David Starkey
@DrDStarkeyCBE • 38,840 subscribers
Using Britain's history to fix where we've gone wrong. Subscribe to David Starkey Talks: https://t.co/WY4PNuazzr
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The prequel to the Jason Arday scandal Nathan Cofnas explains the two articles he wrote back in 2024, which resulted in his essential expulsion from Cambridge University. The first argued that right-wing politics on average attracted lower IQ people. Not a peep was heard from the Cambridge establishment. The second argued that ending affirmative action in higher education in the United States would result in the collapse of black representation within that sector. Cue outrage. As Nathan explains in my interview on David Starkey Talks, the Jason Arday scandal might have played out VERY differently if it hadn’t been him, the man who Cambridge vilified and ostracised just a year earlier, who exposed Mr Arday’s rampant plagiarism.
David Starkey239,187 views • 7 days ago
When did the Great Awokening of our universities, that has culminated in the disgrace of Cambridge, really begin? Different people will have different answers, but I prefer to ground my understanding of these changes in actual law and policy, and there you can see a definitive shift in Britain in 2012. Included with the introduction of higher tuition fees of that year, the Conservative Party greatly strengthened the Office for Fair Access, with the proto-Cameroon David Willetts putting it under the management of the mediocrity Les Ebdon. Sir Les copied the whole apparatus of DEI enforcement from America and applied it here in Britain with, of course, the backing of the Equality Act. And so, once again, the Conservative government of 2010-2024 oversaw the corruption of once great British institutions to satisfy a left-wing ideology.
David Starkey52,881 views • 6 days ago
And there we have it. Tomorrow Andy Burnham will become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, having blazed a singular trail to No. 10 that avoided ever having to defend, let alone stand on the Labour manifesto of the 2024 general election. Already, the total unfitness of the man for high office is beginning to be noticed, with a particularly striking online meme comparing his cringe-Dad antics to those of David Brent. Just how quickly his twee and cloying bonhomie falls apart on contact with the realities of political power we'll find out from next week. For my guest this week, Michael Murphy , Burnham is an even more dangerous figure to put in charge of the country than Sir Keir Starmer. The two represent either side of the same coin: while Starmer's dour legalism represented the underlying mechanics of the British state in all its brute force (the man was never more at home than when clamping down furiously on dissenting speech), Burnham is the smiling, matey facade that that state presents to the public; the tie-less, "call me Andy" school teacher who sits on a chair backwards to explain how he "gets it". But while Starmer included in his team some people who did recognise the priorities of the British working class, for example Morgan McSweeney, Burnham has swept to power on the back of the worst instincts of the already spectacularly inept Parliamentary Labour Party; a gang of charity-sector charlatans so clueless about the real world that they'd be more at home in a playschool. We must prepare for a very rough couple of years with this man at the helm. The world is rapidly becoming more dangerous, Britain is exposed and our enemies know it. The one possible silver lining we can take is that when Andy Burnham fails, perhaps the public will finally realise that that failure will not just be his own, but the failure of the entire Labour Party.
David Starkey204,534 views • 28 days ago
In what is clearly a sop to left-wing Labour MPs, the Prime Minister has boasted about banning overseas activists from attending Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧's Unite The Kingdom March on Saturday, including Members of the European Parliament. I thought we were supposed to be getting closer to Europe? I've been speaking to Tommy about this, click this link for the full interview:
David Starkey263,862 views • 3 months ago
As soon as I heard that my friend Rupert Lowe was turning his Restore movement into a political party, I knew we needed to discuss the move. Another political party on the Right of British politics is precisely the thing I have been arguing against since the election in 2024. The last thing we need is to splinter the small-C conservative vote and allow some monstrous Left-wing coalition, possibly including Zack Polanski's Green Party, to form a government. Nonetheless, in the tradition of British parliamentary politics, it's important to discuss these things openly and respectfully, which of course Rupert and I did. I found it interesting when he told me that the impetus for turning Restore into a political party came from his rape gangs inquiry, and the insight he says it has given him into just how corrupt the British state really is. However I had to challenge him on his dismissiveness about Nigel Farage's political talent. I have often criticised Nigel, but that Brexit would not have happened without him is, to me, inarguable. And he is repeating the feat by bringing Reform to the position it is currently in of consistently leading the polls. My final question was the most obvious one. What if you peel enough voters away from both Reform and the Conservatives that the Left manages to scrape a majority again in 2029? You can see Rupert's response in the full episode.
David Starkey288,178 views • 5 months ago
Recently at a talk I was giving a gentleman tried to make the point that the reason Sir Keir is perceived to be a bad Prime Minister is because of social media. I politely responded that the reason Starmer is getting a "bollocking" (a word not introduced into the conversation by me) is because he is absolutely and objectively terrible. What's more he's presiding over a system of government that the Labour Party created, that serves absolutely nobody other than people like him and his civil service and lawyer friends. Now that people have realised it doesn't work, and now that many of them have decided they'll vote Reform, he's throwing around smears like confetti; claiming if you're not in love with the mass immigration heaped on this country in the last few years you're nothing but a racist. Sorry Starmer, the public isn't buying it. Click here for the full exchange:
David Starkey478,212 views • 10 months ago
An amusing anecdote about the fake working-class hero Andy Burnham
David Starkey132,267 views • 2 months ago
Bridget Phillipson's admission that the government should prioritise the rights of asylum seekers over local British people in Epping - which was also the central thrust of the case made by the Home Office's lawyers - only brings into sharper focus the need to remove from power the "lanyard class" who live among the British people but prioritise everybody else over them. I've been discussing how we go about this with Douglas Carswell🇬🇧🇺🇸 on this week's episode of David Starkey Talks.
