A regional daily journalist has hit out at “woke anti-racists” after being abused online over his coverage of a sporting racism scandal.

Yorkshire Post cricket correspondent Chris Waters has criticised Twitter users who accused him of being “racist”, “vile” and “going after a brown man” following his call for the resignation of Yorkshire County Cricket Club chairman Lord Kamlesh Patel.

Lord Patel was appointed to his role after former player Azeem Rafiq went public with a raft of allegations about racism at the club, and subsequently sacked sixteen members of staff after they jointly wrote a letter to the Yorkshire board disputing Mr Rafiq’s claims.

Among those fired was British Asian physiotherapist Kunwar Bansil, who has now come forward to say he was “never aware of any racism or complaints of racism” during his time at the club in an interview with The Times.

Mr Bansil’s interview prompted Chris, pictured, to write a column urging Lord Patel to resign in order for Yorkshire “to move forward with a truly clean slate” after the scandal.

But the piece’s publication sparked a barrage of abuse for Chris, who then defended himself in a subsequent column.

In the column, he wrote: “My ‘crime’, which drew that latest onslaught of opprobrium on Twitter, was to defend a British Asian man from what I believed to be unfair treatment while at the same time calling for total transparency in the form of a public inquiry into the racism crisis that engulfs Yorkshire cricket.

“To my abusers, though, I was defending the wrong British Asian man against the actions of another British Asian man, while at the same time not quite sharing their opinions about another British Asian man, with the call for transparency neither here nor there. Confused? Alas, there is no mystery here.

“For in the world of the woke anti-racists, which is what I call them, there is no room for black and white in this particular argument. To localise it for these purposes, either you believe and agree absolutely with Azeem Rafiq and the popular portrayal of the Yorkshire CCC regime deposed as a viper’s nest of racism – or else you question that characterisation and are branded a racist.

“End of discussion, end of debate. Agree with us, Chris Waters, or prepare to be publicly abused and branded a racist by those who, you may have observed, seem to believe that the abuse they routinely dispense on social media is contrastingly OK.”

Chris went on to criticise what he called an “increasingly evangelical movement, mostly made up of white people, one fanned by social media in the wake of the George Floyd murder”.

He wrote in the column: “Although I have no doubt that its heart is in the right place, from the desire to end racism, it is actually a particularly pernicious form of anti-racism which is illogical, unreachable and unintentionally damaging.

“In other words, to a comment, to a particularly spiteful and hateful comment such as ‘What a surprise, Chris Waters going after a brown man…’ – proffered, of course, by the sort of white male so often at the heart of this anti-racist movement – there is no reasoning or hope of getting through to that person on any normal level for intelligent discourse.”

Chris added: “Despite their bile and inability or, indeed, unwillingness to apply the usual standards of intellectual scrutiny to stories concerning race, I believe that such people are, indeed, well-meaning at core because they recognise and wish to redress the power differentials in society which have held back, and continue to hold back, people of colour in all walks of life.

“But this woke anti-racism is actually creating more discord and division and a ton of toxicity we could well do without, damaging the very anti-racist values it claims to uphold to the extent that even Bansil’s treatment, however regrettable in its eyes, can simply be dismissed as collateral damage.”

Since the column was published last Saturday, Chris told HTFP he had “never had such a positive response to any article” in nearly 20 years of working for the Leeds-based Post.

Chris said: “I’ve literally had dozens of emails from readers offering their support, plus a lovely letter from a niece of the late JM Kilburn, the great Yorkshire Post cricket correspondent for almost 40 years from the mid-1930s, which touched me greatly.

“One line in it really resonated – ‘be of good courage’. She said that truth and integrity are at stake in this story and that her uncle would have had much to say about that.

“As an industry, I think it’s so important that we are of good courage against those who attack journalists on social media simply for trying to do their jobs, and that we are neither swayed nor discouraged by the ‘hate mobs’.

“We need to stand up to these individuals and to tell them, very politely but also very firmly, to sit back down again while the grown-up conversations and investigations continue in their stead.

“The only thing that surprises me about the abuse that I have received during this story – by far the saddest and most sensitive I have covered – is that, in some cases, it has come from people with highly respectable jobs in society.”

He added: “As I say in the piece, I think that such people are very sadly ‘unreachable’ and really no effort is needed to illustrate the fact; they make the point for you.

“All we can do is keep plugging away and try to write the truth.”