GB News Forgives Racist Bigot

After the fallout between Gammon Broadcasting™ News (“Bacon’s News Channel”) and former Murdoch editor Andrew Neil resulted in a parting of the ways which has left the beleaguered broadcaster with one less means of propping up its piss-poor ratings, the desperate attention-seeking has been ramped up more than the odd notch.

Colin Brazier, part of the GB News talent paddling pool

This has resulted in appalling nonentity Colin Brazier, whose media career may well fall off the cliff without GB News to prop it up, scraping the barrel in no style at all as the suggestion is pitched that racism should be “forgiven”. More specifically, the concept of forgiveness is aimed, rather creatively, at disgraced historian David Starkey.

“The historian Dr David Starkey is my guest tonight on BRAZIER from 8pm. He was cancelled by publishers and colleges after ‘clumsy’ remarks about slavery last year, for which he later apologised. So my twitter question tonight: Can we forgive David Starkey?” told Brazier, telling his audience what course of action he had decreed they should take.

Maybe not giving Dazza another interview any time soon

His problem is that Starkey was not “Cancelled”, because his remarks were not in the least “Clumsy”. He had given an interview to the impenetrably stupid Darren Grimes, the floor crossing failed hairdresser who was on record as not possessing the intellectual capacity to fill in a form correctly, and had made a nailed-on racist comment.

Starkey had taken exception to the idea that slavery was akin to genocide. “Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived”. Previously, after the 2011 London riots, he had appeared on BBC Newsnight and proclaimed “A substantial amount of the chavs have become black. The whites have become black; a particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion”. He’s consistent. Consistently racist.

The Great Man attempted a little contrition in the aftermath of Grimes’ interview going live: his comments “were ‘a bad mistake’ for which he is ‘very sorry’ … He apologised ‘unreservedly’ for the offence his ‘deplorably inflammatory’ words had caused, saying he had spoken ‘with awful clumsiness’”. Awful racist bigotry, more like.

That is who Colin Brazier is trying to rehabilitate. At the same time, he’s doing his best to pretend that the real racists are elsewhere: in a clearly rehearsed - if not rehearsed very well - discussion with Andrew Doyle, out came the deflection. “Have you been called a gammon, a Karen, a remoaner, or a snowflake? These are words that have been added to a list of potentially offensive words by the broadcast regulator Ofcom”.

Then came the Look Over There. “Surely there’s a distinction to be drawn between ad hominem words like gammon, or Karen, where you are ascribing characteristics to an individual … remoaner … doesn’t feel quite as derogatory as gammon [which] feels loaded with obvious racial undertones”. Bullshit. Gammon is a state of mind, not a racial slur.

Thus the GB News agenda: rehabilitate a real racist, while calling racist on others. Sadly, the likes of Brazier are rank amateurs who wouldn’t last five minutes with the real exponents of the craft, such as Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse).

David Starkey remains unforgiven. And GB News ratings are still declining. Sad, really.

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