- Informazioni
- Chat IA
Capitolo 9 del libro B orale inglese sid
Capitolo 9 del libro B orale inglese sid
Corso
Lingua inglese (75898)
54 Documenti
Gli studenti hanno condiviso 54 documenti in questo corso
Università
Università di Bologna
Anno accademico: 2022/2023
Caricato da:
Studente anonimo
Questo documento è stato caricato da uno studente come te che ha optato per l'anonimità.
Università di Bologna
Commenti
accedi o registrati per pubblicare commenti.
Anteprima del testo
9
Rhetoric and Race – David Starkey
and the 2011 English Riots
Neil Foxlee
Ever since the arrival in London of over 400 West Indian migrant workers –
mostly Jamaican, many of them ex-servicemen – on the Empire Windrush
in 1948, the rhetoric of immigration and race relations has played a signifi-
cant part in British political life. In 1968, the Conservative politician Enoch
Powell gave his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (Powell, 1968a), in which
he dramatically voiced white resentment against coloured immigration and
expressed the fear that it would lead to intercommunal violence. Powell’s
speech received widespread popular support, but he was sacked from the
Shadow Cabinet the next day, and the subsequent Race Relations Act 1968
made racial discrimination a criminal offence. This led to the playing of a
peculiar rhetorical game between liberals and anti-racists on the one hand,
and those who sought to express and/or exploit popular prejudice on the
other.
Faced with the risk of being branded as racist by their opponents, some
politicians resorted to coded language, referring to ‘culture’ and ‘immigra-
tion’ rather than race or colour, a practice that has come to be known as
‘dog-whistle politics’ or ‘playing the race card’. (The fact that the latter term
is also used to describe making accusations of racism for personal or polit-
ical advantage underlines the rhetorical nature of this game.) In a 1978
television interview, for example, discussing the prospect of further mass
immigration from Britain’s former colonies, the then Conservative opposi-
tion leader Margaret Thatcher suggested that Britons were afraid of being
‘swamped by people with a different culture’ (Thatcher, 1978) – a remark
repeated almost verbatim by her close ally Norman Tebbit 11 years later
(quoted by Hiro, 1991, p. x). And in the 2005 UK general election cam-
paign, the Conservative Party used posters with the words ‘It’s not racist
to impose limits on immigration’ above the tagline ‘Are you thinking what
we’re thinking?’. Although the main target of prejudice has shifted in recent
133
134 Culture and Society
years from the African–Caribbean community to Eastern European immi-
grants and Muslims, it is against this background that the historian David
Starkey’s controversial remarks on the 2011 English riots should be seen.
Once described by the Daily Mail as the ‘rudest man in Britain’, Starkey
made his remarks two days after the end of the serious rioting in London
and other English cities that took place between 6 and 10 August 2011.
The riots – the worst civil disturbances in Britain for 30 years – began in
Tottenham, North London, after the 29-year-old Black Briton Mark Duggan
was shot dead by a police marksman on 4 August. Duggan had just taken
possession of a gun and was subsequently reported to be a member of a
notorious gang; the presumed role of gangs in the ensuing riots was high-
lighted by sections of the press and by the Conservative Prime Minister,
David Cameron. Starkey made his comments in a discussion about the riots
on the BBC2’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight, alongside the
black crime writer Dreda Say Mitchell and Owen Jones, the author of Chavs:
The Demonization of the Working Class (Jones, 2011). (The Oxford English Dic-
tionary defines ‘chav’ as a derogatory slang term for ‘a young person of a type
characterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-
style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social
status’.)
Like Powell’s speech (to which Starkey referred in his remarks), Starkey’s
comments drew both fierce criticism and popular support. During the
Newsnight discussion itself, Starkey was repeatedly challenged by Mitchell
and Jones, who described his comments as ‘utterly outrageous’ (Spencer,
2011; all further references to the discussion are from this source). More
than a hundred professional historians, academics and graduate students
signed an open letter condemning Starkey’s remarks, which also gave rise
to hundreds of complaints from members of the public, opinion pieces for
and against by newspaper columnists and much comment on social media
(see Spencer, 2011, for a selection of responses). After giving a speech on
the riots, the Labour opposition leader Ed Miliband was invited by a black
member of his audience to condemn Starkey’s comments: calling them
‘racist remarks’, Miliband described them as ‘disgusting and outrageous’
(BBC News UK, 2011). A week later, Starkey responded to his critics in an
article published in the Conservative broadsheet the Daily Telegraph (Starkey,
2011).
