Starkey and his insane and racist ranting

I’ve not really said much about the English Riots but I almost missed my friends wedding due to the riots, so I wasn’t best pleased anyway. I saw some crazy sites from my flat which overlooks quite a bit of Manchester and a retail park which included a JD sports.

The media reaction was insane, almost as insane as the actual riots… But on my way back from London from my friends lovely wedding, I saw a message from my ex-wife saying I had missed the outrage of David Starkey on BBC’s Newsnight. I didn’t think much about it but just before we recorded Sunday nights Techgrumps, Tom send me a link to the actual section of Newsnight. I’ve included the youtube link just in case the video goes away on the BBC site.

What I saw had me spitting blood for minutes…

Historian David Starkey has told BBC’s Newsnight ”the whites have become black” in a discussion on the England riots with author and broadcaster Dreda Say Mitchell and the author of Chavs, Owen Jones.

He also hit out at what he called the ”destructive, nihilistic gangster culture” which he said ”has become the fashion.”

I hardly ever use the word racist but I really can’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. Shocking absolute shocking… if it was me, I’d say he was inducing racism and he deserves the dressing down he’s getting.

I called him something very nasty on techgrumps but you know what although I don’t really like using the word because I know it really really upsets certain people, I can’t think of a stronger word to sum up my thoughts…

How dare he, this is the type of comments I expect from someone very ignorant and uneducated in a pub somewhere not from an educated man. As one of the other more sane guests said, it never going to useful to do the whole us and them thing but seriously when he started to quote from Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, I literally had to pause the stream. Then he went on make these absurd (even for a drunken and uneducated) statements…

“What has happened is that the substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion,”

“Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together. This language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England. This is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.”

I think someone said it somewhere but there’s no doubt, race relations have been set back all thanks to this ****!

Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io