Dr David Starkey: 'Mass migration has destroyed the Britain I knew’
https://www.gbnews.com/news/david-starkey-mass-migration-britain-latest-labour-tony-blair
Award-winning historian Dr David Starkey has bemoaned the current state of play in Britain, claiming it has been “destroyed” by Tony Blair and New Labour.
He joined Steve Edginton on GB News to discuss the former PM’s legacy, and Starkey feels many elements of Blair’s 10-year tenure are still evident today.
Particularly migration, which surged in the Blair years after he took office in 1997.
Starkey said the policy model of immigration has destroyed the UK’s fabric as he furiously ranted about New Labour.
PA / GB NEWS
“The Britain I grew up in was the most peaceful, the most gentle, homogenous society that has ever existed”, he said.
“We did not need identity cards. We had extraordinarily low levels of crime. We had such high levels of public trust.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
“That has been destroyed. It has been deliberately destroyed by Tony Blair and New Labour with this absurd notion they were going to force us to become multi-ethnic for good.
“They were going to rub the noses of the whites and the dirt. We’ve got to understand that it is an act of such inconceivable national self-harm.”
Starkey is concerned that Britain, now being led by a Labour Government for the first time since the Blair years, may undergo another transition.
“Keir Starmer represents an intensely authoritarian streak”, he said.
“People get very confused because Starmer was a human rights lawyer. They think he’s sort of, all soft and cuddly.
“Human rights are really nice, aren’t they? But what we’ve got to remember is that the sort of human rights that Starmer represents are the rights of only minorities.
“This is the terrifying thing. Democracy has been stood on its head. Democracy means the rule of the majority.
“It’s not completely inverted to mean the protection of every exotic minority you can think of against the majority.”
tarmer has been under pressure to shed light on how Labour intends on going about stopping perilous trips across the Channel made by illegal migrants.
The Prime Minister said throughout the election campaign his Government will seek to “smash the gangs”.
The previous Government’s idea to send migrants to Rwanda was scrapped within hours of Starmer taking office after he continually branded it a “gimmick”.
A new Border Security Command is set to come into force with the Government promising millions of pounds in funding.
A Home Office spokesperson said: "We all want to see an end to the dangerous small boat crossings, which are undermining border security and putting lives at risk.
"The new Government is taking steps to boost our border security, setting up a new Border Security Command which will bring together our intelligence and enforcement agencies, equipped with new counter-terror-style powers and hundreds of personnel stationed in the UK and overseas, to smash the criminal smuggling gangs making millions in profit."
英国人如何看待大卫·斯塔基 (David Starkey) 所说的“左派执意改写历史,将英国描绘成一个多种族、移民的国家,而我们以前从未有过如此大规模的移民”?
伊恩·塔利 (Ian Tully)
邓迪大学历史与政治学硕士 (1975 年毕业) 11 个月
当然,我们以前也有大规模的移民,但移民来自爱尔兰。所有适用于后来移民的刻板印象也适用于爱尔兰人,1603 年后早期移民到英格兰的苏格兰人也遭遇了同样的刻板印象,但规模较小。爱尔兰人在利物浦、格拉斯哥和伦敦等大城市形成了贫民窟。与后来的移民一样,这些移民并非完全自愿,而部分原因是排斥和贫困。在两次世界大战期间,苏格兰建造市政住房时,至少有一项蓄意的种族/宗教分裂政策来安置人们。
融合遇到了与我们今天遇到的完全相同的障碍,首先是宗教。爱尔兰人主要信奉罗马天主教,新教和罗马天主教都反对“通婚”,罗马天主教尤其坚持所有孩子都必须在自己的信仰下长大。这与穆斯林和基督徒之间存在的障碍非常相似。19 世纪末,相当大规模的犹太人移民也往往存在于贫民窟,当时,他们的异国情调、意第绪语、宗族主义等都引起了人们的关注。那些繁荣起来的人搬到了郊区,但通常彼此之间距离不远,以便靠近犹太教堂。即使是在社会最高层,即罗斯柴尔德家族,他们也遭到歧视和冷落。西印度黑人与其他人种之间的通婚率远远高于亚洲人与其他人种之间的通婚率,这主要是由于宗教原因。我们在许多国家看到,社区更多地是由宗教而不是种族来定义的,尽管两者经常重叠。在马来西亚,你不会发现很多跨种族婚姻,因为那里很少有华裔或南印度穆斯林。
爱尔兰移民对几个城市的方言产生了显著影响,特别是利物浦和格拉斯哥。没有爱尔兰人,利物浦就不会存在。到达几代人之后,仍然有爱尔兰血统的人认为自己是爱尔兰人而不是英国人。
这两个移民群体都是白人,这产生了影响,并至少使他们能够逃离贫民窟,他们最终可以融入其中,尽管苏格兰仍然存在宗派歧视。就像 19 世纪的德国隐形移民、法国大革命的难民或早期的胡格诺派教徒一样,他们没有明显的特征。随着时间的推移,我怀疑英国的白人身份将只是一个连续体的一部分,我们曾经将北欧肤色与地中海肤色区分开来,但现在几乎没有人这样做了,很难说哪种种族的组合创造了我们在英国看到的灰白色品种。伊朗人看起来比南欧人苍白得多。一起长大的孩子很少会这样,而会更多地分享他们共同的东西。伯明翰等地存在的学校隔离现象将成为最大的障碍,就像苏格兰和北爱尔兰的隔离学校系统一样。