The Newsnight debate
Starkey’s most controversial comments during the Newsnight debate came
after he revealed that he had just been re-reading Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’
speech – a provocative move in itself, implying as it did a racial explanation
for the riots. According to Starkey, however, Powell had been both right and
wrong in his predictions:
136 Culture and Society
didn’t foam with blood, but flames lambent wrapped round Tottenham and
wrapped round Clapham.’
Ethos, logos and pathos
To catalogue such stylistic devices, however, only scratches the surface
of Starkey’s rhetoric, which can be analysed in more depth through the
Aristotelian categories of ethos, logos and pathos. Starkey was introduced
as a historian, and drew on his ethos as an expert in this respect when
presenter Emily Maitlis began the discussion by asking him whether he
thought there had been a ‘profound cultural shift’ that week: a historian, he
replied apologetically, would only know this in the future. This did not, how-
ever, prevent him from pronouncing a peremptory verdict on the ‘profound
cultural change’ which he clearly held responsible for the riots.
All persuasion based on logos, according to Aristotle (Rhetoric 1356b),
relies on either inductive or deductive reasoning: on either examples or
enthymemes (see below). Starkey drew extensively on both, making repeated
use of isolated examples to support sweeping generalisations. His first point
about the riots was that, in one sense, they were ‘completely superficial’: ‘it’s
shopping with violence, it’s merely extended commercialism’. To back up
this point, Starkey evoked what for him was the ‘key image’, widely dissemi-
nated in the media, of ‘the [black] woman coolly trying on a pair of trainers
outside the looted shop’. Starkey thus implicitly dismissed the idea that any
element of social or political protest was involved in the riots. Although he
acknowledged later that ‘it started out as a black protest against the killing of
a black man’, he omitted to say that the man had been killed by the police.
It was left to Jones to point out that this was just the latest example of a
‘civilian’ (sic) being killed in questionable circumstances, that blacks were
disproportionately subject to police stop-and-searches and that the riots had
occurred in areas of severe social deprivation.
To support his claim that it wasn’t a question of skin colour but culture,
Starkey cited the example of the MP David Lammy, whom he said sounded
white. In describing Lammy as an ‘archetypal successful black man’, how-
ever, he unwittingly drew attention to the fact that Lammy’s success was
very far from the norm: in Britain, after all, nobody would talk about an
‘archetypal successful white man’. Starkey used a further example to make an
indirect point when Maitlis asked him whether he was saying that black cul-
ture had caused the riots. Instead of answering the question, Starkey pulled a
piece of paper out of his pocket and – affecting what he took to be an appro-
priate voice – read out two text messages which a teenage looter had posted
to her Facebook page, and which had been published in the tabloid Sun that
morning:
pigs shuldnt ov killed dat guy last nyt init. Den dey wuldnt gt blown up [The
police shouldn’t have killed that man [Mark Duggan] last night, should
they. Then they wouldn’t get blown up.]
Neil Foxlee 137
yh galz r goin to steal weavee. Bt is it stealin doeee. Cozzz da shop keeper
aint f**** derr. Mugs [Yeah girls are going to steal hair-extensions. But is it
stealing though? Because the shopkeeper isn’t f***ing there. Idiots.]
(Quoted by Syson, 2011; asterisks in the original)
Ironically, the teenager in question was herself black, which hardly proved
Starkey’s claim about white ‘chavs’ speaking Jamaican patois. In fact, the
messages were an example of what sociolinguists (Cheshire et al., 2011) have
called Multicultural London English (MLE), misleadingly dubbed ‘Jafaican’
(fake Jamaican). MLE is a hybrid form that combines elements of Cockney
and so-called Estuary English with elements of Caribbean, South Asian and
African–American language. Thus the messages quoted by Starkey mixed
English slang (‘pigs’, ‘mugs’) with the African–Caribbean ‘weave’ and the
quintessentially MLE ‘in[n]it’ – all within the genre of textspeak, which
Starkey clearly found alien in itself.
Starkey was equally selective in his use of statistics. After Jones coun-
tered Starkey’s arguments about the role of black gang culture in the riots
by highlighting socio-economic factors – blacks, he said, were 30 times
more likely to be stopped and searched than whites, while one in two chil-
dren in Tottenham grew up in poverty and half of young black men were
unemployed – Starkey responded by claiming that 80 per cent of gun crime
was black. This claim, however, was apparently based on 2006 figures for
London, not the UK as a whole (Metropolitan Police Authority, 2007; Jones’s
figures for stop and search, on the other hand, related to searches without
reasonable suspicion: see Akwagyiram, 2012).
