Starkey: the problem is the breakdown of national identity

David Medway

I wrote a slighty longer response than one you would put in a comment box.

http://davidmedway.net/a-response-to-starkeys-article-in-the-telegra

Dennis Churchill

“it is the white lumpen proletariat, cruelly known as the “chavs”,”
No, it is a description of the non-working welfare dependant class.
The electricians, kitchen fitters etc Mr.Starkey no doubt occasionally employs would not normally be described as “chavs”.The non-indigenous Irish travellers are, as are welfare dependants on the inner cities’ social housing estates.
When used as a general description of the white working class it is just part of the Anglophobia of so many of our political and media class. Once portrayed as the Salt of the Earth now as the Scum of the Earth. So what has changed about the makeup of our politicians and media hacks?

Peter From Maidstone

Starkey's language expresses the truth. Will the Spectator wholeheartedly support him or not? Will the media wholeheartedly support him or not? Will Parliament wholeheartedly support him or not.

To the extent that Starkey's words are denied and opposed the truth is denied and opposed in favour of continuing lies and deceit.

Those who live in the real world understand and agree with everything that Starkey says. If there are shrill words will they be opposed by the Spectator?

A Theologian

Starkey as a historian should know that "No religion: no culture; no culture: no society; no society: no life worth living; no live worth living; no life worth living: no human flourishing." England's experiment to have a culture without a religion is a brave novelty which can only lead to Hobbes' life as nasty,brutal and short. As the Clint Eastwood character in Alcatraz responded to the question after a particularly violent incident "What kind of childhood did you have?": "Short."

When even Rowan Williams doesn't mention the R word in his HOL speech we are indeed in the world of The Silence of the Lamb(eth)s.

Derek Pasquill

The metro-liberals are petrified indeed - blinking in the headlights and scapegoating the EDL.

You would have to have the heart of a Guardian reader not to laugh.

Matthew Blott

Actually Katherine Burbalsingh's response was a bit more nuanced than the full backing Starkey suggests and it's clear she thinks he made a bit of a tit of himself ...

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/katharinebirbalsingh/100101045/david-starkey-racism-row-i-wish-white-people-on-both-sides-of-the-argument-would-take-a-chill-pill/

denis cooper

"Starkey’s reasonable point could be lost in the shrill that those words elicit."

Like you referring to him as "Public Enemy Number One", even as a weak jest.

Perry, - Hard, Romantic, Heartless

Bravo! to the excellent Dr Starkey, - though I’m afraid –even though oft quoted and derided - he won’t be invited to appear ‘on’ the BBC very much more, - unless in front of a rabble of ‘progressive intellectuals’.

daniel maris

Starkey - like Powell before him - is confusing several different issues.

Once again, in this article, Starkey is confusing skin pigmentation with clothing and culture. For instance, he claims the white lumpenproletariat (strange for him to be admitting the usefulness of Marzist terminology) of having adapted black clothing. But you could equally say - looking at those old photos of neatly turned out West Indian immigrants in the 1950s - men in hats and suits and women in hats and white gloves - that the West Indian community has been seduced into the slovenly clothing habits of the English white working class.

And what about Starkey's evident love of "bling" - has he fallen for "gangsta" culture as well?

As for gangs and gang violence we have had those in our great cities for hundreds of years. Irish gangs have been a particular menace - and we can see the recently named alleged gangster whose death sparked off the initial riots as an Irish phenomenon as much as a black one.

Clearly there are particular problems within the ex slave communities of the Caribbean that have come to settle here. But putting out equations that black = bad is certainly no way to solve them.

Like Powell before him, Starkey has brought in race to pollute a debate about cultural identity and practice or mass immigration which is perfectly valid.

And it is for that above all that I abhor him, as I did Powell.

Robert Eve

Both Pickles & Starkey on good form in the DT today.

Eugene

The response to David Starkey's comments show more about the character of the British than they do of anything else. The British have a need to get heartily indignant once in a while - it suits their national psyche.
Of course Starkey's words reflect the truth and the reality of the situation today. Nothing more or less than that.

Dominic, Northumberland

Starkey is essentially right. The rioting types do not understand our culture. As a society, we have given, endlessly, homes and benefits,'rights without responsibilities', acceptance to the point of indulgence.

