live under... Oh, you're full of such utter nonsense, Nigel Farage. I understand that you're struggling to be relevant, but let me tell you something. The only thing you're an expert on, Nigel Farage, the only thing you're an expert on right now is your backside because everyone out of your mouth sticks. That's quite entertaining. In any case, two days after that, LBC tweeted this, so Nigel Farage's contract with LBC is up very shortly and following discussions with him, Nigel is stepping down from LBC with a media effect. We thank Nigel for the enormous contribution he has made to LBC and wish him well. So this was all quite abrupt. The language used is quite careful. They haven't said they've fired him, but his contract wasn't over. He left before his contract was up. He was in fact due to have a live show that day, so they had to pull him from the air that evening. Someone else, I think it was Ian Dale, took his place. So Aaron, I mean, this is a genuine cause for celebration, even if it is, well, incredibly belated. Yeah. I mean, the whole thing's just puzzling. I mean, who thinks they can get away with saying that? It's kind of incredible calling a bunch of people looking for a quality under the law of comparing them to the Taliban. And the whole thing of, oh, our cities won't be worth living in soon. He lives in, first of all, he lives in rural Kent, right? Nigel Farage hasn't believed that British cities are worth living in probably since like 1962. He's complained before about people, you know, if you were driving out or getting the tube from central London going through zones one, two, three, four, then going out through some of the suburbs, you would struggle to hear English. He's gone on record saying that. He doesn't like modern city life. So the idea that that would change because of Winston Churchill's statue being boarded up for the fifth time in 10 years or whatever, just kinds of seem, it seems absurd. What Farage does, you know, the more history you read on this stuff, the more you realize he's just re-litigating the exact same things I made in the 1980s. You know, in the 1980s, a gay labor parliamentary candidate was a room went round that he had attended the Gay Olympics. Nobody actually knew what this was. It was a it was a sun front. It was a sun front page. I didn't know that. Yeah. Peter Tatchell. That was what they got in there. That Peter Tatchell, right. It was the by-election in in Burmese in Southwark. And yeah, he gone to the Gay Olympics. And then sort of, you know, Michael Foote was being asked to do you have a gay candidate? Of course, the labor left was saying, yeah, we've got, you know, we defended, we stand by LGBT people. Not even Neil Kinnock would be like, yeah, sick, you know, on Michael Foote, none of the kind of that's on the soft trip. You know, I left and people like Farage just saying the same things that they said then, you know, cities are unlivable, cities are now subject to cultural Marxism and minorities and the radical left. That was the exact same argument that was made against the GLC under Ken Lemingston in the in the early to mid 1980s. These people are stuck in a time warp. What I think Farage has seen is probably a political opportunity to to ensure he's relevant after Brexit with Black Lives Matter and kind of increasingly English. It's important to say English, identitarian issues like Churchill. I want to look at some of the background to this. There was an interesting article in the HuffPo. And they'd spoken to some of the staff at the LBC, sorry, because obviously disquiet has been going on there for a very long time. What he said this week wasn't really, you know, qualitatively worse than what he's been saying for the past two decades. Let's get up a couple of quotes from this article speaking to staff there. So they write, a black staffer at Global who asked to remain anonymous had previously told HuffPo's UK that many global staff members want Farage out. The staffer said, the man is vile and racist. I'm upset he's working on a station across the corridor from the UK's biggest black music station. And he's allowed to say those comments on air. So later in the article, Nadine White, she's the author of the article quotes, a source saying pretty much every black person here is upset that Farage continues to have a platform. Yet Global says it's committed to equality. This says a lot. Now the context here, these aren't necessarily people who work for LBC because Global is a very big organization. You might not have heard of it, but it's in the background running many radio stations you probably have heard of. They include capital and capital extra. Capital extra is a particularly interesting example here because unlike LBC, they have lots of ethnic minority hosts and they play predominantly black music. And there was some other background in this article that I thought was very interesting about the culture and