LBC host Steve Allen breached the broadcasting code with a series of offensive comments about the Portuguese, the regulator has ruled.
Ofcom investigated a complaint that Steve, who hosts the early breakfast show on weekdays on the speech-based radio station, made discriminatory comments.
Listeners of his show, on LBC 97.3FM, heard Steve respond to an email from a listener with the remark “he comes from Portugal. Obviously, the further you get abroad, the dumber they become really”.
Shortly afterwards, while discussing another, unrelated story, Steve said: “I suspect they are living in Portugal. That’s about the saddest place we have found at the moment where they really are a bit thick.”
LBC described the reference to Portugal as “irrelevant”, saying that Steve believed his listeners would have understood that he “did not intend to make a serious generalisation about a particular nation”.
But Ofcom said the remarks amounted to a series of “repeated, insulting comments which had the potential to cause offence to listeners” and breached the broadcasting code.
It called the remarks a “series of insulting comments towards a listener’s level of intelligence and an unwarranted indictment of the intelligence of Portuguese people generally”.
An Ofcom spokesman added: “We found repeated comments by presenter Steve Allen about people from Portugal were derogatory and in breach of our rules. They were not justified by the context and were likely to have exceeded listeners’ expectations.”
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