What Jon Snow meant when he talked about ‘white people’

Jon Snow has had a lot of flak for his ‘white people’ comment at the tail end of his report from the Leave Means Leave march on Friday. But in my view he hasn’t had enough. Because it seems pretty clear to me that he wasn’t simply disparaging whiteness and openly commenting on the racial make-up of a protest, which would have been bad enough — since when was it the job of newsreaders to point out people’s skin colour? No, he was also being classist, a bit of a snob. Because make no mistake: when members of the liberal elite say ‘white people’, they aren’t talking about white people like themselves — they’re talking about the ‘white people’ out there, from outside of London, with their strange accents and beliefs and habits. ‘White people’ is increasingly PC code for the lower orders.

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Channel 4 has said it “regret(s) any offence caused by” Snow’s comment to camera. He perused his surroundings — which was basically a very large collection of angry working-class and middle-class voters peeved that Brexit is being betrayed — and solemnly informed his viewers that he had ‘never seen so many white people in one place’. It struck many people as odd. What about Glastonbury, some quipped? Snow hung out there in 2017 (and reportedly chanted ‘Fuck the Tories’) and yet he didn’t see fit to comment on the largely white, middle-class make-up of that corporatised rock affair. Others wondered if Snow has ever walked through Channel 4’s offices: the UK news media is pretty white and posh, after all. And what about his own upbringing? Are we really meant to believe there were more black people at Ardingly College, where Snow’s father was headmaster and where Snow grew up, than there were in Parliament Square on Friday? Hmm.

But that’s why this is so revealing: the fact that Snow has spent much of his life surrounded by white people but only felt moved to comment about being surrounded by white people at the Leave march on Friday confirms that ‘white people’ is no longer just a descriptive phrase.