Piers Morgan has savaged a Scottish politician in a furious TV debate after he described Sir Winston Churchill as a 'white supremacist mass murderer'.
The Good Morning Britain host, 53, told Scottish Greens MSP Ross Greer, 24: 'If it wasn't for Winston Churchill you would be speaking German and goose-stepping your way to Holyrood.'
Piers branded Mr Greer a 'nasty, sneering young man' and accused him of offering 'no balance, perspective or any sense that what Winston Churchill did for this country was good.'
In response the young MSP said Piers's version of events were 'wildly ahistorical'.
When the presenter blasted him on a point about the Bengali famine, Mr Greer said: 'You're getting into a tantrum Piers, that's very snowflake of you.'
Mr Greer, Europe spokesman for the Scottish Greens, sparked outrage with his Twitter rant about Britain's great wartime Prime Minister on January 25.
His controversial tweet generated thousands of responses, including several from Piers Morgan who branded him a 'thick ginger turd'.
After a heated exchange Piers challenged Mr Greer to a TV debate.
Speaking on the show this morning, he demanded to know why Mr Greer had written the inflammatory tweet.
Mr Greer said Churchill was a 'racist because he hated Indians with a passion and branded them a beastly people with a beastly religion'.
He also claimed the former PM 'advocated using poison gas against uncivilised tribes in Africa' as well as using hateful rhetoric against people in Afghanistan and Kurdistan.
But when he accused the late, great Churchill of being 'responsible for the Bengali famine of 1943', Piers was unable to control his emotions.
He said: 'That is a complete and utter lie.
'In the middle of the Second World War Churchill is seen in the papers to be very concerned about the famine in Bengal, going to Canada, Australia and Franklin D. Roosevelt in America, beseeching world leaders to help the Bengalis.
'What you're saying isn't just offensive, it's a downright lie.
'I get enraged by this, because if it wasn't for Winston Churchill you would be speaking German and goose-stepping your way to Holyrood.'
Mr Greer was responding to a Conservative party tweet from January 24 marking the anniversary of Churchill's death calling him 'the greatest Briton to have ever lived'.
Greer, who at 24 is Scotland's youngest MSP, was accused of 'attention seeking' after saying: 'Once again for the old people at the back: Churchill was a white supremacist mass murderer'.
He caused further controversy by describing anyone who admires the Second World War leader – credited with helping save Britain from Nazi Germany – as 'crass and simple minded'.
Mr Greer also spoke to Bob Seely MP, whose great, great uncle served alongside Churchill.
Mr Seely said Mr Greer's argument was just 'trite infantile smearing' and 'eloquent stupidity'.
The Isle of Wight MP highlighted that by branding Churchill a racist, Mr Greer is saying he was no better than Adolf Hitler.
Piers added: 'I know he was a flawed character, but Winston Churchill single-handedly took this country out of the abyss.
'You are saying the man who saved us from the Nazis is actually no better than a Nazi himself.'
Piers was among many to blast him - his message (above) generated more than 5,000 retweets and caused a row that raged online throughout the weekend
Throughout the debate Piers told Mr Greer to 'stop laughing, smirking and sneering' because 'the people who lived through the war are not laughing'.
Exasperated, he ended the interview by saying: 'You denigrate this great national icon. Well, do you know who I find revolting? You.'
Yesterday afternoon he confirmed a Tuesday-morning breakfast-television clash for which some of Piers's followers promised to set their televisions to 'record'.
Mr Morgan tweeted: 'UPDATE: The thick ginger turd MSP @Ross_Greer who said Churchill is a 'white supremacist mass murderer' will be appearing live on @GMB tomorrow'.
Mr Greer, elected in 2016 aged 21, was defiant over the row.
He said: 'This is the real, verified history of Churchill and the one known throughout much of the world'.
He added: 'If that's uncomfortable to some here, it's just a sign of how uneducated Britain is of our own shameful history.'
