Britain's historians turn on Starkey

David Starkey's views on Britain would "disgrace a first-year history undergraduate", his own colleagues have said.

The controversial historian has been the subject of ferocious debate recently after a Newsnight appearance saw him argue that "whites have become blacks" in the wake of the riots. Now over 100 historians from across Britain's universities have demanded the BBC stop describing him as a historian at all and lambasted the sometimeTV presenter for his lack of "professionalism".

The letter, written by 102 academics to the Times Higher Education Magazine, reads: "His crass generalisations about black culture and white culture as oppositional, monolithic entities demonstrate a failure to grasp the subtleties of race and class that would disgrace a first-year history undergraduate. In fact, it appears to us that the BBC was more interested in employing him for his on-screen persona and tendency to make comments that viewers find offensive than for his skills as a historian.

The letter continued: "In addition to noting that a historian should argue from evidence rather than assumption, we are also disappointed by Starkey's lack of professionalism on Newsnight. Instead of thoughtfully responding to criticism, he simply shouted it down; instead of debating his fellow panellists from a position of knowledge, he belittled and derided them.

"On Newsnight, as on other appearances for the BBC, Starkey displayed some of the worst practices of an academic, practices that most of us have been working hard to change."

The letter demands that the BBC stop referring to Starkey as a historian on anything but his specialist subject, the Tudors. Among the signatories are academics from Cambridge and the London School of Economics, where Mr Starkey has previously taught. It also criticises the BBC for choosing to feature Mr Starkey in the first place.

"In our opinion, it was a singularly poor choice," the letter reads.

"The poverty of his reductionist argument... reflected his lack of understanding of the history of ordinary life in modern Britain. It was evidentially insupportable and factually wrong. The problem lies in the BBC's representation of Starkey's views as those of a 'historian', which implies that they have some basis in research and evidence: but as even the most basic grasp of cultural history would show, Starkey's views as presented on Newsnight have no basis in either."

Mr Starkey left viewers aghast when he appeared on Newsnight to express critical admiration for Enoch Powell's 'river of blood' speech and said Labour MP David Lammy sounded like a 'white man'.

Asked about the cause of the riots, he said: "What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs... have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion."

The appearance has subsequently been parodied in several YouTube videos setting his comments to a rap soundtrack.

politics.co.uk

Thanks to Greg for the heads-up

Thugs are still out there

Amid the financial doom and gloom, and the ubiquitous focus on recession statistics, it's easy to forget there are dangers elsewhere. The government's higher education minister, David Lammy, warned last week that unless there's a sustained and organised fight against the British National Party, there's a real risk that, come the European elections next year, the BNP could win enough votes to become the British equivalent of Jean Marie Le Pen's Front National in France.

Lammy doesn't have a decent profile and it's no surprise, therefore, that his warning went largely unnoticed. Even claiming that Labour had to wise-up and copy the "grass-roots" strategy of Barack Obama's US presidential campaign, whilst emphasising that the would-be president and himself share Harvard credentials, Lammy's message was a tangential whisper in the party political clamour for economic credibility.

All of which must be delighting the manipulative thugs that continue to try to pass themselves off as a credible party. The BNP's latest bilge attempts to link the claimed reduction in high-level thinking among 14-year-olds to the rise in the ethnic make-up of British teenagers. There's no point in analysing the BNP's failure to understand simple mathematical correlations. Racist dunces often resort to statistics to "prove" their prejudices.

This time it's numbers from the Office of National Statistics on the Third World origins of immigrant children, linked by the BNP school-of-infant-adding-up to a study of teenage mental aptitude by Professor Michael Sayer of King's College London.

The BNP's conclusion? Because "white" pupils are now outnumbered (total junk maths) by Asian and black children, our precious imperial standards are falling.

Lammy saying Labour have "failed" to address white working-class concerns, I can understand. What I can't comprehend is why Professor Sayer isn't hugely outraged at the way the BNP have kidnapped his work, woven selective lifts from his study into its own numerical diarrhoea and, Goebbels-like, conjured up a racist myth.

So where is the measure of more short-attention television programming, computer games and the rest? Where is the multivariate analysis, the simulations and surrogate models that accommodate the dimensionality of what's being looked at? Hell, that sounds like a tough night in for the wooden tops at BNP headquarters.

So let's be careful out there. In between the FTSE and Dow Jones, there's the BNP. As Lammy says, pay attention.

Sunday Herald (Scotland)

Kick out the BNP for good, says David Lammy

It's time for Britain to wake up. Have we really begun to imagine how we might feel on May 2 with BNP councillors in our towns and cities?

A poison in politics, spreading hatred and division. In the London elections, the BNP needs only five per cent of the vote to get a seat on the Assembly, eight per cent gets them two seats and 11 per cent means three.

The BNP threatens the progress this country has since I was growing up in the 1980s. Our proud history is of opposition to extremism.

In the 1960s my parents, like many others, came to Britain to rebuild homes, to drive trains and buses, or - like my mother - to staff the NHS. This year, as the health service turns 60, I lost my mother to cancer. What will become of her legacy of dedicated service to others, if bigots are elected? Are we really going to let the BNP have a say in our towns and cities today?

We are kicking extremism off our football terraces and out of our shops and factories. Let's kick it out of politics too.

Daily Mirror

Race-row scientist's remarks condemned by minister as fuel for far-right

A Government minister has condemned a Nobel prize-winning geneticist for claiming that black people are less intelligent than white people.

David Lammy, the skills minister, said that James Watson's comments were “deeply offensive” and would “succeed only in providing oxygen for the BNP”.

It follows comments by the US-born Dr Watson to a newspaper in which he said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really”.

He hoped everyone was equal, he said, but “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true”.

Mr Lammy, a Harvard graduate whose family come from the Caribbean, said: “These comments are deeply offensive. They will succeed only in providing oxygen for the BNP. It is a shame that a man with a record of scientific distinction should see his work overshadowed by his own irrational prejudices. It is no surprise to me that the scientific community has condemned this outburst and I think people will recognise these comments for what they are.”

He added: “What is important is that this does not distract from the real business of giving people from all backgrounds the best possible chance in life.”

Dr Watson, 79, was one of three people working at Cambridge University who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA and now runs a School of Biological Sciences in the US. He made the controversial assertions in an interview in The Sunday Times.

Mr Lammy's comments follow the decision by the London Science Museum to ban Dr Watson from giving a lecture tomorrow after his comments were made public. The museum said that it was cancelling the American's speech. “The Science Museum feels that Nobel Prize winner James Watson's recent comments have gone beyond the point of acceptable debate and we are as a result cancelling his talk at the museum this Friday. If people want to know about the science behind genetics and race, they can book on to other events looking at this at the museum's Dana Centre over the next year.”

Dr Watson arrived in Britain yesterday to promote his latest book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science. He may also be banned from appearing at other bookshops and lectures planned for its promotion.

Dr Watson has courted controversy in the past, reportedly saying that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos, and claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured. He has said: “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”

On the issue of obesity, Dr Watson has also been quoted as saying: “Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them.”

Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University, labelled his recent comments as racist.

“This is Watson at his most scandalous. He has said similar things about women before but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain. If he knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically.”

Times Online