Far-right British politician Nigel Farage left his LBC radio station job on Thursday, a sudden departure following his controversial statements this week comparing Black Lives Matter protesters to the Taliban.
“Nigel Farage’s contract with LBC is up very shortly and, following discussions with him, Nigel is stepping down from LBC with immediate effect,” LBC said in a statement. “We thank Nigel for the enormous contribution he has made to LBC and wish him well.”
An explanation for Farage’s sudden exit was not provided. Sky News reported that Farage had hosted his regular show as recently as Wednesday night.
The controversial leader of the Brexit Party and vocal supporter of President Trump faced backlash this week over his comments about the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality and racial injustice.
“A new form of the Taliban was born in the UK today,” Farage wrote Sunday on Twitter. “Unless we get moral leadership quickly our cities won’t be worth living in.”
His remarks came shortly after protesters in England, outraged by George Floyd’s death while in Minneapolis police custody, pulled down a statue of British slave trader Edward Colston and threw it in the harbor in Bristol.
Colston’s company, the Royal African Company, sent more than 100,000 slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas between 1672 and 1689, according to The Guardian. More than 20,000 of the slaves died due to unhygienic conditions, dehydration, dysentery and scurvy.
While appearing with Farage on a “Good Morning Britain” panel on Tuesday, Shola Mos-Shogbamimu called the toppling of the Colston’s statue a symbolic breaking of the “racism chain.”
She compared it to the iconic moment when Iraqi citizens toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Farage, however, described it as “mob rule.”
“If you want to remove statues, if want to change your architecture, then you do that democratically and sensibly,” Farage said, noting that Colton used money he earned through the Royal African Company to become a “big philanthropist.”
Farage’s comments triggered a heated back-and-forth with host Piers Morgan and fellow panelists.
“Nigel Farage embodies what is wrong with this country,” Mos-Shogbamimu, a lawyer and political activist, said. “He exemplifies how some white people will whitewash the oppression of black people as their own so that they can accuse [Black Lives Matter] of an anti-white agenda.”
She accused Farage of making the comparison to the Taliban to “incite hate among racists and white supremacists.”
“There is no justification for statues that immortalize slavery, immortalize British imperialism to remain standing,” Mos-Shogbamimu said. “It has no historical benefit. It embodies the racism that black people experience today.”
Farage responded by declaring the Black Lives Matter group a “far-left Marxist organization whose chief aim is to defund and close down police forces so that we would live under anarchy.”
“You’re full of such utter nonsense, Nigel,” Mos-Shogbamimu said.
Mos-Shogbamimu was among one of several social media users who applauded Farage’s exit from LBC on Thursday.
“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person,” she wrote on Twitter. “We thank him for nothing.”
Kate Williams, a professor who also participated in Tuesday’s heated panel discussion, called the move “long overdue.”
“Race hatred must be off all the airwaves -now!” she wrote.
LBC presenter James O’Brien tweeted: “We got our station back.”