His Twitter attack came the day after the rest of the UK, including Prime Minister Theresa May, marked the anniversary of Sir Winston's death on January 24, 1965, aged 90.
Lee Pollock, of the International Churchill Society, said: 'It seems to me this young man's not as important as he would like, so he has found the biggest target he can in order to get the most attention with a radical point of view. It's a cheap trick.'
Mr Greer's comments highlighted Sir Winston's pre-war activity and his involvement in colonial rule of India.
However, he faced a backlash, with critics telling him to 'do his research'.
Afghanistan veteran Colonel Richard Kemp tweeted: 'If Churchill hadn't saved our country from the Germans, you wouldn't be a so-called 'Green MSP', whatever that is. Y
'You'd probably just about have made it to Oberrottenführer in the West Schottland Hitler Youth.'
Other Scottish politicians jumped to Sir Winston's defence on Monday.
Scottish Tory whip Maurice Golden said: 'Sir Winston Churchill is one of the defining figures of western democracy… seeking to diminish him is a disservice to the millions of men and women who fought to preserve our freedom.'
Piers Morgan: Mr Greer, thank you for joining us, can you just explain to our viewers why your categorisation of Sir Winston Churchill's life and career came down to 'he's a white supremacist mass murder' interposed in your tweet with seven or eight 'clapping emojis', applauding your own genius.
Ross Greer: Absolutely, so lets make a comparison. Piers you're a sensitive soul, yesterday you accused me of being a racist for pointing out that you look like honey glazed gammon.
If you want an example of real racism, you just have to look to Churchill. He talked about his belief in the triumph of the Aryan race. He hated Indians with a passion. He said they were a beastly people with a beasty religion.
When a famine broke out three million people starved to death he was significantly to blame. He said they brought it on themselves for breeding like rabbits.
He advocated using poison gas on people he described as uncivilised tribes. He said that native Americans, Australians and black Africans deserved genocide and the domination that they suffered at our hands because whites were a superior race.
That's why I said white supremacist.
I said mass murdered because he always advocated the most violent the most destructive option. He used poison gas against Kurds against Afghans. He was a strong advocate of Britain's concentration camps in the Boer War when 28,000 people died.
He's always advocated the use of aerial bombardments in what he described as terror bombing campaigns.
In fact his own cabinet in the 1920s had to stop him from bombing protesters in Ireland. That was how he wanted to deal with problems in Ireland.
Susanna Reid: Piers, are you persuaded?
PM: Well let's just take one of those points, which I heard you espousing on the BBC yesterday, that Winston Churchill was to blame for the Bengali famine.
That is a complete and utter lie. He was not to blame for the famine starting or gathering momentum. In the middle of the Second World War he actually went to great lengths, if you bothered to check your history, and Sir Martin Gilbert, actually went back and read the cabinet papers to see the culpability or otherwise of Churchill in Bengal.
He found some interesting things, in which repeatedly, Churchill is seen in the papers to be very concerned about the famine in Bengal, he is going to Canada, Australia, to Roosevelt in America trying to get them help. Does get them help, does get them food.
RG: That's not true.
PM: It is true. It's in the cabinet war papers. So you can sit there laughing and besmirching the great Winston Churchill.
Here's my point on a wider issue. You can take any number of things you find distasteful about Churchill and I'm not here to defend everything that Churchill did.
But what you fail to do is offer any perspective. Your sneering little tweet diminished Churchill to… again you're laughing now because people who lived through the war don't laugh. Winston Churchill was voted the greatest Briton of the last century for a reason. It's because people see that single-handedly, through the power of his rhetoric, saved this country in World War Two from the Nazis.
Again you laugh, that sneering little laugh.
RG: It wasn't him who won the war, it was the soldiers and the sailors and the airmen who voted him out when they came home.
PM: Churchill was the Prime Minister. He was the one making decisions and allowed this country to save itself from Adolf Hitler.
