Diversity

Tuesday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Remember what really bad, racist TV looked like? I give you London Live

From our UK edition

So Lebedev’s London Live has launched. And I don't know about you but I’m hooked. I’d totally forgotten what really bad TV looked like. It's as if the chief execs at Channel 5 got together with Alan Partridge for a 21st-century rebrand. London's new TV channel did get one nice review from the, oh, Lebedev-owned Independent - moving swiftly on. From what I’ve seen of London Live's first full day, it’s as if a posh, ethnically very chic primary school won a Blue Peter competition where they got to dress up as adults for the day and run their very own TV channel - all by themselves! The top news story was the announcement that Emma Watson’s dress was white and pretty.

Friday

Ed West

Playing down Australia and New Zealand’s role in the Great War is shameful

From our UK edition

Back in the 1950s my grandmother wrote her memoirs of childhood in Edwardian London, a story that ends in the summer of 1914, when she was 14. In contrast to the image we’re given of cheering men skipping to war, she recalls her father in tears at the breakfast table, lamenting that the politicians had failed. He foresaw total disaster (optimism runs in the family). She then finds that her brother has joined up, not out of excitement or glory but because he’s ashamed not to be in uniform; he survived, although broken by shellshock, and his elder son was killed in the next war. It’s clear from her recollection that a world is ending, and all the assumptions and beliefs from that childhood now look alien.

Thursday

Marverine Cole

It’s not just older women. Where are the BBC’s black female presenters?

From our UK edition

Harriet Harman missed something on this morning’s Radio 4 Today programme. Yes, the paucity older women appearing on British television remains a very relevant one, since the BBC axed Moira Stuart in 2007. Yet at the same time it single-handedly wiped out 100pc of its primetime black (African-Caribbean) female newsreader talent. That hole left by Stuart has never been filled and no-one has ever been able to explain why. Not even former Mark Thompson, the ex-BBC chief, when I asked him face-to-face that same year. As a teenage swot in Birmingham, I felt proud watching Moira reading the news. She inspired me. After years of faffing, I finally studied journalism in May 2003.  An ITV News traineeship and years in BBC regional news lead me to Sky News.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

The City: a beacon of diversity

From our UK edition

Now, what would those in the Equalities industry say to an industry so diverse that it has — in proportion — seven times as many Hindus, five times as many Indians, three times as many atheists and three times as many gays or lesbians as the rest of the country? And that this was achieved not by a positive discrimination employment strategy, but by sheer hard-headed hunt for the best talent? It would likely be hailed as an exemplar of diversity, an example of how Britain is the most tolerant country in the world. But if they happen to be bankers? Well, that’s another issue altogether. The study from Astbury Marsden (cited in Allister Heath’s City A.M. column yesterday) sampled 1,655 City workers and the results are below.