His comments drew complaints from listeners
Alan Brazil has been found in breach of Ofcom regulations after he said that a rat infestation in Glasgow was caused by Asian immigration.
He said that the rat problem had arisen as a result the way Asian people who had moved to the city store food, drawing complaints from listeners who objected to this assertion.
Ofcom said the former Scotland international’s comments “fell short of accepted standards” and had the potential to cause “harm and offence’.
He will, however, not be punished for his comments that come while he was speaking on air to fellow talkSPORT host Mike Graham about recycling bins.
During the chat which previewed the main segment, Brazil said: “I don’t know if I should say this. I was talking to someone the other day and he came down from a part of Glasgow in fact where my school was. And, umm, things have changed.
“Parts of cities have changed. Because different people move in. And there’s a lot of people there let’s say from Asian – you know from that part of the world. But they don’t, with rice and stuff, they don’t, they don’t store it properly.
“And he was saying, he’s social housing this guy, and he said you can’t believe the rat infestation we’ve got there. What do you mean – how?
“And he was telling me people just a little bit ignorant when they come in, it’s a little bit damp and stuff like that, and where they store the food and stuff, he said its horrendous at the moment.”
After Ofcom launched an investigation into the comments, talkSPORT bosses admitted the comments were ‘ill-judged’ and should have been deleted from their website.
The broadcasting watchdog said talkSPORT Ltd apologised for “the upset felt by [the person who had complained to Ofcom]” and said it was “never [its] intention to upset or to offend [its] listeners, but clearly on this occasion [it had] got it wrong”.
The section of the show that featured the controversial comments has since been removed from the talkSPORT website.
A talkSPORT spokesperson said: ‘We accept Ofcom’s rulings – it’s never our intention to offend listeners. We have taken actions to limit the offence from these comments including deleting the content from the “Listen Again” feature and refreshed our compliance processes.’
