The post you are reporting:
from the telegraph.
Twitter erupted last night after David Starkey's appearance on Newsnight. The general consensus was that he was guilty of racism. Among those objecting on Twitter was the Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, who addressed the following question to Newsnight: "Why was racist analysis of Starkey unchallenged? What exactly are you trying to prove?"
But was Starkey being racist?
He appeared alongside Owen Jones, the author of Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class, and Dreda Say Mitchell, an author and broadcaster, to discuss the broader cultural significance of the riots.
Starkey opened the batting by making two points. His first was that these weren't riots in the traditional sense of the word, i.e. civil disorder prompted by a political grievance. Rather, they were much less significant than that. They were simply "shopping with violence".
Nothing particularly controversial there. It was his second point that set the Twittersphere ablaze.
"I've just been re-reading Enoch Powell," he said. "His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber didn't foam with blood, but flames lambent wrapped round Tottenham and wrapped round Clapham."
Now, that statement is vintage Starkey. He almost says something inflammatory - "Enoch Powell was absolutely right" - but, after pausing for a nano-second, pulls back from the brink - "in one sense". He then went on to say what he thought Powell had got wrong - "But it wasn't inter-communal violence. This is where he was completely wrong" - without saying what he'd got right (apart from the lambent flames). So it's difficult to say which parts of the Rivers of Blood speech he was agreeing with.
In any event, that wasn't the particularly controversial bit. It was the next thing he said that set the cat amongst the pigeons:
What's happened is that a 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. 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.