Now it’s David Starkey’s turn. This eminent Tudor historian has been dropped from the Cambridge University funding campaign after students called him ‘racist and sexist’.
The stinging accusation came in an open letter of heartfelt and hare-brained protest: “Any institution making this choice of representative would seem to care very little about its appearance in the eyes of Black and Minority students and staff, current and future.”
The future of our intellectual life added that they were ‘deeply offended’. So, actually, am I – among other things, by their capitalisation of ‘Black’ and ‘Minority’. This implicitly elevates the groups thus designated to a divine status: they, like God, call for an initial cap.
Never mind the grammar, feel the depth of emotion, along with the delicacy of sensibilities so egregiously offended.
If PC is divine, then Prof. Starkey is either an apostate or a heretic. Out comes the Holy Inquisition to judge his sin and pass its verdict.
The sin can only be redeemed in the pyre of flaming indignation. For back in 2011 Prof. Starkey had the audacity to say that Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of blood’ speech was right “in one sense”.
For those of you too young or too foreign to know what it was, the Tory minister Powell (who was a classical scholar among other things) warned about the dangers of mass, uncontrolled immigration of cultural aliens.
In it he had the temerity to quote Virgil’s Aeneid in making his prophecy: “I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” Political correctness was embryonic in those days, but it gestated quickly enough for Powell to be summarily sacked from the government.
Not having a position from which I could be sacked, nor featuring in any film from which I could be excised, I’d say that Powell was right not just in one sense, but in just about all of them (he was wrong in his adulation of Wagner, but we’re all allowed one unaccountable weakness).
The Tiber has so far been spared a sanguinary infusion, but the Thames hasn’t been, and neither has the Seine. These rivers have received their share of blood spilled by cultural aliens, both freshly arrived and native-born. Surely the Paris carnage, among so many others, vindicates Powell?
Not only that, but Starkey went out on a limb to protest against the negrification of whatever little culture we have left: “The whites have become black; a particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion.”
Now if this doesn’t take the Bounty bicky, I don’t know what will. This statement is so much more objectionable for being true.
Witness for example our Chancellor, professing his affection for one of the nastiest rap groups out there, Niggas with Attitude. The group regales his Eaton- and Oxford-trained ears with such lyrics as “Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off// You too, boy, if ya f*** with me.”
But forget the Chancellor. Just take a short walk through our council estates (preferably in daylight) – you’ll see that Prof. Starkey was absolutely right. Or if you’re too prudent to undertake such an expedition, open the arts section of any of our broadsheets to see what kind of music takes pride of place.
In response to the epistolary witch hunt, Prof. Starkey issues a dignified statement: “If it raises any question about the nature of academic enquiry and academic freedom, I shall reserve the right to comment freely but without recrimination.”
This outrage does raise such questions, among many others. Such as, how did one of our most venerable universities turn into an asylum, run not so much by the lunatics but by politicised, fire-eating morons who debauch the very idea of university?
Actually, I attempt to answer some of such questions in my books. The first one, How the West Was Lost, has just come out in a second (paperback and electronic) edition, available from Amazon UK, various other websites, some of the more discerning bookshops, or direct from the publisher, I.B. Tauris, London.