We have shown the rioting types no boundaries. Until now.

Starkey is starting a valuable fight back. He should be encouraged.

We must explain to those in the counter-culture he describes that they will earn our respect only when they show that they understand the culture to which they are running counter.

Nicholas

"Public Enemy Number one"? Not to this member of the public. My enemies enemy is my friend so I like David Starkey, especially for the honesty with which he speaks, unlike the terrified, weasel-worded, manipulative, politically correct numpties pretending to govern.

Dennis Churchill

August 20th, 2011 12:45pm
Yes the Metro-Liberals (very illiberal if you disagree with them) are the problem here.
This confusion about the term “Chav”, as if it means white working class, is I suspect caused by the fact that in the trendier parts of London, where the media and academic classes live, the only white working class people they see are the underclass (aka Chavs)
The white working class (Working being the key word) also refers to the underclass as chavs.The chav sub-group, Wiggers, who mimic the Afro-Caribbean accent is also not part of the white working class majority. You certainly don’t hear it in Basildon or any of the outer London areas the white working class now live.

John Bracewell

The language of the politically correct, the do-gooders, the liberal left, the equality champions - whatever you want to call them, has been allowed to take root so deep that anyone expressing themselves in any other terms are immediately branded as racist and shouted down. It is their way of closing the argument before it has time to be discussed, so that their views which have become entrenched are continued without inspection. The heckling of Starkey after his views on Newsnight is such an example. It is time serious newspapers and magazines ran articles by both sides and printed exchanges between any who take exception to any of it. When a discussion takes place in front of an audience, the points of one side are drowned in the noise of hecklers and the exchange is stifled. It is one time when the printed word is mightier than the spoken. Let's hope the Telegraph and the Spectator continue the printed discussion. Maybe then after some time elapses, there will be more tolerance on the race equality side to allow proper oral discussion.

John Richardson

“Those who live in the real world understand and agree with everything that Starkey says.”
Steady, Peter from Maidstone.

These are dark days.

Our enemy’s enemy is not always our friend.

Sometimes we are just surrounded by one foe after another, some of whom hate one another.

“When even Rowan Williams doesn't mention the R word in his HOL speech we are indeed in the world of The Silence of the Lamb(eth)s.”
A Theologian
August 20th, 2011 12:42pm
Nonsense.
What do you mean ‘even’ ?
Do you want to lose?
In my Church, always packed, (standing room only for Sunday’s THIRD Mass) we offered prayers for swift JUSTICE for the rioters and help for their victims.
It’s not the Christianity that is the problem.
It’s not the blasphemous Williams; it’s his idiot audience.
What’s wrong with you?
Why are you still listening to him and giving him your money?

WHY?
Is it the same reason that you are afraid to use your own name?
If you are under the age of thirteen then my questions are answered.
You are in the wrong Church on Sunday if it is always empty.

R.McGeddon

What would Trevor Phillips have to say ???

http://bit.ly/ocGeEN

John Bowman

"...racially-loaded terminology of black and white.3

How else can there be a debate about Black and White without mentioning either?

The only 'racial loading' is by those who do not want the subject discussed and so turn every descriptive word into a taboo.

2trueblue

For goodness sake get a life. Starkey has his points and is entitled to them. We have to put up with so much twaddle on the BBC and the PC brigade need to take a deep breath. No one wants to face up to the problems, they are all couched in PC terms and the left have cowed and corrupted our media over the years. Let the man live and he has a right to be heard.

Simon Stephenson.

There's rather a good comment about this by Howard Jacobson, in today's Independent:-

Basically, although the point Starkey is trying to put over is a serious one, there's absolutely no future in trying to do so on a staged gladiatorial encounter like a Newsnight "discussion". In fact, such an attempt is bound to be counter-productive, since there will always be present in such an encounter a sanctimonious defender of received opinion, whose purpose for being there is not to engage in rational talk, but, by any means possible, to belittle the sayer of the conventionally unsayable, and by association, the unsayable itself.

Jacobson's final sentence - "On a huge hill, cragged and steep, John Donne wrote, truth stands, and five minutes on the telly is not the way to reach it."