the function of Global. So this conglomerate, this company that runs radio stations. So let's get this section of the article up. So it says established in 1990 and acquired by Global in 2005, Choice FM was the UK's first legal black radio platform. It was rebranded without warning to capital extra at Builders and Urban Dance Platform in 2013 during Black History Month. All specialists shows such as gospel and soccer were scrapped never to be reinstated. Sorry, the introduction I should have given you I'm as the LBC, sorry Global bought Choice FM. So Choice FM very successful black music station. Global bought it and then they shifted it without telling anyone or without getting any consent to capital extra. Let's go to the next graphic. The revered stations legacy has faded with many deeming this move from Global as a director front to the black community and an attempt at erasing an important part of black culture from the mainstream. So this is a company that bought Britain's first legal black radio station and who against the wishes of the black staff changed its sort of role, its name, its function and then kept employing Nigel Farage down the corridor. So you can see sort of the toxic role they've played in terms of Britain's cultural industries. And let's go at the people who were making these decisions. Let's take a look at the people who bought Britain's first legal black radio station. So this is the executives of Global. So you've got 10 people, all of them white, nine of them men. One thing I find quite entertaining is the only woman there, her job is chief people officer. What job is chief people officer? It's like, oh, women, they're people people. You know, the idea that these are the people who are making all of these decisions I suppose explains quite a lot as to what LBC's output is like. They also have Nick Ferrari on in the morning who as we saw on Wednesday has said some pretty racist things on air. Aaron, what do you make of all of this? I listen to LBC because I quite like talk radio but it is, I mean, the fact that they feel they can get away with having, you know, nearly all of their hosts are white guys. You know, the furthest left they go is sort of James O'Brien, a sort of remain a liberal and everyone else is, you know, whenever they're pushing the boat out it is definitely to the right. They're shifting the overton window in that direction. Yeah, they're all, I mean, they're all anti-left. I mean, James O'Brien, you'd probably say he's a liberal, you know, they're anti, Majid Nawaz calls himself a liberal. I don't think he is a liberal in a meaningful sense to the word because he can't, you know, tolerate disagreement and debate. They're anti-left, you know, Majid Nawaz is vehemently anti-left. James O'Brien hates the left. You know, he was calling all Labour Party, he tweeted Labour Party members are all Holocaust-anized. I was like, this is an insane thing to say. He's a party full of Holocaust-anized. It's just repulsive, really revolting thing to say. So you're right. And what's interesting is you brought up a picture of the kind of executive team, presumably the head of people as HR or something, but if you got up at the sort of the LBC radio roster, they all look related, you know? Nick Ferrari, Ian Dale, Clive Ball, James O'Brien, there was a couple of them. Tom Swarbrick used to work for Theresa May. They kind of, if you were like, yeah, it's a kind of family. They're kind of brothers and uncles and nephews. I can totally believe that. It's not even that they're all white, you know, they all have the kind of same skin complexion. They all look the kind of same. It's odd, it's odd. And at the end of the day, we have to say, Britain's, it's a white country primarily, but London is really mixed city in no way, reflects London politically, ethnically, culturally, like not at all. You couldn't have a poorer reflection of what London looks like and sounds like and thinks. And, you know, something should be done about that. Farage, when the question is now who's gonna replace him? And it can't just be, oh yeah, let's get a black or brown person with the exact same ideas. Let's get, you know, well, there's very few of those around in their defense, but, you know, a black conservative or a brown conservative, come on. Let's have a bit of dissensus, but the problem is they won't ever do that. You know, Owen Jones has had his own show on there a few times, Pilots. They would never make it a radio show because of course, he'll be right about so many things. He'll prove so many of their regulars to look so stupid. So quickly, all of a sudden, I think that'll become a problem for the brand. You know, their brand is kind of very angry, 50-something white males. And actually, I don't think necessarily that's the audience. I think if there was a purely business decision going on, they'd get a young, lame woman, we'll see. Well, with someone, I think