This is a Global Player Original podcast.

It is three minutes after 10.

And I think somewhat oddly for a relatively successful media platform at the moment.

This program has not talked endlessly about immigration for the last, what, 10, 15, 20 years.

I remember the first time that I began to discuss it on LPC, and it was quite an awakening for me.

The kind of people who would ring in to insist they weren't allowed to say what they wanted to say about immigration without being called racist.

So you'd encourage them to say what they wanted to say with the promise that you wouldn't call them racist.

And then they'd say enormously racist things.

And unfortunately, that was at the time a fringe

and sometimes even for, I suppose,

possessors of white privilege,

it was even sometimes quite a funny experience.

I don't imagine it was very funny if you were listening

and the person that my callers expressed undiluted hatred for was you,

although I'm sure they'd follow it up very quickly by saying,

oh, no, no, no, I don't mean you.

But it has become, whether you like it or not,

the defining political issue of our age.

There is no way that Brexit could

have been achieved without people who did actually know better, harnessing, stapling themselves

to the racist rhetoric and the hideous bigotry of people like Nigel Farage. I don't, for the

record, think that Boris Johnson or even Jacob Rees-Mogg are possessed of that hideous bigotry,

...