In argumentative terms, the elliptical nature of Starkey’s remarks gave
them an enthymemic character. (Broadly speaking, enthymemes are com-
pressed arguments which rely on unstated assumptions.) Because they are
based on premises that are taken for granted, unpacking enthymemes
is a key part of making ideology explicit. In the case of Starkey’s
Newsnight remarks, his underlying argument – if one can call it that –
may be roughly reconstructed as follows, with the claims he made
being just the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of unstated assumptions
(Starkey’s words are italicised, with the missing argumentative links in
brackets):
[Powell’s] prophecy [that mass coloured immigration would lead to vio-
lence] was absolutely right in one sense [because blacks were involved in
violent rioting].
But it wasn’t intercommunal violence [because white ‘chavs’ were also
involved].
[Therefore] a substantial portion of the chavs [must] have become black [in
other words, started behaving like young blacks].
A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic [black] gangster culture
has become the fashion [in the shape of ‘Jamaican patois’ – which Starkey
Neil Foxlee 139
best-selling book Deutschland schafft sich ab [Germany is doing away with
itself]; BBC News Europe, 2010).
We do not deserve becoming strangers in our own land.
(Far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, 2010)
When you join us, it sends a message of hope to the pensioners and war
heroes who feel like strangers in their own land. [... ] Joining the British
National Party sends a message of defiance to the Islamic Extremists who
seek our peoples’ destruction.
(British National Party leader Nick Griffin, 2011)
We are sick and tired of feeling like strangers in our own lands, of being
mugged, raped, stabbed, harassed and even killed by violent gangs of
Muslim thugs, yet being accused of ‘racism and xenophobia’ by our
media and intimidated by our own authorities to accept even more such
immigration.
(Far-right Norwegian blogger ‘Fjordman’, 2007)
The last sentence was quoted – twice – by Anders Breivik in the rambling
and derivative manifesto he released in connection with the terrorist attacks
he carried out in Oslo and Utøya in July 2011 (Breivik, 2011, pp. 722, 769).
At his subsequent trial, Breivik invoked Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.
Starkey’s Telegraph article
While the remarks he made on Newsnight were often disconnected and ellip-
tical, Starkey’s (2011) subsequent Telegraph article gave him the opportunity
to construct a coherent argument in his defence. Within the framework of
the Aristotelian appeals of ethos, logos and pathos, Starkey drew on a dif-
ferent set of rhetorical tactics. These included presenting himself as a victim
rather than a perpetrator (ethos); using fallacious arguments and question-
able appeals to authority (logos); and using emotive narratives, metaphors
and myths (pathos).
Ethos: The perpetrator as victim
Starkey’s main rhetorical strategy in his Telegraph article was to cast himself
in the role of victim rather than perpetrator (on the use of this technique
in far-right discourse, see Wodak, 2002). He began by alluding to the con-
troversy surrounding his Newsnight remarks: ‘What a week! It’s not every
day that you’re the subject of direct personal attack from the Leader of Her
Majesty’s Opposition’. Inviting his readers to identify with his experience by
using the second, rather than the first person, Starkey thus depicted himself
as the humble and innocent victim of an unprovoked verbal assault by one
of the most important figures in the British Establishment. In fact, Miliband
had criticised Starkey’s comments, not Starkey himself. Yet whereas Starkey
140 Culture and Society
described Miliband’s remarks as a ‘direct personal attack’, he described him-
self as merely expressing ‘opinions’, intensifying the force of Miliband’s
words and downplaying the force of his own.
Starkey went on to suggest that Miliband ‘might have replied that he dis-
agreed with what I said, but in a liberal democracy defended my right to say
it, since it broke no laws’. Equally, Starkey himself might have replied that he
disagreed with what Miliband said, but in a liberal democracy defended his
right to say it, since it too broke no laws. Instead, however, Starkey said that
Miliband – whom he described as ‘the son of a refugee who fled from Nazi
Europe to preserve his life and freedom of thought’ – had ‘agreed enthusiasti-
cally’ with the audience member who had invited him to condemn Starkey’s
remarks. Starkey thus insinuated that there was something Nazi-like about
Miliband’s comments, reinforcing the idea that he himself was the victim
in this case, insofar as his own freedom of thought and expression were
somehow at risk.
Logos: Fallacies and arguments from authority
Starkey showed his defensive skills by inviting his readers to judge for
themselves whether some of the points he had made on Newsnight justi-
fied Miliband’s condemnation of his remarks as ‘disgusting and outrageous’.
