Starkey raving racist or cantankerous old goat?

David Starkey’s a racist! That’s right, a racist, a knuckle-dragging ignoramous better suited to what passes for debate at The Den than that practised in the cloistered, cerebral majesty of his alma mater. 

In a recent interview with the brilliant yet spooked Darren Grimes, he argued that the Atlantic Slave Trade was not a genocide. If it had been, he said, rather injudiciously in the current climate, I must concede, there wouldn’t be so many ‘damned blacks’ in Africa. 

But was this statement a clumsy faux pas or an expression of Starkey’s barely concealed racism? 

I’d be inclined to go with the former. Yes, as I said, his words were clumsy and ill-considered, but he wasn’t damning black people per se, and anyone who listens to the interview objectively can see that. He was expressing his exasperation with those who claim that the Atlantic Slave Trade was an act of genocide. If it was, he implied, albeit slightly exaggeratedly, then after 300 years of unrelenting genocide, there wouldn’t be any black people left in Africa. 

But he’s done this before, his detractors scream. He said that British whites were emulating blacks. Again, this blunt, provocative, shoot-from-the-hip style does not betray the heart of a fascist. It betrays a thoughtful historian exploring socio-cultural trends without the burden of political correctness.

It enables him to speak freely and explore ideas, ideas that will no doubt be honed and modified, sharpened into a more accurate and nuanced diagnosis, in the distiller of free and open debate. 

His claim that whites are emulating blacks, for example, hits on an important sociocultural phenomenon in which US and Jamaican ‘cool’ gangster culture has been imported and adopted by black, Asian and white, often but not always, inner-city youths with not only dialectal and sartorial consequences, but violent ones too. It’s a very important discussion to be had. 

Okay, he’s too general for my taste, and could be misinterpreted - as he has been - and open to accusations of promoting and perpetuating stereotypes. Indeed, it’s easy for me to say, but he should have modified his remarks and said that, yes, a destructive subculture has been imported from mainly black communities in Jamaica and America, but that’s not to say that all Afro-Caribbeans inhabit it, or even that those who manifest some aspects of it are dangerous and afflicted. But he didn’t.

He shot from the hip. That doesn’t make him racist, though. It makes him clumsy. 

What worries me more is the reaction to Starkey’s tactlessness, especially among those claiming to be against race-baiting and for free speech. They immediately accused him of racism - knowing that the accusation alone will cancel him - and, more worryingly, anyone who defended him, me included, has been branded with the same rotten, damaging label, my accuser weirdly saying that she still liked me. It was like being carted off to the Gulag after being denounced, only for my denouncer to say, as I’m being herded onto the cattle wagon, ‘I still like you.’ Incredibly worrying.

Where’s the forgiveness for misspeaking? Why think the worst of people? We need to be more charitable and stop shouting racist; otherwise, people will stop speaking, ideas won’t be explored and remedies will remain lost.

Neo-Marxist academics have spent decades radicalising their students. They must be reined in.

Julia Hartley-Brewer conducted a fascinating and revealing interview with Dr Kojo Koram earlier this week. A lecturer in race and empire at Birkbeck College, the University of London, Dr Koram could hardly contain his enthusiasm for the violent removal and illegal submersion of Edward Colston's statue in Bristol. He pointedly refused to condemn the violence and, at one particularly surreal moment, even claimed that vandalising the statue - a statue that no doubt served as a comforting mainstay for over a hundred years, bearing witness to the trials and tribulations of successive generations of Bristol's proud inhabitants - was both educational and supported by the majority of the British public. It was astonishing. A learned academic not only condoning but celebrating mob rule.

You could be forgiven for being taken unawares by the events of the last week or so. Statues have been toppled, monuments desecrated and national heroes publicly humiliated. It's indeed been a disorientating time for us all. Why do so many youngsters appear to despise our country? Why are so many immune to reason and seemingly possessed by a visceral, uncontrollable fervour that manifests itself in blood-lust and violence? As I said, it's incredibly disorientating. And when you add the complicity of our educated elites and previously respected institutions into the mix - either through actively encouraging and cheering on the rioters or cowardly turning a blind eye - you get a perfect storm of bewilderment, confusion and, as an inevitable consequence, anger and frustration.

That's why Dr Koram's revelation was so helpful. He represents the source of our current unrest, the womb in which these destructive cultural forces gestated.

Broadly speaking and simply put, our universities are to blame. They are the madrassas responsible for this recent assault upon our cultural heritage. Indeed, over the course of the last several decades, they've become hotbeds of neo-Marxist thought disseminated and promoted by radical left-wing scholars like Dr Koram. 