At no point do you offer any balance, any perspective, any sense that anything Winston Churchill ever did was actually good for this country.
A lot of people who look at that tweet think what a nasty, sneering young men who got elected to represent a country that frankly you, we, would all be speaking German and would be goose-stepping your way to Holyrood.
So let me go from you to an MP and ex-Army sergeant Bob Seely, whose uncle served alongside Churchill.
This enrages me, Bob Seely, because there is a creeping attempt now to besmirch everything Churchill stands for.
I have a brother who is a colonel in the British Army who I talked to about this last night and he was spitting with rage from where he is currently serving for this country.
This just gets everybody's goat up. I don't defend everything Churchill did, I think he's a difficult, complex character.
SR: As any historical hero will be.
PM: We heard a rant then that didn't offer any balance, any attempt to say anything positive.
Bob Seeley MP: If you want an example of racism, read some of Gandhi's work. Does it make Gandhi a racist? No
PM: Or Nelson Mandela's…
BS: Mandela said and did things in his early years that he would have regretted in his later years. So if you want to portray someone as a racist in the way that Ross does with his eloquent stupidity it's very easy to do so.
But if you want portray Churchill as a racist, my great, great uncle and he when they served as Conservative MPs they crossed the floor to the Liberals because they were outraged by the treatment of Chinese in South Africa.
Now Ross if he checked his history, would know that.
You can say Churchill was an old guard Conservative and yet he supported the people's budget in 1911, he campaigned for better treatment for coal miners, shop workers.
He did many things that we now regard as being central to the foundation of the welfare state.
With the Bengal famine, they had a choice between feeding Bengal and feeding the Balkans and at the time he Churchill, one of his great attributes, was he focused this nation.
Ross in his very crude misunderstanding of history says 'oh it was the servicemen who won the war', well of course it was, but our political leadership was not willing to fight that war in the first place.
On Bengal, in these papers we have a direct message to Lord Wavell his new Viceroy of India, from Churchill, every effort must be made to deal with local shortages in India.
Then there are copies of letters he sent to the Prime Minister of Canada, Australia to Franklin D Roosevelt over the next two years in which he is beseeching them to help the people of Bengal.
For you to take that and blame him for the deaths of 3,000 people in Bengali is not just offensive, it is a downright now.
RG: No Piers, you just don't understand history.
PM: I'm reading history.
RG: You mentioned who was then the Viceroy of India, when Wavell was in Churchill's war cabinet, he was planning how to get food to the people of Bengal. Churchill came into that room and stopped them.
In fact Churchill spent so long stopping people from getting aid to Bengal.
And to go back to Bob's point, it wasn't to feed people in the Balkans it was to stop pile food in the Balkans while three million Indians were starving to death.
PM: Here he is begging F D Roosevelt to help, but he was unable to give it to him.
RG: But that was after he destroyed 46,000 boats. He let that famine happen.
PM: Let me explain to you do you know what Winston Churchill was actually doing during World War Two? Do you realise…
Why do you keep smirking and laughing? What is funny about any of this? About your attempts to smear the reputation of a great leader like Winston Churchill?
Why do you get a kick out of this?
Why do you not have any sense of honour about you that allows you to offer any balance.
RG: It's brave about you to talk about honour Piers when the one thing the British public knows about you is that you were sacked from a British newspaper for lying about British troops on the front page and refusing to apologise for it.
PM: I knew you would do this. So let me explain what happened there.
I was sacked from the Daily Mirror for publishing those photographs of troops, rogue elements of a regiment, who had been abusing Iraqis.
They were held to account and some of them were imprisoned for the abuse that they enacted.
I never apologised because the abuse happened. I then sat down with General Nick Carter, the head of the British Army, several years ago, in northern France and he told me I was right to publish what I published.
So I'm sure you know more than the head of the British Army, but I suspect you don't, like you don't know what happened in Bengal.
