First Farage, now Jenrick, the BBC pandering to the extremists does nothing to dial down the temperature
Robert Jenrick has some brass neck contending with the widely-held belief that the latest of his poisonous remarks, consistently demonising migrants, is xenophobic.
The BBC this week issued an apology after the Shadow Justice Secretary complained that a critic had been handed airtime to push back.
And when the state broadcaster caves in to men like Jenrick, we are all in trouble.
It was theologian and author Dr Krish Kandiah, speaking on the BBC's Thought for the Day who spoke for many - including the ordinary people across the country at risk from the increasingly inflammatory language and people platformed by broadcasters who should know better.
Kandian used the word 'xenophobia' in relation to an article in which Jenrick said: "I certainly don't want my children to share a neighbourhood with men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally and about whom we know next to nothing.'
Kandian said: "These words echo a fear many have absorbed – fear of the stranger. The technical name for this is xenophobia. All phobias are, by definition, irrational. Nevertheless, they have a huge impact.'
Jenrick posted online in response: "On BBC Radio 4 this morning listeners were told that if you're concerned about the threat of illegal migrants to your kids, you're racist. Wrong. You're a good parent.'
The BBC's position was that it was apologising to Jenrick for the inclusion of an opinion in a place where it was inappropriate, not passing judgement on the rights or wrongs of the opinion.
But when is pushing back against hate ever inappropriate?
What message does it send when the man maligning millions of people about whom he knows nothing, comes out as the good guy?
And what world are we living in when we cannot use the words (Kandian let him off lightly in my opinion) that accurately sum up yet another of Jenrick's attempts to stir up division.
Here's a glimpse at his recent body of work.
There was the time in January he used the sexual exploitation of young girls to blanket-condemn 'hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures who possess medieval attitudes towards women'.
Describe one of your colleagues' countries at work as medieval with an alien culture and see how far you get before you are disciplined.
Twelve months ago Jenrick was vilified for saying police should 'immediately arrest' any protesters shouting 'Allahu Akbar', the Arabic phrase meaning God is great.
In response, Conservative party chair Baroness Sayeeda Warsi said: "This language from Jenrick is more of his usual nasty divisive rhetoric.'
Labour MPs Naz Shah, the MP for Bradford West, called Mr Jenrick's comments "textbook Islamophobia'.
His comments "literally equate every Muslim in the world with extremism" she argued.
In a social media post she said: 'Imagine in this climate, either being that ignorant or deliberately trying to stigmatise all Muslims. He should apologise and speak to Muslim communities and learn more about our faith.'
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said: 'People like Robert Jenrick have been stirring up some of the problems that we've seen in our communities.'
Then there was the time last October the Shadow Chancellor insisted Britain's former colonies should be thankful for the legacy of the empire.
Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, lawyer and activist posted on X: 'The ingratitude of this political illiterate @RobertJenrick. Britain would be nothing without colonised African & Asian nations. Its Industrial Revolution & Capitalist Wealth were built on the blood, sweat, forced labour & lives of our forebears.
'The 'inheritance' it left were the resources it stole, lands it pillaged, genocides committed, division of nations, systemic rape & collective punishment committed in the name of its racist British empire – a genocidal & thieving empire that still profits off former colonies to date.'
Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on African reparations, said: 'Enslavement and colonialism were not 'gifts' but imposed systems that brutally exploited people, extracted wealth, and dismantled societies, all for the benefit of Britain.'
So for the BBC to apologise to Jenrick, even on a technicality, sums up how detached from reality the broadcaster finds itself.
In any case, what does Jenrick have to be upset about?
Firstly the context. As we know there is precedent for politicians using language like him to insult, vilify entire groups of people and stir up hatred.
In 1964, former Tory MP Peter Griffiths was elected to Smethwick, north west Birmingham, on the slogan 'If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour.'
Griffiths refused to disown it, claiming he regarded it as 'a manifestation of popular feeling.'
Second, the framing. Jenrick's Tory party closed off all the legal routes into this country in order to deliberately frame those arriving as illegals.