The three points were as follows: ‘A particular sort of violent, destructive,
nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion’; ‘This sort of black male
[gang] culture militates against education’ (Starkey’s interpolation); and ‘It’s
not skin colour, it’s cultural’. Starkey was highly selective here, focusing on
what might have seemed, to some at least, to be unexceptionable assertions.
Although he went on to say that some of his other remarks produced ‘espe-
cial outrage’, he did not refer to these until later, thus mitigating the remarks
involved.
Switching to the attack, Starkey then posed a rhetorical question:
‘ “Disgusting and outrageous”, are they? In which case, those who agree
with Miliband must believe the opposite of all these. They are therefore
convinced that gang culture is personally wholesome and socially bene-
ficial’. Attributing absurd opinions to his opponents, Starkey combined a
straw-man argument with a false dichotomy and a fallacious enthymeme,
with the unstated premise that anyone who disagreed with Starkey’s com-
ments must believe the opposite of what he said. Starkey used the same
technique when he expressed mock surprise at what he portrayed as
‘Miliband’s apparent notion that, far from militating against educational
achievement as I suggested, “the gang culture of black London” must
therefore be a seedbed for scholarship and sound learning’ (note the allit-
eration). Although nobody could seriously believe that Miliband would
think this, nobody could agree with the view that Starkey attributed to
him either, thus inclining readers to side with Starkey against his straw-man
opponent.
142 Culture and Society
majority of immigrants, in his view, did not want to become integrated.
Although Starkey did not see integration as a delusion, Powell’s definition
of it as immigrants becoming indistinguishable from the native population
coincides with Starkey’s own view of ‘good’ integration as a one-way process,
as seen in successful blacks ‘merg[ing] effortlessly’ into a mainly white elite –
and in the case of blacks like Lammy, even sounding white. ‘Bad’ integra-
tion, on the other hand, was exemplified for Starkey by young working-class
whites becoming, as he saw it, culturally black.
Starkey had, of course, explicitly referred to Powell’s speech in his remarks
on Newsnight – a move which, he said, all his friends agreed had been
his greatest error. Yet although Starkey conceded that it had been a ‘tac-
tical’ error – a concession which was itself tactical – he seemed intent on
re-opening what he called, using the first of a series of medical metaphors,
the ‘unhealed wound’ caused by Powell’s speech. Arguing that the speech
and reactions to it were central to understanding current problems, Starkey
recalled that Powell’s views had been popular at the time, but that ‘lib-
eral elites’ in both the Labour and Conservative parties had driven Powell
‘into the wilderness’, and had concluded that the white working-class ‘could
never be trusted on race again’. Here, having previously claimed that it
wasn’t a question of skin colour, but of culture, Starkey clearly did make
it a racial issue.
Starkey’s biblically inspired description of Powell as being driven into
the wilderness cast Powell – and by implication Starkey himself – in the
guise of a prophet without honour in his own country. His reference to
‘liberal elites’ in both major parties, on the other hand – whose reaction
he hyperbolically claimed was ‘unanimous’ – clearly showed the populist
nature of his own conservatism. He claimed that there had been a pro-
longed and systematic attack not just on what he euphemistically described
as the ‘perceived xenophobic patriotism’ of the white working-class, but
also on the very idea of English identity. Just as he had depicted himself
as a victim rather than a perpetrator, Starkey saw the ‘wound’ caused by
Powell’s speech – or rather by the reaction to it – as being inflicted, not
on blacks, but on working-class whites. Similarly, Powell, arguing against
anti-discrimination legislation, had claimed that ‘[t]he discrimination and
the deprivation, the sense of alarm and resentment, lies not with the immi-
grant population but with those among whom they have come and are still
coming’ (Powell, 1968a).