Heirs to a heady mix of Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs and a long line of anarcho-socialist thinkers, they wish to overturn the hegemonic cultural conservatism that, in their eyes, oppresses the less fortunate, whether represented by working class, BAME, gay or transgender groups. For these scholars, Scientific Marxism is inadequate to the task: oppression is not only experienced through economics; it's also experienced through culture and religion. That's why our statues, monuments, art, even television programmes are under attack. They are seen as instruments of oppression.

And if you believe I'm being alarmist and reductive, that Dr Koram is one man, unrepresentative of the university sector as a whole, consider this: a 2017 survey conducted by the Adam Smith Institute found that eight in ten university lecturers were left-wing. According to the report, 'Conservative and Right-wing academics are particularly scarce in the social sciences, the humanities and the arts', and, as a consequence, universities are 'afflicted by group think and a dysfunctional atmosphere where key assumptions go unquestioned, dissenting opinions are neutralized, and favoured beliefs are held as sacrosanct'. 

In addition, signalling their underlying desire to subsume and suffocate our cultural particularism as embodied in the nation state - which, let's not forget, they view as oppressive -, nine out of 10 university staff backed Remain during the EU Referendum. And this phenomenon isn't just the preserve of the UK, either. A 2016 study conducted in the US found that left-wing university professors outnumbered their conservative colleagues by 12 to 1. It couldn't be clearer. The Left has a stranglehold on the dissemination of ideas throughout our great educational institutions. Furthermore, it has progressively increased this stranglehold over the last five or six decades.

Think, for one moment, what this means. Yes, academics are brainwashing impressionable young kids who - armed with a bit of knowledge and the passion, naivety and arrogance of youth - are deployed as shock troops, violently railing against perceived, largely mythical inequalities, and practically applying the trite, unoriginal anarcho-Marxist theories of their tutors.

But they have also indoctrinated the politicians, Silicon Valley hipsters who patrol and police the Web, right-on journalists and broadcasters: all those university-educated elites who provide the rioters with covering fire and control the narrative. They, too, are sympathetic to the protesters' demands, for the simple reason that they've been inculcated with the same worldview that sees oppressor and oppressed in just about everything.

Okay, you might say, but many of the protesters aren't university educated neo-Marxists. And you'd be right. But they've been exploited by groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter. These are the groups orchestrating the incipient cultural revolution taking place. And they are very much led by university educated neophytes. Just take Black Lives Matter as an example. This radical, extremist group which calls for nothing less that the abolition of the police, the nuclear family and, among other things, the destruction of capitalism, was set up by Alicia Garza, a devout Marxist and sociology graduate from the University of California, San Diego. Her comrades in arms, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi are, again, like Garza, left-wing graduates. 

Antifa, moreover, hardly needs to be introduced. It's full of middle-class, highly educated, privileged radicals demanding revolution. Make no mistake, these groups are conducting the purge, and they're led by graduates brainwashed by leftist professors.

Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, they're being tacitly, sometimes explicitly, supported by our cultural and political elites - elites imbued with the same worldview as the iconoclasts. Even our Police Force appears to be sympathetic to the cause.

It's quite incredible when you think about it. Those who extol the virtues of a university education the most - its recipients -, are the first to forget an important aphorism: a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. And by giving their students a half-baked, highly ideological, one-sided educational experience, our universities are failing in their duty to provide a well-rounded, objective view of the world, a failure that's leading to grotesque displays of intolerance.

Dr Koram did us a huge favour this week. He inadvertently exposed the insidious source of the cultural vandalism we've borne witness to over the last week or so. Neo-Marxist academics have spent decades radicalising their students - students that are now both our elites, and our cultural vandals. They must be reined in. 

George Floyd's murder was not the result of institutionalised racism.

George Floyd's death was shocking. To witness David Chauvin, a man ostensibly employed to enforce the law and uphold the highest standards of conduct so publicly and brazenly do the opposite, choking a defenceless citizen whilst he begged for his life and, most disturbing of all, pleaded for some final gesture of maternal love and comfort during his dying moments, was indeed a profoundly grotesque and provocative experience. I felt both sickened and angry. 

The protests that followed were therefore understandable. America certainly seems to have a problem when it comes to police brutality. There were over a thousand victims of police shootings in 2019 alone. But the protesters - and later the rioters (criminals with whom I have little sympathy) - are not protesting against police brutality per se; they're protesting against what they perceive to be institutional racism within the US-wide police force - racism that, according to them, leads to African-Americans being disproportionately targeted and murdered. That's why the protest movement Black Lives Matter has played such a significant part in the demonstrations.

