David Starkey's Newsnight race remarks prompt 700 complaints to BBC.
Yes it's the complaints that I find outrageous not the historian David Starkey's remarks.
If you watch the BBC interview there's some very poor behaviour from two younger people who jump in with emotional reaction along the lines - "you can't say that" - and don't let Starkey finish his sentences.
He quotes Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech which also got a similar reaction so many years ago.
Surely if we don't allow people to put forward arguments, we can learn nothing. Why can't we take both these thoughtful men seriously and consider what they are saying?
If we did we might change our policy a little.
I believe there is an element of truth in his argument and this needs to be examined and discussed - not shouted down or hushed up.
Both Powell and Starkey need to be praised for saying the unpalatable. Powell was immediately diserted by the main Tory party because hs vews were not politically correct. Surely there was and will be some truth there: one doesn't have to accept the argument totally but lets examine the idea objectively.
Starkey was talking about black culture not all black people. But surely it was a mistake to encourage so many of them to come the Britain at the time - we were just taking an easy option at the time of making the most of cheap labour to do jobs the whites didn't want. Now we have a subculture that has never been integrated into British culture.
At the time of encouraging blacks to come we should have made sure that these people were treated as equals.
They were not.
When will we learn to discuss issues like this in the open and call a spade a spade?
Sadly this is not the hypocritical British way.
However the most important is to come up with a realistic solution to our problems. Now is a time to calmly listen to what wise and knowlegeable people have to say. To listen and reflect before we act.
Or if action is needed quickly, to at the same time be ready to admit that we may have part of our actions wrong, stop and try something else.
3 comments:
Bloody 'ell - I find myself agreeing with YOU!!??** Starkey was merely saying what everybody knows and some think you mustn't say.
By talking and behaving in the manner he describes "yoof" simply and deliberately places itself outside mainstream society.
Put it this way - if I was interviewing 2 young people for a job, one talking "proper", one using Jafaican (as they call it), the former would get the job every time. The fake Jamaican would doubtless go away considering himself rejected and with yet another self-inflicted chip on his shoulder.
Those that preach tolerance are the most intolerant when they don't like what they hear!
Possibly the stream of Jamaicans that arrived years ago likely came here knowing the jobs they would do, and were pleased to be given the chance to earn a living doing them. (Rather like many of those coming here from Europe doing work our out-of-work people prefer not to do.) Surely the problems arrive when the children of these hard-working families want the same opportunities as the rest of the population they were brought up with — and rightly so. Will the same problems come about with today's immigrant families? There will always be insecure people on the lookout for those they can demean. Even so, those in power should be looking to the future when considering education provision and job security — and be learning from the past. This is merely common sense.
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