 The Black Lives Matter movement has brought to attention racism in our policing, in the way we remember history and in our society at large. It's also shining a light on the racism that's been ignored in our mainstream press for far too long. So a shocking example of this was highlighted by journalist Afua Hirsch, who on Tuesday shared a clip of an exchange she had with LBC's Nick Ferrari on an episode of Skies, The Pledge. Let's take a look. All over the world, statues are coming down. In just the last couple of weeks, New York has removed from Central Park the statue of a doctor who tortured enslaved Black women. India has brought down Lenin and Canadians have defaced statues of Queen Victoria. In Britain, Bristol has agreed to rename its famous music hall, removing the name of Edward Caulston, one of the nation's most prolific slave traders. Now it's time to take a long, hard look at other hugely problematic figures we continue to glorify, such as Horatio Nelson, Cecil Rhodes, and yes, Winston Churchill. I'm not saying we should necessarily bring them down. Take a deep breath, everyone. But all options should be on the table. As the global movement to re-question our so-called heroes shows, the thing that's clear is this, doing nothing, burying our heads in the sand and hoping this debate will go away is simply no longer an option. Hi, Nick. Afua, Afua, I really like you, but I wonder if I can remind you of some words you wrote concerning Britain. Please do. Britain, we have moved on from this era, no more than the US from its slavery and segregationist past. The difference is that America is now in the midst of a frenzied debate on what to do about it, whereas Britain, in our inertia, arrogance, and intellectual laziness is not. I don't write a lot bad, do I? Well, you could have been a bit snappy, but I won't worry about subbing it. I'm delighted. Why do you stay in this country if you take such offence when you see Nelson's column, if you take such offence when you hear Winston Churchill's name, who I would argue, if in the unlikely event that anybody wanted to have a poll, I would say probably 80 to 90 percent of people would say that Winston Churchill did a good thing. I'm delighted that I see you at least Thursday. I'm delighted you opt to stand. But if it offends you so much, how do you manage to stay here? I find that a really strange thing to say. So there's nothing in Britain that bothers you. Sure, but I don't want to put it down. So why are you leaving an option for my country? And the reason that I raised this critique is not because I hate Britain, it's because I care about this country. That is so shocking and outrageous to say, why do you stay here? Would he have said that to a white person? No. Important to recognize that. I mean, that video, like one of the ones we showed, for example, of the police racism earlier, that's a clip from a couple of years ago. But it's only just now got the attention of the public. It's only now just got public attention. So Aforah shared that on Tuesday yesterday. It's now been shared, or it's been viewed three million times. So only now is the pressure coming up. I didn't obviously, I didn't notice that two years ago. I didn't see that going viral on social media. As far as I can tell, Ferrari has still never apologized in the independence right up at that video today. They say both Sky and LBC are yet to comment on what we just saw there. Aaron, your thoughts? Yes, disgusting. He shouldn't be working in the media, if that's what he thinks. If a person of color says I have an issue with a particular feature of this country, which as Aforah rightly says, I'm sure Nick Ferrari finds many things sort of displeasurable about Britain. Nobody will say, well, you should piss off then. And the reason why people don't say that to him is because he's white. I think it's astonishing. If Nick Ferrari doesn't want to apologize for it, if Sky doesn't want to apologize for it, then they've got no credibility on the issue. I don't think Keir Starmer should be doing things in LBC when Nick Ferrari, if you want to apologize for it, he's a racist. If he's not going to apologize for that, Nick Ferrari is a racist. If Sky aren't going to apologize for that, they are giving a platform happily to racists. Not good enough. Really not good enough. You can give all the funding you want and the public relations which Sky have done. But if you're not doing it on the thing that matters as a media company, your content, you're failing. Someone else who should apologize. Again, what's ridiculous here is how overdue this is. This was two years ago. Obviously, Aforah has found it very upsetting, but the issue didn't get any traction. And we've seen over and over again that racism is completely acceptable in our mainstream press. And one place where it is acceptable over and over again is in The Times, Britain's paper of record. So in Monday's Times, this isn't something that's just been unearthed. This was this week. Melanie Phillips wrote a column under the headline, We're giving in to the race revolutionaries. That's already a headline that begs a lot of questions. But let's go to what was actually in the article because it's worse. Can we get up this quote? So yet, having been inculcated with the unchallenged belief that they are victims of white society, black people believe that any disadvantage they may suffer is not the result of bad luck circumstances beyond anyone's control or perish the thought their own behavior, but must be the product of white racism. So that's Melanie Phillips, regular columnist at The Times in Britain's paper of record right after a Black Lives Matter movement, which is putting racial justice at the top of the political agenda. And she thinks it's acceptable in The Times, thinks it's acceptable. I think we should focus on the institutions, not the individuals, because I don't think Melanie Phillips would mind if you called her racist. But the paper of record should be held to higher standards. And this idea, she's saying that black people believe that any disadvantage they may suffer is not the result of bad luck circumstances beyond anyone's control or perish the thought their own behavior. So she's basically saying, all black people think they're victims of racism when actually the reason they have disadvantages in society is because they didn't bother to work hard enough. There were some changes to it. So The Times did realize that they probably had crossed a line here, but they were really minor. So where it originally said black people believe that any disadvantage they may suffer is not the result of bad luck or their own behavior, it's changed to too many black people believe that. So the concession they've made is that instead of saying all black people, they're saying too many black people have this sort of victim complex where they think that any misfortune is because of racism, which obviously is dismissing the fact that racism is significant in this country. And they removed perish the thought presumably because they thought it was just too dismissive and awful. The Times also had a leader today that was basically a commentary on the statues. And I was sort of expecting them to say, let's be careful about figures like Winston Churchill who have complex histories, et cetera, et cetera. But no, they decided to do an outright defense of basically slavery and colonialism saying at the time everyone thought it was fine. So we shouldn't judge people by today's standards. So they were basically saying that people like Rhodes, they should stay up because everyone thought at the time colonialism was spreading civilization. So who are we to judge? Aaron, what do you make of that Phillips comment piece? And I suppose, what the Times deems to be acceptable? Obviously a murder-conned paper, like he's someone who's used to publishing out and out awful racism, but that's supposed to be an establishment, middle-class intellectual outlet. Well, she's not alone. If you think of the Sunday Times, Rod Liddle, there's a range of figures like this, Gels Koran. But I think, yeah, I think the fact she's been quoted at length by Anders Brevik probably tells you what you need to know about the content of her politics. But what I find interesting, again, is that like Darren Grimes, like Nick Ferrari, these aren't kind of crazed political figures on the sort of periphery of our conversation as a country. She's on the BBC every week. She goes on BBC Question Time, she'll be on the Daily Politics and so on. And again, she's a really racist lady. She was the lady that coined the term Londonistan, I think in the mid-2000s. She will quite actively say that Muslims aren't welcome in Europe. She says it probably a bit more explicitly than Douglas Murray. So she's got views which I wouldn't really say fit in in a sort of free democratic society. But she seems to be fine. She seems to be immune from the criticism. And what's interesting is she wrote for the time, she wrote for, I think she still writes the Jewish Chronicle. These are publications which have called out racism in the Labour Party. Some people agree on whether or not, I would say that their level of criticism is inadequate to the scale of the problem. People can disagree about that. But surely we can all agree that somebody who says this shouldn't be writing for those very same publications really just stinks.