But are African-Americans disproportionately the victims of police brutality and, if so, is such disproportionality the result of endemic, institutionalised racism? Many seem to think so. From politicians to media luminaries, celebrities to ex-president Barack Obama himself: all subscribe to the pervasive and, in their eyes, incontestable view that racism is incubated within and secreted from the very institutions responsible for dispassionately and equitably upholding the law and with it, the constitutional rights of every American citizen, regardless of race. According to this perspective, that's why blacks are more likely to be shot and killed by the police. Obama even linked George Floyd's murder to 'slavery, Jim Crow, redlining and institutional racism'. He hastily concluded that Floyd's murderer was indeed motivated by racial hatred tolerated and encouraged by an institution that remains bedevilled by the legacy of Jim Crow.

But these charges don't stand up to scrutiny. First, we don't know what motivated the officer responsible for Floyd's death. It is therefore presumptuous and, I must say, knowing the possible repercussions of making such inflammatory claims, irresponsible and reckless to ascribe motive when it's far from clear what prompted the offender. Trump's not the only one stoking the fire here.

Secondly, let's not forget that whites are the victims of half of police shootings. Okay, they'll say, but blacks only represent 13 per cent of the population, therefore, proportionately, they’re more likely to get shot. But blacks are responsible for over 50 per cent of the nation’s homicides; they account for 40 per cent of the prison population; in short, they are more likely to commit violent crime. Bearing this in mind, they’re also more likely to find themselves confronted by an armed police officer, increasing the likelihood of getting shot and killed. Any sane, reasoned glance over the statistics reveals the charge of endemic racism unsustainable. That is not to say that racism doesn’t exist within the police force; nor that racism wasn’t the primary motivation for the murder of George Floyd - though, as I said, that hasn’t been proven yet. But these protests are motivated by spurious claims of endemic, institutionalised racial hatred. They’ve even led to nauseating mea culpas by white, privileged virtue-signallers. They must be challenged with the facts.

This will be no easy task. University educated opinion-formers, virtue-signalling celebrities, corporate CEOs and politically correct politicians - brainwashed by an anti-Western, self-loathing, anti-white and anti-democratic educational establishment and encouraged by an elite culture that values the public display of moral superiority above all else - are almost irredeemably invested in this lie. Antifa activists are their shock troops; members of Black Lives Matter their useful idiots. It really is incredibly disturbing to watch educated people gleefully report the looting of shops and destruction of businesses, especially when they belong to the very people they purport to champion.

It is also incredibly disturbing to watch people in this country who, just over a week ago, hysterically called for the head of one man accused of breaking the Government's lockdown rules, refuse to even question let alone condemn the Antifa-inspired protests gripping London - protests that clearly and flagrantly breach the Government's rules as thousands of people stand cheek by jowl, refusing to even pay lip service to the social-distancing strictures. The West is in a deep malaise.

Yes, the murder of George Floyd was more than a tragedy. It was an abhorrent display of police brutality that caused public revulsion and understandable demands for justice - demands that, let's not forget, have been met with David Chauvin's arrest and indictment. Moreover, it shone a light on the charged and highly sensitive issue of police brutality in America - though perhaps the prevalence of firearms can at least partially explain the nervous overreactions of some officers. But febrile charges of institutional racism - the accusations that sparked and sustain the protests - just don't stack up. The real story here appears to be the chattering class, bien-pensant willingness to perpetuate lies in an effort to sow division and further demoralise the Western democracies. We must not let them.

Leaving the EU is a joyous expression of national self-confidence. For that, we have Thatcher to thank.

When one considers our historic, ever-changing and uneasy relationship with the European project, one can’t escape the conclusion that it’s predicated upon a post-war diminution in national self-confidence brought about by the decline and fall of the British Empire.

Our victory in the great twentieth-century struggle against nazism, fascism and Japanese militarism may have led to unbridled celebrations and unprecedented feelings of national pride, but, ultimately, and quite unexpectedly, it introduced a period of national decline and soul-searching, punctuated by the odd awakening, until 1979, when a more long-lasting and irreversible revival took place.

Indeed, the referendum result and Boris Johnson’s election victory, culminating in our departure from the EU last week, were the long term consequences of Margaret Thatcher’s revolution and the resurgence in national pride and confidence that accompanied it.

During World War Two, the contradiction immanent in Britain’s fight for freedom against Nazi imperialism whilst presiding over the largest seaborne empire in history was necessarily ignored. After victory, however, this was no longer possible. It had to be confronted.

