David Starkey and the Foot in Mouth

The riots across England last week have, being quelled for now, been subjected to all sorts of analysis and reasoning, of which a particularly outspoken thread was to be found in David Starkey on Newsnight. His words have created an entire school of meta-analysis about racism and racial stereotyping, with Twitter being alive with calls to arrest him or otherwise silence this noted historian.Toby Young has, to the best of my knowledge, been the only person to suggest that racism may not have been at the top of Starkey's agenda in his Telegraph blog, for which he has been roundly lambasted, and this is unfortunate, because it shows that Britons, despite all the tough talk of the past week are no more ready to engage in a realistic debate about how such riots might be avoided in future than we were previously.

I will fess up to being on Toby Young's side here, as I do not believe that David Starkey was being racist. Rather, he was simply insufficiently prepared to back up the argument he had chosen, resulting in an ill-advised simplification of the issue. What he was getting at, as was made perfectly evident by his reference to Enoch Powell, was the failure of certain elements of the afro-Caribbean and Ghanaian immigrant populations properly to assimilate in their adopted culture, falling back instead on a semi-indigenous culture primarily informed by so-called "gangsta" culture, typified by a casual attitude towards violence and drug use and a truly astonishing degree of materialism.

The basis of most arguments posited against David Starkey is that in saying that such a culture has a damaging effect on youth, he was being racist. While Starkey was certainly inadequately equipped to discuss gangsta rap, speaking against it is not racist. As he said himself, it is an issue of culture, not of skin colour, and explicitly stated that unlike Powell, he did not consider the black man to hold the whip hand over the white man, rather that the musically-informed lifestyle of certain elements unprivileged black youth had come to hold sway over underprivileged children and adolescents in many areas, regardless of race or ethnicity.

In a forum such as Newsnight where expansive explanation of a point is not possible, it was foolish of Starkey to air such unfashionable views - all that resulted was a shouting match at the end of which everybody felt aggrieved and nobody was able to put their points across properly. However, he did raise an important question: to what degree is the culture peculiar to the majority of those involved in the rioting responsible for the evident decline in moral and behavioural standards among the youth of the underclass? My money's on "quite a lot".