Dr. David Starkey CBE344,697 views • 11 months ago
Why oh why doesn’t our establishment accept that its only moral obligation is to the British state and the British people? Not to global welfare. Not to international liberalism. To us, and our country, and our self-government. That is it. The moment they do that, so many of the issues which plague our society become easier to manage. Immigration is no longer a question of benefitting the largest number of global citizens but about boosting the British economy while keeping British people safe. Foreign relations is not about promoting obscure minority rights in far off lands but about securing British interests wherever necessary. And most of all we drop the idea that every culture in the world is the same and therefore anybody can fit in here, and celebrate the fact that Britain has a highly distinct, highly evolved culture all of its own that we want to cherish and protect. What’s so difficult about that?
David Starkey117,549 views • 4 months ago
As a schoolboy I once played Malvolio in Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’; the pompous, authoritarian steward of Olivia’s household. I completely misunderstood the role and didn’t realise I was having the piss taken out of me for the entire play, which made for an excellent performance. I cannot think of a better parallel for Sir Keir Starmer’s time in office. Vain and oblivious, he stumbles and stutters his way through his premiership. Or perhaps you can think of a more suitable Shakespearean character?
David Starkey88,050 views • 3 months ago
It’s now clear that Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership is at least as dishonest as that of Boris Johnson, but worse for being cloaked in an insufferable sanctimony. There’s a remarkable play to be written about a man who rises to the highest political office by denouncing the most trivial lies of his rival about who ate what cake at a party of six people or however many it was, only to succumb to a far graver mendacity about his own political decision-making involving the highest diplomatic role in the land and associations with a convicted sex-offender. It would be Shakespearean if the characters involved weren’t so insubstantial.
David Starkey71,664 views • 3 months ago
The unstoppable Toby Young perfectly explains the impulse that is driving Labour to clamp down on free speech and the platforms, like this one, which facilitate it. A poisonous mixture of believing themselves always right, they're opponents always malign, and discomfort at robust intellectual exchange (I call this stupidity). A masterful summary:
David Starkey127,665 views • 7 months ago
When speaking to members of the governing class, I’m often struck by the sheer array of topics that are raised as being of pre-eminent importance. The list is almost endless: climate change, democracy in Togo, trans rights in Bolivia… The last thing that ever comes up is the British national interest. I’m not entirely convinced many of them know such a thing even exists. And I’m not talking about the diffuse nonsense that claims Britain ultimately benefits when it spreads human rights around the world. No. There are, at any moment in time, clear, specific objectives that will need to be taken to secure the safety and prosperity of the British people. It is the job of our governing class to discern them and work to achieve them. What else do they think they’re there for?
David Starkey76,481 views • 4 months ago
The Church of England has unwittingly presented us with the perfect metaphor for the desecration of this country by the Blairite establishment. As I discussed with Charlie Rowley, Britain right now is a noble monument plastered with Blairite cr*p that has to be stripped off.
David Starkey159,504 views • 10 months ago
The "Boriswave" of immigration since 2021 was the culmination of a quarter-century-long revolution in British governance and life initiated by Tony Blair in 1997. Reform's acknowledgement today that it should be overturned is part of a long English tradition of reversing bad revolutions, from Magna Carta in the 13th century to the Restoration in the 17th. This is The Starkey Thesis: England's constitution is its history, and that history is CONSERVATIVE. It is both the accommodation of change AND the reining in of progressive fads. Blairism was the ultimate progressive fad; the alignment of this country and its common law system with the unworkable principles of human rights law and international law enforced by domineering judicial activists. It is time to restore the constitution we had, to reverse this bad revolution.
David Starkey166,495 views • 10 months ago
Brexit was just the beginning of the process of taking back control of this country. In a sense the sequel of Brexit is an “internal Brexit” - wresting control from the deep state: the quangos, the judges, the permanent bureaucracy, and making it once again subject to public accountability. But if we’ve learned anything from the Brexit Wars, it’s how fiercely the establishment will resist this change. As Danny Kruger reminds us, just look at how even Parliamentarians in the 2015-2019 Parliament used unconstitutional methods to oppose reclaiming the sovereignty that is rightfully theirs. If it was that bad then, how bad will it be next time around?
David Starkey56,579 views • 3 months ago
It has become perfectly clear that the so-called "rules-based international order", with its treaty obligations to facilitate illegal migration, has been weaponised against Western countries. It's no different to how China abused its membership of the World Trade Organisation and cheated in every way when it comes to trade. President Trump and JD Vance realise this and have chosen to do what any patriotic government must do, forget the rules. Again, we await such courage on this side of the Atlantic.
Dr. David Starkey CBE175,333 views • 1 year ago