战后移民规模确实比诺曼征服以来的任何移民都更大、更具变革性,假装事实并非如此是无稽之谈。同时,否认早期移民的影响,甚至假装它们没有发生也同样愚蠢,这就像否认普金、戴利厄斯或布鲁内尔等移民之子的出身,或否认德国移民查尔斯·哈莱,甚至否认鲍里斯·约翰逊的出身。移民对我们的文化做出了不成比例的贡献,剩下的很多东西都是从国外借鉴而来的(从亨德尔到埃尔加,英国音乐以德国模式为主)。
What do Brits think of David Starkey saying “There is a determined effort by the left to rewrite history and to portray Britain as always having been multiracial and as a nation of immigrants, when we have never had immigration at this scale before”?
Ian Tully
MA in History & Political Science, University of Dundee (Graduated 1975)11mo
We have, of course, had immigration on a large scale before, but it was from Ireland. All the same stereotypes applied to later migrants were also applied to the Irish, and on a lesser scale to earlier Scottish migrants to England after 1603. The Irish formed ghettos in major cities like Liverpool, Glasgow and London. As with later migrations these were not entirely voluntary but in part due to exclusion and poverty. When Council Housing estates were being built in the interwar years in Scotland at least there was a deliberate policy of ethnic / religious division in housing people.
Integration hit exactly the same barriers as we meet today, first and foremost religion. The Irish were mainly Roman Catholic, both the Protestant and the Roman Catholic Churches opposed “marrying out” and the Roman Catholic especially insisted that any children were raised in their Faith. Very much the same barrier that exists now between Muslims and Christians. The fairly large Jewish migration at the end of the 19th century also tended to exist in ghettos, much was made at the time of their exoticism, their Yiddish language, their clannishness etc. Those that flourished moved out to the suburbs but often still not far from one another to be close to a synagogue. Even at the highest levels of Society i.e. the Rothschilds they met with discrimination and snubs. Intermarriage between people of West Indian Black origin and others is much higher than between those of Asian origin and others largely because of religion. We see in many countries that communities are defined more by their religions than by their ethnicity, although the two often overlap. You won’t find many inter-ethnic marriages in Malaysia because there are few Chinese or South Indian Muslims.
The Irish migration had a noted effect on the dialects of several cities particularly Liverpool and Glasgow. Without the Irish Scouse would not exist. Several generations after arriving there were still people of Irish descent who thought of themselves as Irish and not English.
What made a difference, and enabled at least some escape from the ghetto was that both these migrant groups were White, they could eventually blend in, although pockets of Sectarian discrimination still linger in Scotland. Like the invisible German 19th century migrants, the refugees of the French Revolution or the earlier Huguenots they had no giveaway distinctive features. As time goes on I suspect that the Whiteness of Britain will only be part of a continuum, we once distinguished sharply between north European colouring and that of the Mediterranean but hardly anyone does any more and it is hard to tell which combination of ethnicities create the off-white varieties we have in the UK. An Iranian can look much paler than a southern European. Kids growing up together make less of such things and more of what they share. It will be the ghettoisation of schools, which exists in places like Birmingham that will be the greatest hindrance as it has been with the segregated schooling systems in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
It is certainly true that the post-War migration was on a bigger and more transformative scale than anything we had seen since the Norman Conquest and to pretend otherwise is nonsense. At the same time to deny the impact of earlier migrations, or even to pretend they didn’t happen is equally foolish, it would be to deny the origins of Pugin, Delius or Brunel for example, the sons of immigrants, or Charles Hallé a German migrant, or even Boris Johnson. Migrants have made a disproportionate contribution to our culture, and a lot of what is left was borrowed from abroad (from Handel to Elgar British music was dominated by German models).