 So I watched a video recently. It was on the YouTube channel of a guy called Darren Grimes. He's a kind of conservative influencer. He's young and right-wing. That's quite a rare combination these days. So he's gained quite a big national profile for himself. He's regularly on the BBC, Sky and so on and so forth. On this YouTube channel, his first guest is a guy called David Starkey. David Starkey is probably the most successful kind of pop historian in Britain in recent decades. He's been around for a really long time but he's not just somebody who makes these kind of public interventions, political kind of interventions. They're overtly political often. He's also somebody who is viewed by many people as a legitimate historian. You know, he's gone honorary fellowship at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge. He's got a CBE. All that accounts for much these days often but he's got the credentials. He's very much part of an intellectual establishment as well as somebody who appears on the television. And yet, and yet, I'm going to show you just one minute from that hour-long interview and just in that one minute is contained, I think, some of the most ridiculous, crazy and hinged comments I've seen from a public figure in Britain in a really long time. Watch this. Slavery wasn't genocide. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? You know, an awful lot of them survived. Slavery wasn't genocide because people survived. There were so many damn blacks in Britain and America and of course, the continent of Africa, hundreds of millions of people. How could it have been a genocide if people survived? Well, Professor Starkey allowed me to introduce you to literally every genocide ever, the Holocaust during the period of the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945, around 6 million Jewish people die. I don't think anybody would contest that was a genocide despite the fact that today there are millions of Jewish people around the world. Who says that isn't a genocide or the fact that towards the end of the Ottoman Empire about 1.5 million Armenians are killed during the Armenian genocide? Because there's Armenia today, nobody says, well, that never happened. That wasn't a genocide. No, it was a genocide. Or what goes on in the Americas? Christopher Columbus discovers, discovers the island of Hispaniola in 1492 has a population of around a million, 30 years later the population of 30,000. Is that not genocide because 30,000 people survived? Or the Americas had 100 million people when Europeans first encountered the Western Hemisphere, 100 million people, these really great complex civilizations, the Maya, the Incas and so on. And it goes. And because today you have a couple of million people of indigenous descent in the country, you would not call that a genocide. So this is the first point. This is crazy because according to this highly esteemed historian who, like I say, is regularly on the television, there's never ever been a genocide because any genocide with any survivors isn't a genocide. Crazy. And what again, there's no point in arguing against globalization or Western civilization. They are all products of it. What is he talking about? Globalization, Western civilization, it's one of those things where people on the right try and basically mystify and obscure categories and they say two things which are completely different and they try and make them the same thing. So people go liberalism and free markets and the Enlightenment. Hold on, these are all the renaissance. These are all completely different things. Globalization is a process of the world getting smaller, a contraction of time and space. We could talk about it emerging with real-time communication. We could talk about it coming out of the 19th century with rail and steam engines and the telegram. Obviously the internet makes that time-space compression even more intense. Or we could go further back, we could talk about the Roman Empire. Or we can talk about the discovery of the Americas by Europeans, the beginnings of European colonialism. Why would you want to start globalization with Western civilization? Think about it. Our numbers are Arabic numerals. We used to use Xs and Vs and 1s until about 500, 600 years ago. Our gods are from the Middle East. Most basic mathematical concepts come out of India. Zero infinity. Are they Western? They've globalized. They've done pretty well. They've traversed cultural norms and borders and boundaries. Why is Western civilization and globalization synonymous? Hidden in terms of what I'm trying to say here, they aren't the same thing. We are all products of it. The honest teaching of the British Empire is to say, quite simply, it is the first key stage of world globalization. It's probably the most important moment in human history. What is this guy on about? The beginning of globalization is with the British Empire. I mean, you can make the argument. I mean, I wouldn't make the argument. You can make the argument. Then he says it's the single most important moment in human history. More important than agriculture 12,000 years ago. Before 12,000 years ago, there were about 5 million human beings about the population of present-day Ireland on the whole planet. After agriculture, you get to 1 billion by 1800. You get to about 7.5 billion today. I mean, I think agriculture and the domestication of animals and crops is probably a bigger historical moment than the British Empire. I could be wrong. It gives us little things like cities and literacy and really complex configurations of society. I mean, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's a bigger deal than the British Empire. And if you're still with us, its consequences are still on. And generally speaking, in most ways, actually fruitful. There were downsides, again, as the Brexit vote demonstrated. So he's saying, first of all, there's a couple of things here. He's saying that the British Empire was generally good. And he goes to some downsides and says, okay, he's going to try and give a historical account here of there's a ledger. Some things were good. Some things were bad. Okay, well, what was bad? The Brexit vote. What? We can talk about some of the bad things that come out of the British Empire. Approximately 35 million Indians or people in South Asia, what was then the Raj, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, 35 million people die as a result of Britain occupying that country. 