According to Starkey, the ‘astonishingly successful’ attack on ‘English’
(not, note, British) identity left a void which, for too many, had been
‘filled with the values of “gangsta” culture’. Noting that despite very high
levels of unemployment in some areas, there were no riots in the North
East, Yorkshire, Scotland or Wales, Starkey claimed – again using medical
metaphors – that it was their ‘powerful sense of regional or national iden-
tity and difference’ that had ‘inoculated them against the disease of “gangsta”
Neil Foxlee 143
culture’ and its associated violence. After making some disparaging remarks
about what he called the ‘licensed xenophobia’ of the Scots, Starkey argued
that the English needed a nationalism of their own, one which included
all races. Fortunately, he said, there was ‘a powerful narrative of freedom
that runs like a golden thread through our history’ – an openly sentimen-
tal appeal to the patriotic feelings of his readers. In support of this claim,
Starkey cited Somerset[t]’s Case, a 1772 trial about a slave resisting deporta-
tion by his master, in which the defence counsel, William Davy, famously
declared that ‘the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe in’. The
phrase Starkey quoted, however, was not a condemnation of slavery: it was
praise of England, used rhetorically by a barrister as part of an attempt to
secure a favourable judgement from the court, just as Starkey was using it
to try and win over his readers. Davy, in fact, saw England as only fit for
whites, for he also stressed the risk of adding to the existing population
of around 14,000–15,000 blacks, describing them as ‘foreign, superfluous
inhabitants... a nation of enemies in the heart of the state’ (quoted in Davis,
1999, p. 495). Once again, Starkey’s use of evidence was highly selective –
and highly misleading.
Presumably referring to the legacy of slavery, Starkey said that we had to
concentrate on ‘the righting of the wrong rather than the original wrong
itself’, on ‘healing’ (another medical metaphor) rather than division. ‘[W]e
have had enough of division’, he declared, ignoring the divisiveness of his
own earlier remarks. Expressing the hope that all the people of the country,
black and white, would be able to ‘enter fully into our national story’, he
implied that there was only one such story, rather than a variety of com-
peting historical narratives. When Starkey went on to make the caveat that
this would have to be on the basis of ‘reciprocity’, however, he explained
this in terms which showed that his view of the relationship between blacks
and whites was essentially asymmetrical: ‘In other words, I must be as free to
comment on problems in the black community as blacks are to point the finger
at whites, which they do frequently, often with justice, and with impunity’.
Although he admitted that blacks’ complaints about whites were often jus-
tified, the freedom Starkey claimed was for himself – to make the same sort
of remarks that had already proved so controversial, and with the same sort
of impunity that was enjoyed, as he saw it, by blacks.
At this point, Starkey referred once again to the legacy of the reaction
to Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, arguing that its other pernicious effect
had been ‘an enforced silence’ on race, which meant that the subject had
become unmentionable, at least by whites. (So much, again, for Starkey’s
claim that it wasn’t about skin colour, but culture.) Any attempt to break
this silence, Starkey claimed, had been ‘punished by ostracism or worse’.
His own remarks had provoked a ‘hysterical reaction’ and ‘the witch-finders
already ha[d] their sights’ on him. Here, as before, Starkey the perpetrator
was claiming the status of victim.
Neil Foxlee 145
(sub-)culture – the culture of Multicultural London English, rap, sportswear
and text-messaging. Starkey may have been sincere in expressing the hope
that blacks could enter fully into ‘our’ national story, but he let his preju-
dices show in his ill-informed outburst about a ‘wholly false [... ] Jamaican
patois’ that had been ‘intruded’ into England and which gave him ‘[a] sense
of literally a foreign country’.
As we have seen, Starkey used a wide range of rhetorical devices, tactics
and techniques. Some of these were generic, though perhaps particularly
characteristic of political polemic: rhetorical figures, ranging from antithesis
to the rule of three; dramatically emotive language and hyperbole; ques-
tionable enthymemes; the use of isolated examples as the basis for sweeping
generalisations, along with the selective and tendentious use of facts, includ-
ing statistics and quotations; and various fallacies, including dubious appeals
to authority, false dichotomies and straw-man arguments. Other rhetorical
features of Starkey’s remarks, however, are disturbingly characteristic of more
extreme racial discourse, in Britain and elsewhere: the trope of ‘[living in]
a foreign country’/‘strangers in our own land’, which runs from Powell to
Breivik; the related trope of perpetrator as victim, extended to the construc-
tion of a populist ‘us’ against ‘them’ narrative that pitches whites against
non-whites on the one hand and ‘liberal’ elites on the other; the use of med-
ical metaphors, based on the underlying metaphor of the body politic; and
appeals to nationalism/patriotism on the basis of a sentimental myth of a
homogeneous indigenous identity, founded on freedom and threatened by
an alien culture, with ‘culture’ used as a euphemism for race.
To simply dismiss Starkey’s comments as ‘racist’ and leave it at that is an
inadequate response, failing to engage with his arguments and the prejudices
that underlie them. When an articulate Establishment figure like Starkey –
who was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (sic) in
2007 – uses his formidable polemical skills to voice pernicious popular prej-
udices, it is necessary to pay heed to what he is saying and to subject his
rhetoric to an equally necessary critique. That this critique, as readers may
have noticed, has itself used rhetoric is not an objection, but goes with the
territory.