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/howard-jacobson/howard-jacobson-foolish-vanity-of-a-public-intellectual-2340751.html

TomTom

Starkey is a real piece of grit in the oyster and expresses himself so wonderfully. If only we had more people with his intellect able top communicate clearly and develop serious discussion how much better our country would be.

Whatever Starkey says is worth serious discussion instead of the mind-numbing pablum we usually have to endure from the brain-dead

George Rolph

David Starky. I 'almost' entirely agree with you.

You made one crucial mistake in my view David. You went into a BBC studio (which is like entering a vipers nest these days) alone and you walked straight into a trap. The techniques used were to set you up as one against three and then use mobbing to try and confuse you and drive you off your point and into saying something, anything, that they could use against you. The moment you mentioned blacks and black culture their PC antenna were raised and the mobbing began. I call the technique �mobbing� because it reminds me of what crows do when a is Hawk nearby. They come out in numbers squawking and diving and wheeling about to confuse, try to frighten and drive off the threat. Feminists are famous for the same techniques. Well, they would be, it is standard Marxist fare. In my view, you should never go into a studio unless you know that the people there will be from a balanced political spectrum. Anything else is asking for trouble.

To the lefty Cultural Marxist, only lefty opinions are to be tolerated. ANY opinion from the right that does not meet their criteria for political correctness will be attacked. Those attacks will be ruthless and brutal and will carry on for a long time and may even become physical. The technique is straight out of Herbert Marcuse' writings on �Repressive Tolerance.� See here for a deeply lefty interpretation of what tolerance is: http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm

They band together to carry out these attacks which is why, even as I watched you on Newsnight last week, I turned to my friend and said, �They will go after his career now.� I know because I have suffered those attacks myself and in my case, some of them were physical. These techniques have been used to destroy the careers of very good and very learned men and women in academia and elsewhere; as you are probably well aware. They are being used to destroy free speech on American Campus' even today. They are used to attack religion, promote violence and disorder and to attack the family and males in particular in every Western country on earth. They need to be exposed BEFORE they can happen again to someone else. We have to stop playing catch-up with the left and take the initiative and that means educating our people about what they are REALLY up too in this country. In the 1960's, and 70's we all knew what the Marxist conspiracy was. Our biggest mistake was in thinking that when the Berlin wall came down it had all just stopped. It did not, it just changed gear. Marxism is no longer just an economic theory, it has morphed into Frankfurt School Cultural Marxism and its aims are the destruction of ALL Western or Westernised cultures. Their first point of attack is ALWAYS against the males and the families of the nations they target. They use feminism to attack the males and turn their wives against them and then they use the State apparatus to replace the nuclear family with the State. Just as they did to us in the 60's, 70s and up to today. They are busy doing exactly this in India, even as I write this. What is most galling is that they use faux �charities� run by women's groups (feminists) to milk money from the public using exaggerated statistics and scare stories in the lefty press and then they use that money to help them destroy our culture. In effect, we pay them to destroy us!

David, the only place I disagree with you in what you said was that you blame gang culture on males alone. This is a mistake. It's a trendy leftist mistake too. Amongst this gang culture is a thriving, equally violent but often in different ways, female gang culture. These lads do not work in isolation according to some feminist style gender model and they never have. That is also a truth we MUST face up too. Females are often involved and working to stir the males up in their violence. Banking on the perverted style of chivalry the boys were taught by lefty teachers in school to manipulate them.

You can watch a clip (Warning contains nasty language) here, of the girls doing just that in London last week.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXVfdsHmp-g&feature=player_embedded&skipcontrinter=1

We HAVE to reassess this 'sugar and spice' outdated idea we have of females. They are no longer like that but we have closed our eyes to this reality. Today's female can be and often is, as violent, manipulative and destructive as any male. Don't be misled by the 'bitches and ho's' speak of popular black culture, these girls are anything but subservient in real life.

See more on my blog here: http://justamanwriting.blogspot.com/2011/08/one-of-most-sickening-aspects-of-life.htmls nearby.

I wish you luck David. Keep speaking out, but please be careful. Gather your friends and keep them tight you will need them.

Lonesome Dave

"Public enemy number one" ???? WTF?

Perhaps a Guardian / BBBC / Channel 4 / Labour Party whipping boy....