The British empire had become morally unjustifiable and consequently unsustainable, as well as, after the financial strain of the war, economically unviable to boot. In 1947, the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown was granted independence and violently partitioned into Pakistan and India; Ghana gained independence in 1957 and Nigeria in 1960; indeed, throughout the 1950s and 60s, Britain’s imperial possessions fell, like dominoes, into the hands of charismatic, indigenous leaders armed with the language of liberty devised by the British themselves.

Britain had become a shadow of its former glory. Britannia no longer bestraddled the world, mistress of the seas, trident in hand; instead, she sat passively, seeking handouts from her new creditor and master on the other side of the Atlantic – an ocean once dominated by the imposing guns of her navy. In 1956, in a final coup de grace, her master and patron chased her out of Suez with a swift, humiliating reproach. Britain’s hegemony was at an end.

Let’s just imagine for one moment what this meant to its people, how disorienting it must have been. Everything they had known, everything they had taken for granted, their identity and the sense of self that came with it, had been turned upside down. It is unsurprising that a great loss in national self-confidence ensued and, to make matters worse, Britain, exhausted and demoralised, peered across the English Channel and enviously observed the economic miracle taking place in Europe.

In West Germany, for example – as a result of Marshall Aid, currency reform and responsible labour relations, as well as the opening up of global markets -, industrial output doubled and Gross National Product grew by 9 to 10 per cent each year between 1950 and 1957. Between 1947 and 1973, moreover, the French economy grew by, on average, five per cent per annum. Both countries, along with Italy, which also experienced phenomenal growth rates during this period, caught up to and eventually exceeded Britain’s GNP. Furthermore, from 1950 to 1965, Britain’s GNP per capita slipped from 7th to 12th in the world. By 1975, it was down to 20th.

Riddled with inflation, beset by poor productivity, declining industries and truly dreadful labour relations, not to mention a precipitously haemorrhaging empire and concomitant decline in global prestige, Britain’s leaders desperately sought to find a new role in the world and forge a new identity by joining the Common Market and, they thought, tying themselves to Europe’s economic miracle.

After Britain was refused entry in 1961, Edward Heath’s Conservative administration finally joined the European Economic Community in 1973 – a decision ratified by the British people in a referendum two years later. The loss of national self-confidence that resulted from our post-war imperial retreat and relative economic decline had led to a decision made of desperation and fear. We indeed joined the EEC in a fit of anxiety-induced panic.

However, Thatcher changed everything. Her radical reforms, unapologetic patriotism, uncompromising will and remarkable character lifted the nation out of its post-war torpor and restored its self-confidence. The unions were tamed, fiscal profligacy was replaced by fiscal restraint, markets were liberalised, inefficient nationalised industries privatised, inflation was controlled and, consequently, annual growth exceeded four per cent during the late 1980s.

A British ‘economic miracle’ was being enviously mooted on the continent – a truly remarkable turnaround from the stagnation and misery afflicting the nation just 10 years earlier. Successive governments, even Labour ones, refused to reverse the Iron Lady’s reforms and, in 2015, Britain became the fifth largest economy in the world, largely thanks to her courageous endeavours – wisely left to bear fruit by her successors.

Most important, though, was the national pride restored by Thatcher’s indomitable spirit and sense of moral purpose. Along with Ronald Reagan, she led the free world’s fight against the inhumanity of Soviet communism; in 1982, she ignored her doubters and successfully dispatched a task force to wrestle back the Falkland Islands from Argentina’s military junta; and in 1990, just before her downfall, she encouraged George Bush senior, then American president, to dispense with the wobbling and stand firm against Saddam Hussein after his unprovoked attack on Kuwait. Like Britannia, Thatcher bestrode the global stage, handbag in hand, and gave Britain back its pride and self-confidence.

That this national revival led to rising public disaffection with the EU cannot be gainsaid. Why should a wealthy, self-confident country like Britain sacrifice its sovereignty to a sclerotic, unresponsive, undemocratic, supranational and meddlesome bureaucracy like the European Union? On 23rd June 2016, the answer was clear: it shouldn’t – a decision that, after three and  a half years, was reaffirmed by Johnson’s election victory.

If Britain joined what was to become the EU in a moment of disorientation and self-doubt, it voted out as a confident, self-assured, optimistic, outward-looking and independent nation state. For this, we have Thatcher to thank. And as a delicious accompaniment, she posthumously drove a stake through the heart of her vampiric nemesis, Michael Heseltine. Victory has never been sweeter.

First published on Conservative Home on 3rd February 2020