with left-wingers, they're worried that they'll critique the basis of the company, because I mean, it is a bit of a, it's an asset stripping company by smaller radio stations, lays off staff, shuts them down. It seems like it has a bit of a parasitical relationship to the UK's cultural industries. And it's tax arrangements on entirely. Exactly, so they don't want to get a host who is calling out that kind of thing. I just wanted to point out that in terms of insular groups of people from the establishment running Britain's news organizations, there was some breaking news today, which was George Osborne, he became editor at the evening standard, of course. He's stood down. Today, we found out his replacement and it's former British Vogue Deputy Editor, Emily Sheffield, who, wait for it, you might not have heard of her, I had an Eva, but she just so happens to be ex-Prime Minister, David Cameron's sister-in-law, right? So, I mean, it was a joke when George Osborne got that job. He went straight from being the Tory Chancellor to being the editor of London's most widely read newspaper without any journalism background. Now he's been replaced and he's been replaced by David Cameron's sister-in-law. These people will have sat at, not even professional dinner parties together, like someone's birthday. These people all know each other, all come from exactly the same background and now they're running London's most, probably most politically significant newspaper. The Metro might be more widely read, but the evening standard definitely has more political influence. I mean, you couldn't make it up, could you? Do you think, I mean, it's kind of, it's finished, right? Do you know what you just found, Michael? Well, I mean- Well, we don't know. We don't know what's gonna bounce back after that. She said that, you know, she's basically, she's there to lead on making it a digital first company. Making it a digital thing, yeah. The whole point of the evening standard is it's, that's their thing. It's a free sheet, which gets loads of eyeballs and it sells advertising. Two thirds of the evening standard is basically advertising. That's not gonna work with an online model. I mean, they're finished. The whole revenue model of the free sheet doesn't seem to work anymore. So I don't know. I mean, you're saying it's influential. I think it's probably, in a way, it's probably a symbol of the company's sort of imminent collapse. And actually, if you look at the Lebedev's other assets, the eye has really struggled. Obviously, the independence already, it's no longer a newspaper despite the absolute shambles of it regularly showing a front page on the front pages of tomorrow's newspapers. It's like showing the Varamedia's front page. You know, another front page is living in complete denial of the fact they're no longer a newspaper. I think the evening standard will probably follow suit. You know, will it be an influential thing? No, like people on LBC and TalkRadio and BBC will talk about it, but I think average Londoner. I think the evening standard has influenced me going down for a very long time. I remember in 2004 or eight during the London mayor elections, when they went for Ken Livingston, especially in 2008, it was a really big player and sort of Boris Johnson could not have won without the evening standard. I just don't think that's the case now. I just think it's kind of like pathetic. So yeah. And they really went for Tadeek Khan actually, didn't they? There was a really toxic hostile campaign against him, often, you know, seemingly a bit racially motivated. And then I remember, you know, the date then he gets a stomping victory the next day, like, oh, Tadeek Khan, maybe he's okay. Great. So there's a part to go back with their tail between their legs. And obviously, Tadeek Khan isn't the kind of guy who sort of likes to have a popular showdown with national newspapers. So I think he was fine for this comeback with their tail between their legs. Make peace. The thing is, you know, Michael Foote actually was the editor of the evening standard, I think just immediately following the Second World War. You know, it wasn't always a really right-wing newspaper. Yeah, it wasn't always a really right-wing newspaper. So, you know, in a way, there's a bit of a legacy there that's gonna be lost, but influential, I don't know. I mean, I think the future of political influences is LBC, talk radio. I don't think it's print media. And I think these people realize that, right? I think there's a reason why Rupert Murdoch has gone into Times Radio. There's a reason why they bought talk radio. You know, okay, there's a bit of business going on. It might make some money, but primarily it's about creating a vehicle to advance certain political interests. And I think now people look at the sort of the hybrid of the radio slash social media kind of platform as doing that far more effectively than the newspaper.