Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Take down slave traders’ statues but don’t forget our brutal past
Farage leaves LBC after BLM controversy Towie’s Vas blasts show for ‘racism’
NIGEL Farage has left LBC radio “with immediate effect” amid controversy over his statements on Black Lives Matter protests.
The Brexit Party leader was a regular host since January 2017.
This week he compared Black Lives Matter protesters to the Taliban and labelled those who toppled a statue of slave trader Edward Colston a “violent mob”.
On Sunday he tweeted: “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 a statement, the station said: “Nigel Farage’s contract is up very shortly and, following discussions Nigel is stepping down with immediate effect.”
Asked if it was related to his comments, a spokesman for the station declined to comment.
THE Only Way Is Essex star Vas J Morgan has accused the show of “systematic racism”.
Vas, a cast member from 2014 until 2018, claims he was “consistently put into situations that perpetuated the same racial stereotype”.
He said his comments under a Black Lives Matter post on the show’s Instagram page were deleted, while “they left racist comments” up.
He added: “The incident was reminiscent of similar experiences while filming The Only Way Is Essex. The experiences I had are part of the systematic racism that has had a spotlight put on it.”
TOWIE said it contacted Vas to “discuss the issues raised”.
You could smell a slave ship days before it docked. The stench of vomit, sweat and faeces worked its way into the very planks of the ship. Olaudah Equiano, trafficked from Africa to the West Indies, described the so-called Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean: “The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.” On their arrival in Barbados, “the buyers rush at once into the yard and make choice of that parcel they like best.”
Between 1662 and 1807, British ships transported three-and-a-quarter million slaves to work on sugar plantations and cotton fields.
More than 10% of the enslaved Africans regularly died during the journey. Some captains even threw slaves overboard, and tried to claim insurance on the lost “cargo”.
So, few will shed any tears for the memory of Edward Colston, whose statue was pulled down in Bristol as the Black Lives Matter campaign focused on the historic symbols of British racism. There seemed a poetic justice to Colston being dumped in the docks where his slave ships once set sail.
Personally, I would rather the memorial had entered a museum much earlier, under the democratic leadership of the local council.
But now comes the question, who is next? And what real change for today’s Black communities will this destruction of symbols of slavery lead to? Students are demanding the removal of William Gladstone’s name from an university building because of the Victorian Prime Minister’s family involvement in slavery.
Statues of the famous Conservative leader Robert Peel, Scouts founder Robert Badenpowell and even Nelson’s Column have also been targeted. The danger of removing every