Another day, another Tory racism row
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2024
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
Today's Tory 'was it racist?' row centres a donor who's given the Conservatives more than ten million pounds.
The Guardian scoop revealed comments he made 5 years ago - centring on the now-suspended Labour MP Dianne Abbott whom he blamed for making him 'want to hate all black women'.
Rishi Sunak has called the comments 'clearly unacceptable' but refused to call them racist.
Is there any chance he'll chose to return the money? And why is the Tory party struggling with yet another case of the 'Lee Anderson's'.
Later, an exclusive: The prison in England where MORE inmates are on drugs than are NOT. What's going wrong with our prison system? And what's the knock-on effect?
Editor: Tom Hughes
Senior Producer: Gabriel Radus
Producer: Laura FitzPatrick
Video Production: Rory Symon and Shane Fennelly
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The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:08.9 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:12.9 | Another day, another Tory racism row. |
| 0:15.5 | This time it concerns remarks made by Frank Hester, one of the Conservatives' largest ever donors, |
| 0:22.6 | about Diane Abbott, the former Labour MP, quite frankly, revolting. But this is his friend, |
| 0:30.5 | Lord Jonathan Marland, defending him. Well, I know Frank Hester, and the first question I ask |
| 0:36.8 | myself, is he a racist? And the answer |
| 0:38.9 | is the Frank Hester I know isn't. He's an international businessman. He travels widely overseas. |
| 0:44.9 | He does a lot of business in Jamaica. He does business in Malaysia, Bangladesh and places like that. |
| 0:50.2 | So he's not a racist. Well, that's conclusive then. He does business in Bangladesh and in |
| 0:55.4 | Jamaica, makes a lot of money there. How could he possibly be a racist? The problem is that he said |
| 1:02.5 | that when he looks at Diane Abbott, it makes him want to hate all black women. No, nothing racist |
| 1:10.6 | in that at all. What could be more inclusive? But what are the |
| 1:14.3 | Tories going to do about it? And do they give back the millions that he has donated to them? |
| 1:21.9 | Welcome to the newsagents. |
| 1:26.6 | The newsagents. |
| 1:28.8 | It's John. |
| 1:29.9 | It's Emily. |
| 1:30.6 | It's Lewis. |
| 1:31.6 | And the response from Number 10 Downing Street to this row over Frank Hester, who has just cut a check for 5 million quid into Conservative Party coffers, is to say what he said was wrong, and then when press, |
| 1:47.3 | Downing Street, wouldn't say what it was that was wrong. Exactly what happened with Lee Anderson |
| 1:54.6 | when he had made his comments about Sadiq Khan. All you need to do is apologise and everything |
... |
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