The vast majotity of comments (that I have read and heard) are in full agreement with the good Doctor. He speaks sense and in a rational form.

cactusman

At last someone has found the B**ls to say "The King has no clothes on"PC ,Open Doors Multi C etc all a massive flop.Cannot admit it though.

Archibald

Simon Stephenson - thanks for the reference, I was thinking along those lines as I watched and Jacobson expresses it well. It's rather terrifying that hardly anywhere on TV or radio allows reasoned debate, and that the vast majority won't even see this farce of an argument, just get the boiled down summary that Starkey is the devil incarnate and act accordingly. The BBC surely has a responsibility to rectify the lack of proper discussion, rather than brief slanging matches and phone-ins for borderline retarded people to phone up and shout their ill-informed 'views'. I think there is a real appetite for it.

Pete Hoskins, Fraser Nelson et al. I think it's time for you to dip in to your transfer fund before the window closes, and sign Starkey up for this site immediately. And if you could get Douglas Murray while you're at it, all the better.

Frank P

Starkey is an outrageous old queen; he is enjoying his renewed notoriety immensely; said what he said quite deliberately knowing that it would attract the attention it has.

All I can say is more power to his elbow. He can handle with aplomb the PC wankers who are screaming at him. The Newsnight appearance was just 'jacks for openers'. He's an entertaining historian who doesn't strut his proclivities or make demands for his 'sexual orientation' despite his somewhat camp presentation style - and in in fact abhors those who do. In other words - WBGTDWI?

I like him. Most of what he has said on this matter is true. What he failed to state, because he probably didn't know, is that this was all carefully planned and executed in Notting Hill basements and 'social centres' (only later in Brixton and other suburbs and then on to the provinces) in the mid-sixties by a group of far leftist black activists from around the four corners of communism the and their fellow travelling white associates. They achieved heir ends by attracting into their enclaves young second generation West Indian lads, mostly English born, in their mid-teens bunking off school and rebelling against their strict Baptist or Methodist God fearing West Indian immigrant parents and breeding and nurturing the cod gangsta-rap, street mugging, culture.

It then became an attractive sub-culture for all rebellious youngsters of whatever colour who jumped on the bandwagon - literally - under the aegis of blue beat, reggae, rocksteady ska, skank etc. The cod patois became the argot and it developed, aided and abetted continuously by those who intended it to so develop for subversive political purposes. People who were regarded as 'community leaders' were not only subversives, they were funding their subversion through drug dealing and other vice crime on the grand scale, the product of which was also an element in the apparatus of cultural change a la Frankfort School, Gramsci et al.

The police were provoked, then confronted and undermined when they tried to address the problem and as ever, ambitious police bosses, both local and central, afraid of sabotaging their own advancement by un-pc measures obstructed front line officers from doing their job; thereby creating 'no-go' areas in the inner Metropolis. The pattern has been repeated cyclically and cynically ever since and now you have what you have: a fractured culture that is irrecoverable and those whom the movement professed to be representing and ‘improving’ have suffered most. That is because their 'champions' were lying, crooked kuntz, whose aim was chaos for ideological ends (with as always the concomitant personal profit and ‘community power’), to enable the Long March to continue.

That's the sp folks. I was there when it happened and where it happened. I know the main contenders and have outlived some, but not others. The game goes on as the country goes down. There is inevitability about the process that is depressing, because far too few people really care - and that means docile acceptance of a diminishing civilisation and the Dhimmitude of England.

Ken

Dr Starkey is certainly not public enemy number one. His plain speaking on a subject which "the shrill", as you call it, will not hear, deserves great applause. More force to his eloquent erudition. Keep going good doctor.

martin stone

public enemy (what tosh)the man is right what is wrong with speaking the truth

Paul Dogson

One major hole in Starkey's argument, or should I say excuse for trolling a sensible debate.

Members of the English Defence League fought police during the riots. They are English nationalists.

Purpleline

I tend to agree & disagree with Starkey, he has made some good points and then gets caught over complicating as an academic. He needds to keep it raw and tell it as it is.

I disagree with the notion that Lammy & Abbot are successful 'Blacks' to me they are attempting for personal gail to become ‘Coconuts’ in fact they are just tokens manipulated by the Islington inteligensia & both carry a typical left wing failed Afro-Marxist ideology. A successful black person to me is the Doctor, the Footballer, the Business owner, the Banker, a Teacher a university lecturer, a factory / office worker, a London Transport operative, a Policeman.

