How to win votes for the BNP

The following statement appears on the website of Carlton, owners of ITV: ‘The company does not discriminate between employees or potential employees on grounds of sex, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, colour, race, ethnic origin, age or disability.’ Unless, it would appear, you happen to be white.

As a freelance print journalist with an eye on one day moving into the broadcasting side, my attention was grabbed when I recently saw a recruitment advertisement for a funded training scheme in television news. The scheme sounded like a pretty good way in: it was the ‘award-winning TV training scheme for news journalists’ provided by London News Network (LNN), maker of London Tonight, the flagship regional news programme for Carlton. Three posts were on offer.

But there was a caveat. LNN had specified that it was looking for applicants only from the following ethnic groups: African, Caribbean, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Chinese. I emailed LNN to ask for an application pack, pointing out that I was ‘ethnically white’, and asking if this would affect my chances. The reply from LNN’s personnel department was clear: ‘You only qualify if you belong to the ethnic groups specified in the advert.’

It is worth reflecting on the full implications of this statement. LNN provides news to eight million Londoners, including millions of white Britons but also many thousands of ‘other whites’ such as Greeks, Turks, Eastern Europeans and the growing hordes from the white Commonwealth and Latin America. Yet the only in-house training scheme that LNN now operates has three places and not one of them is open to these people, for no other reason than that they are white. As the LNN personnel department confirmed, this policy also excludes Jews, since they are white.

LNN justifies this racially selective recruitment policy on the old chestnut of ‘positive discrimination’; it is only recruiting from ethnic groups ‘under-represented in the newsroom’.