With Asian motorists being dragged from cars and Black men being attacked by gangs of thugs, the Far Right’s stoking the flames. But shows like Question Time and I’m a Celeb must also take blame for giving the likes of Nigel Farage a platform

Over the weekend my wife and I were forced to tell our teenage kids to watch their backs during the school holidays. We’ve done the same with relatives and friends. We are driving our children to their summer jobs and their friends’ houses.

Few parents can afford to take any chances with mobs roaming the streets looking for anyone Black or Brown to assault – or worse. So it is time for a grown up conversation about the role that sections of the broadcast media have played ahead of this past week. It’s a chat we should all want to have.

Because holding the line isn’t really an option when you see the results. Random Black men surrounded by 10-20 menacing thugs in parks, then punched and kicked. Mobs dragging Asian motorists from their cars and attacking them. Mosques pelted with missiles as Muslims take refuge inside.

Shop owners of colour, beaten up by groups of kids with zero care for the camera phones recording them. Racists ramming stores in Liverpool – a city built on immigration – that they believe are owned by minorities shouting: ‘P***s out!’ and ‘We want our country back!’.

Parents now keeping their kids away from summer schools and even adults thinking twice about doing the simple things, like going to play football, for fear of attracting hate. The solution to all this remains unity. And thank God for the people of all colours and faiths across the land who stood their ground, staged the clean-ups and denounced the extremists.

It is still key to recognise, however, how this happened so that we are not back here again. It’s no good the broadcast media attacking X, formerly Twitter, for allowing misinformation to go unchecked when they too had a role in sowing the seeds of xenophobia that have left communities and demographics like mine at risk.

This is on the news debate shows that ignored more relevant MPs and handed free airtime to proven liars and bigots to spout their poison. This is on the supposedly progressive TV and radio morning shows which force fed us a daily diet of fear with confected debates on immigration which played into hands of the far right puppet masters.

It’s no good now holding politicians to account on the struggling police operation when for years you allowed proven liars like Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak to whip up fear and spout their racist soundbites. The past week has simply taken a flame to the petrol poured over time by those same MPs and commentators who used hate as a business model.

I wrote in December about being sick of waking up every day to find TV “debates” within which unified communities are groomed to fear, hate and turn on each other. Especially when most people are actually more concerned about heating, eating, the cost of living, seeing a GP and paying their rents or mortgages with interest rates going up. Working class people have been made poorer by politicians for years.

They were playing us all. Instead, they were given a free pass to continue stoking culture wars. So this is on shows like I’m A Celebrity where Nigel Farage was able to launder his reputation, a guy whose rancid politics have convinced decent, fair-minded people to be worried – just as they were in the 60s, 70s and 80s – that Black and Brown people are coming in to take their jobs and their houses rather than live in harmony and rebuild the country.