Abbot is a fraud a fake she bought her son a private education at the first opportunity, because she knows the power of education to getting on in this world. Yet Abbot sits inside a party that has destroyed education for generations focusing on political left wing teaching ideals in nice shiney new PFI buildings, all lipstick and no knickers.

To change the young we need to strip away the welfare state & tighten the net and allow people to bounce out after falling on hard times, not to be trapped under the net.

We must abolish immediately the minimum wage, where aspiration and movement between employers of similar standing has been virtually eliminated. Within the jobs market there were always mini laders that thrived, where a young person could leave a job on £5 an hour and move to an identical job with another emploer on £5.50 or £6.00 and so on ever and upward.That process helped society as it widened the social skill set of the individuals who moved around with aspirations of getting more & more. Now there is no alternative as on the bottom a glass floor has been placed above their head, the minimum wage, where all low paid workers get the same, this leads to people failing as progression is non existent..

My solution would be to give employers the dole money to employ young people for a year as a Tax break, so the cost of employing them is reduced markedly. And then educate the workforce from within each business with incentives on pay for reaching or attaining certain levels of excellence. This is a win win win scenario.

Brown & Labour actions after the 2008 collapse were very dangerous by blaming the banks and bankers, it created the seeds of the class war of those with and those without, this was compounded when corruption and abuse in Wesdtminster & the Police reared its ugly head. The loss of all esteem from the establishment power created a vacuum that the rioters attempted to fill.

If Cameron was smart and his advisors were smarter they would abolish the Trevor Phillips quango as there is no need for a race relations act any longer or the EHRC by creating a problem that is no longer there the black community instead iof integrating will always play the victim. That is human nature

Cynic

"The root of their disaffection is a perceived lack of opportunity and the death of aspiration, but Starkey also alights on another issue: the absence of a completely cohesive national identity." And for this what do we have to thank? 'Education, education, education' and the curse of multiculturalism. Credit where credit is due - step forward New Labour and claim your legacy.

Simon Stephenson.

Purpleline : 7.01pm

"I tend to agree & disagree with Starkey, he has made some good points and then gets caught over complicating as an academic. He needds to keep it raw and tell it as it is."

I'm sorry, Purpleline, but I think you're 100% wrong here. We're a nation of 60 million people with widely different needs, opinions, focuses of importance, understandings, prejudices and intellect. We're also part of a world of interlinked interests. "As it is" is not raw and simple - it's tremendously complicated.

The logjam in our political process is, I think, real, but it's not the result of over-complication - it's the result of far too many people refusing to accept that back-of-an-envelope simplicity is not an acceptable way for national decision-making to be carried out.

rosie

I thought CHAV stood for Council House And Violent, not English Working Class.

TGF UKIP

If only Starkey had made clear he was gay he would have been granted full licence.

frank owen

The problem with Starkey is that he spouts vast generalizations about people he knows nothing about. Take this comment: "Scots are allowed - and even encouraged - to be as racist as they please and hate the English with glad abandon." Is Starkey saying all Scots hate English people? And if so, where's the evidence?
Even when he makes the legitimate point that the riots were about culture not cutbacks, he manages to mangle that, too, by suggesting that whites are learning violence from blacks. Is Starkey so dim that he is completely unaware of the long history of recreational violence among the white working class? Or does he think that notorious crime boss Dominic Noonan, who was arrested in Manchester directing the rioting, was taking his cue from Jamaican yardies? I think not.

Keith Woods

Mr Starkey is right. For decades we have allowed millions of immigrants to flood into this country. A great many of them come from countries that do not have anything like our long history of evolved social systems, attitudes, norms, and culture. Not surprisingly therefore, they feel alienated - because in fact they are alien - alien to our culture, history, attitudes, and expectations.

Joh Harwood

I am afraid he is so very right in what he says.... good on David Starkey that he had the "guts" to say what he did. It may not be PC, but almost nothing is these days.

Frank Sutton

While we're om the subject, what is racism, anyway?
And why is it such a bad thing?
Any ideas, anyone?

