BBC wrong on migrants and Brexit, says Peston

THE BBC ignored how migration was affecting millions of its viewers, Robert Peston has admitted.

ITV’s political editor, who spent nine years at the corporation, accused the BBC of not being impartial and said it had ‘neglected the effect’ the EU was having on British families.

‘I love the BBC but I did feel that during the Brexit campaign they slightly got confused about what impartial journalism meant,’ said Peston, who left the BBC in 2015.

‘For too long, people like me had a particular view of the benefits of globalisation and we simply neglected the effect it was having on millions of our citizens.’ He said that journalists

‘We were slightly patronising’

including himself had ‘ patronised’ viewers by failing to listen to their worries about migration.

‘When we have all that migration from eastern Europe, people like me focused too much on the economic benefits in terms of the rates we were growing, and not enough on the experience of communities who were changing rapidly as a result’, he told the Cheltenham Literature Festival.

‘In a way, we were slightly patronising. People like me were basically saying “don’t you know this is making the country richer?” In fact, it was also dislocating hundreds of thousands to millions of lives, and those people’s lives had been radically changed by immigration. It is not, in my view, racist to be concerned if the composition of your community changes by something like 10 or 15 per cent over a very small number of years.’

WELL, fancy that! After decades in which his former employers at the BBC vilified the Mail for voicing public concerns over mass immigration, Robert Peston finally confesses the Corporation got it wrong. What a pity he waited until now, when population pressures mean 40 per cent of young adults can’t afford the cheapest local homes, to admit that it’s ‘not racist’ to be concerned about rapid demographic change.