t’s Tina I feel sorry for. This week she rang LBC’s breakfast show to tell host Nick Ferrari what toppling statues of racist Britons means to her as a British woman of African-Caribbean ancestry. Could she get her point across? Not a chance. Every time she tried to air her views, Ferrari’s voice cut through hers. “Tina, Tina, Tina,” Ferrari said in his trademark oleaginously patronising simper as if speaking to a dim child. Tina complained about him interrupting her, but Ferrari wouldn’t be silenced. Taking down statues is illegal. End of. “I can’t breathe” is a Black Lives Matter slogan. “I can’t get airtime” might be Tina’s. “Tina, Tina, Tina”, for me, had Thatcherite resonance. There was no alternative to her neoliberal ruin of Britain – and on the London radio station, there is no alternative to the stale pale male discourse, no airtime for BAME women’s voices to be heard. There is one female presenter, the superbly intelligent Shelagh Fogarty, and one person of colour, the former Islamist who became David Cameron’s anti-extremism adviser Maajid Nawaz, now the station’s eviscerator-in-chief of dimwit callers. No wonder there have been reports of BAME staff, and quite possibly anyone with a social conscience at LBC, having long been sickened by Nigel Farage, who has been hosting his show five days a week since 2017. They will be pleased that the former Ukip leader’s toxic demagoguery has finally received its comeuppance. This happened when Farage tweeted comparing Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol who toppled the statue of Edward Colston to the Taliban. On ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Farage clashed with host Piers Morgan over his comments and had his microphone muted as a result. Sources at LBC told Business Insider that there had been “so much anger” among staff about the station publicly endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement “while promoting a man that likened it to the Taliban”. LBC has long been too cosy with Farage’s agenda, right down to gleefully plugging his exclusive interview with Donald Trump. I say interview, but it was more a case of Farage kneeling down, puckering up and smooching for an hour. The first principle of political interviewing is, as Jeremy Paxman argued: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” Farage stands for a different kind of journalism, one that led Ofcom to investigate his show and one that LBC should have dispensed with years ago. LBC has previous in falling foul of its fetish for hiring toxic blowhards. Three years ago, hate factory Katie Hopkins lost her show on the station after a tweet in which she called for a “final solution” following the Manchester Arena bombing. This has left more responsible presenters putting out fires. A year ago, Brexiteer Trevor rang in in the small hours of the morning to ask rhetorically: “Why the hell do we need Europe when Europe is filled up with black people who are raping?” “At some point,” retorted presenter Darren Adam, “people who say a racist thing lose the right not to describe them as racist.” After LBC showed Farage that leave means leave, token leftwing presenter James O’Brien tweeted happily that he and his colleagues had got their station back. Perhaps, but that’s not good enough. One evening last week, Denise from Enfield rang in to Iain Dale’s show. Dale is having a good lockdown – his ratings are up and his kindly, intelligent, albeit Tory, persona has been soothing for many of us. Denise rang in to tell truth to power, namely that black people don’t get chances for representation on TV and radio. Dale was so impressed by her insights into race issues that he invited her to cohost a show. The result was a revelation, not least because Denise was a natural for radio: warm-voiced, kind to callers and, like a pro, very aware of the need to cut people off before the ad break. Mostly, though, Denise’s hour on LBC was a revelation because, finally, a white man was listening to a black woman. She told Dale: “I think you can have empathy for a person’s situation, you can also have sympathy because most people in the world are decent in terms of the day-to-day understanding. I’m sorry, Iain, but you wouldn’t know.” Good for Dale, opening the airwaves to Denise. He will now, apparently, do a four-hour show, taking in the 6-7pm evening slot previously filled by Farage. Why don’t they just let Denise replace Farage? It would be a step in the right direction.