BREAKING NEWS: Shocking Racism at the BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation has been embroiled in another giant racism scandal. If you missed the story, BBC Radio 5 Live presenter Nihal Arthanayake revealed that his terrible experiences at the national broadcaster left him struggling with his mental health. The situation is “really affecting” him, he explained.

So what happened, exactly?

Did a group of colleagues show up to the BBC canteen holding aloft pictures of Tommy Robinson, chanting “England till I die”? Was Mr Arthanayake told to go back where he came from? Have his career opportunities been curtailed on account of his race?

No. The allegations made by Mr Arthanayake are far more serious than that. In a shocking statement to the Journalism Diversity Fund conference at BBC Media City, he explained that his mental health problems are down to the “overwhelmingly white” working environment he is forced to endure on a daily basis. “It’s really affecting me that I walk in and all I see is white people,” he added.

Arthanayake further explained that when he raised the “problem”, his colleagues’ response was often to say that they were not being racist. Can you believe it? When Mr Arthanayake bravely confronted his fellow employees for the offence of being white, they brazenly denied that their skin colour was a racist hate crime. Outrageous!

He further added that “the hardest thing is to walk into a room, look around and nobody looks like you”.

Mr Arthanayake’s parents are from Sri Lanka. I have never been to Sri Lanka but I am willing to bet the equivalent of his excessive £150,000 salary that very few people in Sri Lanka would place “having to walk into a room where nobody looks like you” at the top of their list of the Hardest Things to Do.

What is more, were I to move to Sri Lanka, I would be rather disappointed if the son my wife and I raised there grew up complaining about the Sri Lankan national broadcaster being staffed primarily by brown people.

Were this to occur, I imagine I would feel the pressing need to remind him of the tremendous opportunities he enjoyed thanks to the fact that his parents were allowed to make their home in Sri Lanka.

I would caution him in the strongest terms against adopting the pernicious and racist idea that people should be judged on the colour of their skins rather than the contents of their character.

I might even suggest that if he is so uncomfortable with being surrounded by brown people that it is “affecting his mental health”, then perhaps Sri Lanka is the wrong country for him and he may wish to consider following my example by moving to a country that is more to his liking.

I would also not be surprised if his racist remarks were badly received by the public and resulted in some sort of formal statement from his employer – the national broadcaster – distancing itself from his comments given that it is funded, after all, by a lot of ordinary Sri Lankans of the skin colour that makes him so uncomfortable.

And, in a sane world, all of this would also happen in Britain to Nihal Arthanayake. But it won’t, of course, because we don’t live in a sane world.