35 million people. That strikes me as something of a downside when Britain conquers India, so to speak. It wasn't originally Britain. It was the British East Indies Company. It only becomes Britain when you have a mutant in the 1850s. When they do that, India is the world's first or second largest economy. It's one of the wealthiest places on earth. When Britain leaves India in 1947, it is one of the poorest, illiterate countries on the planet. GDP per head in India doesn't move from 1735 until 1945, right? People in this country say GDP per capita per head per person. Oh, it's barely moved for 10 years. Yeah, try 200 years. Try 200 years. And even then in the latter half of the 19th century going into the 20th century, life expectancy dramatically fell. It dramatically fell. So how is this a good thing for Indians? And this was a country which was persistently marked by famine under British rule. This wonderful, laudable, generally kind and beneficent British rule. Well, there were famines all the time. India hasn't had a single famine since 1947, not a single one. During the Second World War, it was subject to the Bengal famine, which was a policy of enforced famine by the British. And today, it's the world's number one producer and exporter of rice. So you've gone from a basket case which couldn't feed itself to a country which is exporting food overseas. Somehow, rather than Britain being good, it seems to me that it was very, very bad for India. And this is just one country. We could talk about Ireland. Ireland today has a smaller population than it did at the beginning of the 19th century. What other country does that apply to? Ireland had more people in the 1810s, 1820s than it does today. Why? Because we had a policy of enforced famine. People had to leave the country. It was made unlivable. You could talk about Kenya. Britain was operating there as a colonial power until the 1960s. Between 1945 and the early 60s, you've got about 1.5 million people have put in detention camps by the British. About 150,000 people die, use of torture. Today, if you fly into Nairobi, you'll probably use Kenyatta Airport. That was built by forced prison labour. Political prisoners who had never been subject to a trial, generally speaking, built the airport. This isn't Stalin's gulag. This is the Brits. Then you've got Malaya. Very similar strategy the British had in terms of putting down the insurgency there. They used a thing called Agent Orange alongside the Briggs Plan, which again was a policy of enforced detention. Do you know who adopted that afterwards? It was the Americans in Vietnam. It was the Brits, however, which pioneered it. So you're looking at East Asia. You're looking at South Asia. You look at Ireland. You look at Africa. None of these places have benefited from the British Empire. I'm sorry, Professor Starkey. You're talking complete crap. So that's how you go about tackling it. And as for the idea, as I said, that slavery is this kind of terrible disease that dare not speak its name, it only dare not speak its name, Darren, because we settled it nearly 200 years ago. We don't normally go on about the fact that Roman Catholics once upon a time didn't have vote and weren't allowed to have their own churches because we had Catholic emancipation. We settled slavery 200, by the way, it wasn't 200 years ago. Almost 200 years ago. We settled slavery 200 years ago. And he says it's the same as Catholic emancipation. If slavery was settled 200 years ago, can you explain to me why today, the average African American male will live to 72 years of age, which is the same as somebody who lives in Palestine or is actually less than somebody in Cuba, which is a much poorer country than America, right? They'll live less than somebody who lives in certain provinces of India, which are much, much poorer. Why? Because they're African American males, because we still have the legacy of slavery. If slavery was dealt with two centuries ago, why does pretty much every country on the continent of Africa have as their primary export, either an agricultural good, or, you know, basic resources, minerals, or diamonds? Why would that be the case? Why would all these countries in Africa be so poor and be exporting things to be made into more expensive commodities by other people? The reason is something called neocolonialism, right? It didn't just disappear. Slavery became something else. We still have empires right until the 1960s, the 1970s. And even then that carries on through other means. So the idea that we did our thing with slavery 200 years ago, we never need to talk about race ever again. What the hell are you talking about? Even in an advanced economy like America, like I say, African American people are massively disadvantaged. In this country, rates of home ownership amongst black people massively lower compared to the rest of the population. That's before you talk about racialized policing. That's before you talk about experiences of the criminal justice system, et cetera, just in terms of the economic experience within which they're growing up as human beings, completely different. So the idea that we dealt with slavery 200 years ago, therefore it's in the past, and you're comparing it to Catholicism. Are you mad? The countries which went to bloody the Americas and the late 15th century, early 16th century were Portugal and Spain. They were Catholics killing them. So the idea that, oh yeah, these great colonial powers, Spain and Portugal, somehow they were the subaltern. We're going to say, well, we got rid of Catholic laws that prejudiced against Catholic people 200 years ago. Anti-black racism is kind of the same thing. Are you crazy? Are you crazy? Because we had about 12 million people cross the Atlantic as slaves, about a million and a half people, by the way, died making that journey, forced to work on plantations for cotton, tobacco, coffee, timber, which was then going back to Spain and Portugal, but you're comparing it to Catholicism. Are you crazy? I mean this just shows me the complete, the terrifying nature of anti-black racism and how permissible it is to apply society. Do you know what? We had Catholic emancipation at pretty much exactly the same time that we got rid of slavery in the 1830s. We didn't go on about that. He's nodding. He's nodding. Darren, if you had any self-respect or an ounce of intelligence, you would say, I don't think it's right that we compare Catholic emancipation to the abolition of slavery and anti-black racism. I mean, unless he agrees with it, right? That's the most worrying part of this. He probably does agree with them. If he disagrees with them, Darren, if you disagree with somebody, you should tell them, especially when they're being a giant racist. Now, like I say, this is just one minute from a 60-minute interview. I could have done a five, six-hour video here, but it's really important takeaway for me is this. David Starkey is on BBC Question Time, he'll go on The Daily Politics, he'll go on Sky, he's hosted his own shows. He's seen as a really legitimate, credible voice on UK politics. Not only is he racist, not only is he talking garbage, he's completely uninformed, and the worst part about it is he's unchallenged. Now, why at his age is he saying these things? It's because he's been unchallenged for a really long time. And you'll notice he comes from a working-class background, but he's very well spoken, and that generally is my analysis, actually, of why David Starkey is where he is and saying the things he's saying. Because in this country in Britain, if you're a racist, if you don't know what the hell you're talking about, as long as you say it in a polite, civilized, Queen's English accent, you'll be given all the time in the world. And I think it's time, we say to people like the BBC, to Sky, to whatever media outlets, look, you can have a range of views, that's great. You should do that. I'm not up for narrowing the scope of debate, but this is crazy. This guy is saying that black people weren't subject to genocide because they still exist. This is nuts. How is it possible that somebody goes this far overboard? It's because nobody at any time in the last several decades of his career has said, David, enough, you're talking complete batshit nonsense. Maybe it's time you started doing that.