Starkey and his black & white world

“The bee has only one weapon
Like the suicide bomber it dies
Using it.”
From The Military Manuals
(Ed. Bachchoo)

The riots in urban Britain were reported and their significance exaggerated in every country to which satellites beam television and where the Internet is available.
Some of the international coverage saw Britain breaking out in symptoms of a deep malaise. One comment in an Indian publication was succinct in its smugness. It simply said “Welcome to the Third World”.

Of the British commentators on the phenomenon — the process of analysing the riots, their deep causes etc. will go on for years without definitive conclusion — one of the most contentious was the contribution of the historian David Starkey.
Starkey is something of an egg-head celebrity. He appears on TV and talks history. His face is recognised all over Britain and his opinions are absorbed as leading ones. On the riots he said something to the effect that the white youth of this country had picked up the culture of black immigrants and that culture generated, sanctioned and lauded the existence of street gangs bent on living outside the system of law and order. Hence the involvement of white people in the smash and grab riots. He pointed at the violent lyrics of rap music, the reported defiance of young blacks in schools, their over-subscription in the correctional facilities (youth jails) of the country and produced some nebulous notion that the Afro-Caribbean and African population had banged a wedge into this law-abiding nation’s body politic.
The wedge was incorporating to itself the disaffected white youth who also participated in the mayhem of the wicked week in August 2011.
Starkey didn’t care to differentiate his description or judgment of “black culture”. He may have got away with his remarks if he had said “a minority of blacks behave badly and a minority of whites follow them into an imitative badness.” He could even have hidden his obvious prejudices by using the universally ameliorative adjective “some”. He didn’t.
By implication he was saying that the entry of black immigrants to this country, bringing with them assumptions, cultures and traditions of misrule, had corrupted Britain. Hence the riots.
The Indian commentator I quoted was welcoming Britain to the Third World. Starkey was saying the opposite. He was saying the Third World has been allowed to infiltrate and subvert Britain.
Both commentators are indulging each his seductive fallacy. Riots and looted shops are not in any sense the mark of the Third World. The definition came about because the capitalist world and the Communist one seemed to have left behind largely peasant societies in poverty. Is China today part of the Third World? Is India?
One may maintain the old definitions and say that the United States has an agricultural proletariat but no peasantry and no feudal structures. India, by contrast, in possession of a virulent if sick and corrupt capitalism, still has a vast peasantry and pockets of populations that live in feudal and even pre-feudal economic and social structures.
Then there is the vast proportion of the population who are landless agricultural labour. So whatever the percentage of growth that the country can boast, there is still a definition of “Third World” that applies to it.
Britain is not that. It is a late or advanced capitalist society and, as with the US, has a small agricultural proletariat but no peasantry. In the latter part of the 20th century Britain imported labour from its ex-colonies. This wasn’t out of any feeling of generosity or the opening up of its social and cultural gates, but because it needed cheap labour in order for its menial service industries to keep running and for its manufacturing industries such as textile mills to retain their competitiveness with other, hitherto exploited and often ex-colonial countries who were manufacturing textiles. In other words, Britain imported Mirpuri labour from Pakistan to work in the textile mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire because Pakistan was making textiles and competing in the same domestic and international markets.
The Afro-Caribbeans were mainly in the service trades — transport, hospitals, cleaning and the auxiliary jobs in heavy industry.
It was under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher that she or Britain acknowledged the fact that even with cheap imported labour the country could not compete with the goods that the Third World was offering much cheaper.
Capital was flying to the “tiger economies” and orders for the making of things began to go to China. Britain had established a welfare state in which there was to be no homelessness and in which the unemployed would be given a living subsistence. With dwindling manufacture and a squeeze in the service industries, more and more people fell into the welfare net.
There is plenty of evidence that this advanced capitalist country has bred a new class of welfare dependents who have discovered as many ways of getting money for nothing out of the British state as there are ways of dodging tax in India.
This class, black and white, has indeed generated a culture — one which owes little allegiance to a sense of community, which doesn’t subscribe to the Protestant work ethic and which in every way feels outside of and defiant towards authority and the state.
As a “historian” Starkey should be teaching me these truths rather than the other way around.