Round-up

1. This is interesting: The BBC and other broadcasters have overcompensated for their shortage of Black and Asian executives by putting too many ethnic minority faces on television, according to an Asian BBC director.

His comments, made yesterday during a Royal Television Society speech, came on the same day that equalities minister Harriet Harman announced plans to make it legal for a company to promote a black or female candidate over an equally-qualified white man.

2. An important piece from Stephen Glover at the Daily Mail:

Which is the most shocking example of racism we have learned about in the past week?

Is it the video of Prince Harry, made in 2006, in which he refers to a fellow officer cadet as a 'Paki' and tells another Army colleague that he looks like a 'raghead'?

Or is it perhaps the revelation that his father Prince Charles addresses a polo-playing Asian friend by the nickname of 'Sooty', which is apparently perfectly all right by the gentleman concerned, whose real name is Kuldip Dhillon?

Or might it be the case of a young Englishwoman called Lucy Newman, who was punched to the ground in Aberdeen and very badly injured, apparently because she was English?

Although you will have heard and read a great deal about Prince Harry and Prince Charles, you probably know little or nothing about what happened to Ms Newman, and her fractured cheekbone and damaged eye nerves, for the simple reason that the media have barely reported the incident.

And yet it could easily be argued that the attack on her was by far the most serious and disturbing example of racism.

It was the only case of the three in which something nasty actually happened as a consequence of a racist attitude. Prince Harry and Prince Charles used mere words.

Lucy Newman's attacker hit her in the face after saying: 'Get back to England.' The police are treating it as a racist incident, and they could hardly do otherwise.