Frank P

TGF UKIP

What did you expect from him, "POOF" tattoed on his forehead? :-) You could hardly describe him as closeted, but sensibly he doesn't want to make that an issue or dance around in a pink tutu in the street with others of similar persuasion. He's trying to address hybrid race cultural issues, not metrosexual confusion. Cue Andy Car Park.

Frank P

Frank Sutton

The answer to both questions can be answered in one word - Auschwitz!

If that isn't plain, then try one phrase - Ku Klux Klan.

Does that help?

Simon Stephenson.

Frank Sutton : 1.26am

Racism

What it's not

Recognising from observation that different cultures and different nationalities have different attributes, different strengths and different weaknesses.

What it is

Concluding from the above that every person of a particular culture or nationality possesses the attributes, strengths and weaknesses which are displayed, on average, by the population as a whole.

Why is it a bad thing?

Because it is normally the result either of mental laziness or of a self-serving delusion, and in either case, decisions are made through using a second- or third-rate thought-process, with the result that, on average, the outcomes will also be second- or third-rate - unnecessarily.

anyfool

when starkey referred to lammy as sounding white i thought the female newsnight presenters body shuddered as she slowly realised that starkey had said something that she could twist into a race issue and use it as a stick to denigrate him, the other two instantly went into attack mode on the same lines, still it is now down to only 3 to 1 odds on the unbiased BBC, looks like starkey will be skewered if he appears on question time again, he might now realise even independent thinkers are just as bad as the NF in the the eyes of all media people including the crawler who runs this blog

Anne Wotana Kaye 1

It's getting even harder to say or write what one believes. Has anybody else noticed what now appears on most "Daily Mail" online articles:

We're sorry but reader comments are currently unavailable.

Hardly brave, unless it's about sordid private sexual affairs, diets, face lifts, et al, the media gets worse.

achmed hassan

Any comment should be valued,it is true that the black community especially in Londistan don't like to admit that there is a huge problem with the black youths,has anyone been to Tottenham or Peckham?

London Calling

achmed hassan
August 21st, 2011 1:13pm

Q. Has anyone been to Tottenham or Peckham?...

A. Tottenham – Catherine Tate and more recently, David Cameron, Ed Milliband, Boris Johnson, Prince Charles and Camilla.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldZhlTc8k_E

A. Peckham – The Trotter family?...

Frank Sutton

FrankP and Simon Stephenson: Thank you for your revealing definitions - one of nurderous evil, one that amounts to little more than careless assumptions and sloppy thinking.
It's beginning to look like accusations of "racism" - like the terms "fascist and "extreme right", for instance - can be applied to almost anything, while still carrying implications irredeemable evil.

Peter From Maidstone

I was born in Peckham. My family all came from Peckham and have escaped. We had lived in SE London for 120 years or more. Now the streets look more like an African capital - I have lived in Africa - and the pub that my family once owned is now an African Shamanistic type religious centre.

Archibald

Worry not Peter from Maidstone, my experiences of Peckham are of the sort of increasing gentrification that gradually strikes all parts of London eventually. Give it 10 years and you won't be able to find a pub that doesn't have the pre-fix 'gastro', never mind any African Shamen. Personally, I don't think that is progress, but then I do like a good coffee so it's swings and roundabouts.

Simon Stephenson.

Frank Sutton : 4.33pm

I don't doubt that Frank P's scenario can happen, but the Achilles heel of racism - one that too few people seem to recognise - is that it is based on the fallacy that it is correct to take a common character trait of a particular group, and conclude that it applies similarly to each and every member of that group.

As I wrote earlier, this fallacy can either be the result of poor quality thinking, or it can be a device that is deliberately and knowingly misused in pursuing naked self-interest.

Bobo

"When used as a general description of the white working class it is just part of the Anglophobia of so many of our political and media class. "

-Spot on!!!

William

Oh do observe a period of silence, Dr Starkey, pray! You have no qualifications or experience whatsoever in this subject. As a history professor, would you have appointed as lecturer on Tudor history someone who was a specialist in methods of dealing with gang culture? I think not. Well, old fruit, the reverse also obtains. Qualifications and expertise are important old-fashioned qualities and necessities, so please desist from your attempt to devalue this essentially English cultural strength.

Nicholas

William, why should Dr Starkey desist when the leftist collective, the Borg, have been at the same game for over 15 years?