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OUTRAGE: David Starkey

WELL KNOWN historian and broadcaster David Starkey has been blasted for his comments on BBC TV where he blamed ‘black culture’ for turning white youngsters into looters.

In a discussion on BBC2's Newsnight show, Starkey said he had been re-reading racist MP Enough Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech.

Starkey claimed: "His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham," he said.

“The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion. And black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.” He added.

To further outrage, the historian went on to say: “Listen to David Lammy (MP), an archetypical successful black man,” he said. “If you turned the screen off so you were listening to him on radio you’d think he was white.”

The association being that those who speak like a ‘white person’ are civilised and those who speak with “Jamaican patois’ are criminals.

Writer and education adviser Dreda Say Mitchell, a fellow guest on the show, was clearly annoyed with Starkey’s comments.

She said to Starkey: “You said David Lammy when you heard him sounded white and what you meant by that is that white people equals respectable.”

She added: "You keep talking about black culture. Black communities are not homogenous. So there are black cultures. Lots of different black cultures. What we need to be doing is ... thinking about ourselves not as individual communities ... as one community. We need to stop talking about them and us."

HIT BACK:Dreda Say Mitchel