But let me come to a wider point where you're going to talk about things in my life.
RG: Oh, I've lost interest in your life.
PM: Do you believe that Winston Churchill did anything positive in World War Two?
RG: Yes, he showed strong leadership but let's not pretend that wipes out anything else he did.
Because of Churchill, I nearly didn't exist, because of Churchill's hatred of the workers on the Clyde, my gran was almost killed in the Clydebank Blitz.
Clydebank was the only place in the UK completely destroyed by the Blitz, because Churchill hated the workers and he hated the unions.
Bob mentioned what he did for miners. Miners in Wales hate Churchill because he set police officers against them when all they were doing was campaigning for their own rights.
PM: I asked him to say something positive but…
BS: If Churchill was a white supremacist and clearly Hitler was a white supremacist, is there some kind of moral equivalence between them?
SR: I just wonder whether that was the deliberate intention of the two phrases you used, because as has been pointed out what does that make us think?
Hitler was the white supremacist mass murder responsible for the deaths of millions of people, and if it wasn't for Winston Churchill who knows what would have happened to Great Britain.
RG: It wasn't just Churchill, if it wasn't for Roosevelt and Stalin in the Soviet Union, but we don't pretend he was a decent man? He was a scumbag. You're not a Stalinist are you Piers?
BS: Thank you, that's the first word of sense you've come up with this morning mate.
RG: This is about us taking a rounded view of history.
PM: You have no rounded view of history, you're just a Churchill hater.
RG: You're throwing a tantrum Piers? That's very snowflake of you.
PM: I'm not a snowflake about Winston Churchill, I know he was a flawed character, but I also know he almost single handedly pulled this country from the abyss in World War Two.
RG: That's wildly ahistorical.
SR: I think the thing is Ross, you seem to be articulating a very unique, isolated version of history.
RG: No, not at all.
SR: Well you are, aren't you. Everyone celebrates Sir Winston Churchill.
RG: No they don't if you go to India, Ireland or Kenya, they absolutely don't. If you come to communities like Clydebank that I represent if you got South Wales Valleys. These points of view that have been long held haven't been voiced. Because the prevailing narrative is to not speak ill of this 'war hero'.
SR: You can be critical of him but the way you're talking about him… White supremacist mass murder…it's an equivalcence with Hitler. People find that very offensive.
PM: It's disgusting.
SR: Nobody is denying that every historical hero should be scrutinised but the use of language is so offensive.
BS: I was going to completely agree what you were saying. But there is a difference between a great historian summarising and revaluating a great man's life and the rather infantile tripe sloganeering. Putting a racist tag on that person or a sexist tag on that person.
This is not history, this is just silly slogan politics.
PM: It's become worse than that. There's a younger generation that you epitomise, that decide to twist history to suit a narrative that people like Churchill are evil people that should be condemned.
You have not presented a single positive argument.
I know 95 per cent of our viewers will be hearing what you're saying and seeing it with utter revulsion.
Why does this kid, who's 24, and has been elected to represent Scotland, why does he not appreciate what Winston Churchill did, even if he didn't like him.
And when you call Churchill a white supremacist, in your tweet with all these clapping emojis, you are doing an equivalence with Adolf Hitler.
You are saying the man who saved us from the Nazis was no better than a Nazi himself.
Do you believe that Winston Churchill was better than a Nazi?
RG: Of course he was.
PM: But you called him a mass murderer, that's what Nazis are.
So when you say of course he was better actually you want the world to believe he was no better than a nazi.
RG: He was less worse. But his own cabinet minister for India said I cannot tell the difference between Winston Churchill's views on race and Adolf Hitler's. I wouldn't make that comparison because I think it's crass.
He was so revolted he felt he had to make that comparison.
PM: Do you know what I find revolting? You. I find what you said about Winston Churchill, your sneering performance today, revolting.
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January 29, 2019
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