To suggest everyone arriving - including families - as a threat is a throwback to the days of Griffiths.
Third, the BBC is the channel that ordered one of its non-white presenters to, humiliatingly, apologise for stating that Nigel Farage had been using, in a Reform UK speech, his 'customary inflammatory language' - even though he actually had been using his customary inflammatory language.
The Beeb is also the channel which had its own staff publicly rebel after Breakfast show presenter Naga Munchetty was found to have breached the corporation's editorial guidelines in criticising US President Donald Trump for telling black politicians to 'go home'.
Munchetty was ruled to have overstepped by accusing the US president of racism.
Angry colleagues at the time pointed out that the complaints unit is dominated by older white men with no real grasp of the way in which Trump's words impact ordinary people.
It looks very much as though that unit is still crammed to bursting with privileged middle-class high earners with their heads in the sand.
Because if Jenrick's remarks don't qualify as xenophobic then what does?
The Beeb needs to pick a side, because if you are non-white there have been a number of decisions from the broadcasters which do not help the fight against those who wish to divide us.
Remember the time when it broadcast live, in its entirety, that repugnant, 2022 party conference speech by then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman, packed with lies and 'hurricane of migrants' rhetoric.
The criticism of the Beeb's decision to hand a season ticket to Farage for its flagship political debate show Question Time, long before he was ever elected to Clacton, is well documented.
And there remains a feeling that the broadcaster is happier to chase controversy than play its part in calming tensions.
It needs to answer that charge urgently. Because to pander to extremists is simply not good enough.
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Speediest was the transition in the vast archipelago of the Dutch East Indies (encompassing much of modern Indonesia), which the Japanese occupied from March 1942 until the end of the war. The Dutch tried to re-establish domination after 1945 but were confronted by an organised national movement under President Sukarno, who won independence for Indonesia in 1949. Similar events in French Indochina were longer, more tortuous and appallingly bloody – stretching out over 30 years. After Japan's wartime occupation of the colony, the French returned in 1945 and were confronted with the communist leader Ho Chi Minh's declaration of independence. After a decade, the French abandoned the struggle and in 1955 Vietnam was partitioned, leaving the communist party in control of the north. That was unacceptable to Cold War America, which increasingly propped up South Vietnam with economic and military aid, and then later, by vast bombing campaigns and US combat troops. But the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal destroyed Richard Nixon's presidency, and during 1975 US forces were driven ignominiously from all of Indochina. The lurid backdrop of Indonesia and Indochina allows us to see the British withdrawal from south Asia more clearly. Although Britain fought a protracted counterinsurgency before conceding independence to Malaya in 1957 and then similarly to the enlarged Malaysia, it generally managed to avoid the travails of the Dutch and the French. Crucially, the Indian Raj was never invaded and occupied by Japan. Equally significant, Labour's victory in the July 1945 general election replaced the diehard Churchill with Clement Attlee. Whereas Churchill's experience of India ended in 1899, Attlee paid extended visits there in 1928 and 1929 with a parliamentary delegation. He had no doubt that India – a chequerboard of princely states and areas under direct British rule – should eventually follow Australia and New Zealand down the path to self-government and then full independence. He saw this as part of a shift in global power that had been accelerated by the Asian war, telling the cabinet in 1942 that 'the East is now asserting itself against the long dominance of the West'. But trying to surf the tides of history was a perilous business in a polity as vast and volatile as India. Attlee and Labour placed too much faith in the Hindu-led Congress Party, which dominated the interim government formed by Britain in September 1946. Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the All-India Muslim League demanded a greater role, and the escalating communal violence cost thousands of lives. Attlee was also grimly aware of the financial costs of victory, including debts priced at £4.7bn, the sale of £1.1bn worth of overseas assets, and exports down to a third of their 1938 level – no basis for an assertive foreign policy. Over cabinet opposition, he announced a firm date of 30 June 1948 for the end of British rule in India and was then obliged to abandon hopes of a unified country – fabricating instead the states of West and East Pakistan, a thousand miles (1,600km) apart. (The latter broke away in 1971 to form Bangladesh.) The human cost of partition was terrible – scholars estimate one million died and 15 million were displaced. But the Conservatives privately agreed that there was no alternative and even Churchill, despite fulminating about 'socialist scuttle', did not turn India into a political crusade, as he had done in the 1930s. The endgame was briefer and less bloody than Indochina, and the new rulers of India decided to keep their country in the Commonwealth – preserving the fiction of a 'transfer of power'. [See also: How China is reclaiming history] The long denouement of the Great Asian War is only part of the story of Japan's defeat. The central drama of capitulation is beyond the scope of this essay, except to note the continuing debate about the relative importance of the two American atomic bombs, dropped on 6 and 9 August 1945, compared with the shock of the Soviet declaration of war on Japan on the 9th. The answer might seem obvious now, but in Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan (2025), the historian Richard Overy notes that Japan had never previously been conquered by a foreign power and that the threat of invasion by a communist state seemed particularly horrendous to the Japanese ruling class – opening up fears of a domestic revolution as in Russia or Germany in 1917-18. Regardless of which superpower claimed credit for Japan's defeat, the actual occupation of the country (1945-52) was dominated by the US – unlike the endgame in Germany. Stalin's attempt to grab Hokkaido, one of the four main islands, was blocked by President Harry Truman. American administrators in league with Japanese civil servants pushed through demilitarisation, democratisation, land reform, labour laws and also women's rights beyond anything sanctioned in the US. Galvanised by these radical but peaceful reforms, and sheltering under America's defence umbrella, Japan's economy grew exponentially until the country boasted the highest per capita GDP in the world by the 1980s – not bad as the price of defeat. But the Japanese bubble burst in 1990, and it was followed by two decades of stagnation. Talk of 'Japan as number one' evaporated, and the focus of international attention shifted to China after its Communist Party's brutal suppression of the pro-democracy movement in 1989. This brings us back to the roots of Japan's militarist expansion in the 1930s and 1940s. Its conquest of Chinese Manchuria in 1931-32 escalated into full-scale war with China from 1937 to 1945, costing perhaps 15-20 million lives. The War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, as it is known in China, was entangled with the longer on-off civil war between nationalists and communists for control of China itself, which resumed in 1946 and led to the eventual triumph of Mao Zedong in 1949 and the nationalists' retreat to the island of Taiwan. For Xi Jinping, appointed leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 2012 and now president for life, these historical issues are of central importance in his sustained challenge to the hegemonial position of the US. He has insisted since 2015 on the need to 'reconsider the great path of the Chinese people's War of Resistance' by taking account of the nationalists' war effort and thereby underlining 'the great contribution that the war [of resistance] made to the victory in the world anti-fascist war', which he also referred to as 'the Second World War'. (This was an attempt to move the Sino-Japanese conflict from the margins to the centre of historiographical discourse.) Speaking in this voice, Xi implied common ground with the nationalists. But that could not override the intolerable fact that their successors still controlled the island of Taiwan – centre of the world's semiconductor production, flanking one of the major global trading arteries, the Taiwan Straits, and a standing affront to the PRC's claim to rule a unified and sovereign state. The possibility that Xi might resolve this dispute by force makes Taiwan one of the world's most sensitive hot spots. Another of Japan's former wartime conquests falls into the same category. Korea has been divided since the war in 1950-53. North Korea is a totalitarian state with nuclear weapons; South Korea is dependent on US military support. Both claim to be the rightful ruler of the whole Korean peninsula, and they are separated only by the armistice line from 1953. Taiwan and Korea are sobering reminders that the legacies of the devastating wars unleashed by imperial Japan are still shaping the 21st-century world. VJ Day should not be treated as a mere postscript to VE Day. As for the Trumpian issue of which country won the Second World War, it should be clear by now that a world war is a lot more complex than winning the World Series. David Reynolds' most recent book is 'Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him'. He co-hosts the 'Creating History' podcasts. [See also: North Korea's guide to going nuclear] Related
