BBC ‘EMPLOYED ME BECAUSE OF THE COLOUR OF MY SKIN’: Ramsha Khan (£ Telegraph 30/9), in a personal opinion piece, explained that after undergoing work experience at the BBC in Manchester and London, she now believed – ‘as a woman of Asian heritage’ – she had been ‘invited into the gilded palace of political correctness because of the colour of my skin, not because of my insights. If I had been white, I doubt I would ever have been parked in front of a microphone’. Ms Khan described how she had noticed something was ‘off’ when she had been invited to appear in a programme on BBC Radio Manchester. She said:
‘I naively presumed I was invited because they believed I would have something insightful to add. It was a blow when a producer on the show, seeing me, casually said “Oh, we’ve hit the diversity quota today”. The panel consisted of five of us, all ethnic minorities. At that instant it seemed as if I had been invited purely based on my ethnicity. I felt as if I was being defined by my race and cultural background, rather than as a person.
‘From there, it was a short hop to feeling as if I was expected to have “correct” opinions on certain issues. The fact that I might not view the world through socially progressive biases – that, as a conservative-leaning person I might support Brexit, for example – seemed not to have occurred to them.’
Ms Khan concluded that because of the BBC’s approach to ‘diversity’, the time was right to defund it.