References
Akwagyiram, A. (2012) ‘Stop and Search Use and Alternative Police Tactics’, BBC
News UK, 17 January, bbc.co/news/uk-16552489, date accessed
10 November 2014.
BBC News Europe (2010) ‘Germany Central Banker Condemned for “Racist” Book’,
30 August, bbc.co/news/world-europe-11131937, date accessed
10 November 2013.
BBC News UK (2011) ‘Ed Miliband Condemns David Starkey’s Race Com-
ments’, 15 August, bbc.co/news/uk-14531077, date accessed
10 November 2013.
146 Culture and Society
Birbalsingh, K. (2011) ‘David Starkey Is Wrong, Plain and Simple’ (blog), http://blogs.
telegraph.co/news/katharinebirbalsingh/100100907/david-starkey-is-wrong-
plain-and-simple/, date accessed 10 November 2013.
Breivik, A. [as Andrew Berwick] (2011) ‘2083: A European Declaration of Indepen-
dence’, washingtonpost/r/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2011/07/
24/National-Politics/Graphics/2083+-+A+European+Declaration+of+Independence.
pdf, date accessed 10 November 2013.
Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S., and Torgersen, E. (2011) ‘Contact, the Feature Pool
and the Speech Community: The Emergence of Multicultural London English’,
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(2), 151–196.
Cohen, S. (2002) Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 3rd Edn (Abingdon: Routledge).
Davis, D. (1999) The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (New York:
Oxford University Press).
‘Fjordman’ (2007) ‘Native Revolt: A European Declaration of Independence’, http://
brusselsjournal/node/1980, date accessed 10 November 2013.
Griffin, N. (2011) ‘A Personal Message from the Leader of the British National
Party, Nick Griffin MEP’, 8 October, bnp.org/news/national/spread-
word-%E2%80%93-join-britains-fastest-growing-political-party, date accessed
10 November 2013.
Hiro, D. (1991) Black British, White British: A History of Race Relations in Britain (London:
Grafton).
Home Office (2011) ‘An Overview of Recorded Crimes and Arrests Result-
ing from Disorder Events in August 2011’, homeoffice.gov/
publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/overview-
disorder-aug2011/overview-disorder-aug2011?view=Binary, date accessed 10
November 2013.
Jones, O. (2011) Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (London: Verso).
Metropolitan Police Authority (2007) ‘MPS Response to Guns, Gangs and Knives in
London’, policeauthority/metropolitan/committees/x-cop/2007/070503/
05/index, date accessed 10 November 2013.
Musolff, A. (2010) Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust: The Concept of the Body Politic
(Abingdon: Routledge).
Parsons, T. (2011) ‘UK Riots: Why Did the Riots Happen? Who Are the Rioters? What
Can We Do to End This Madness?’ Daily Mirror, 13 August, mirror.
co/news/uk-news/uk-riots-why-did-the-riots-happen-who-147237, date accessed
10 November 2013.
Powell, E. (1968a) ‘Rivers of Blood’, Speech at Birmingham, 20 April, http://www.
enochpowell.net/fr-79, date accessed 10 November 2013.
Powell, E. (1968b) ‘Speech to London Rotary Club’, Eastbourne, 16 November, http://
enochpowell/fr-83.html, date accessed 10 November 2013.
Reynolds, M. (2010) ‘Strangers in Our Own Country’, Daily Express, 12 April,
ukpressonline.co/ukpressonline/open/simpleSearch.jsp;jsessionid=
C3DDC01F25AA7345DA8970B9E3CDD115?is=1, date accessed 10 November 2013.
Sewell, T. (2011) ‘David Starkey: Gangsta Culture is Poison Spreading to all
Races’, Daily Mail, 15 August, dailymail.co/news/article-2026053/
David-Starkey-Gangsta-culture-poison-spreading-youths-races, date accessed
10 November 2013.
Spencer, C. (2011) ‘Daily View: David Starkey’s Comments on Race and Riots’ (includes
video of the Newsnight discussion of the riots), bbc.co/blogs/seealso/
2011/08/daily_view_david_starkeys_comm, date accessed 10 November 2013.
Questo documento è stato utile?
Capitolo 9 del libro B orale inglese sid
Corso: Lingua inglese (75898)
54 Documenti
Gli studenti hanno condiviso 54 documenti in questo corso
Università: Università di Bologna
Questo documento è stato utile?
9
Rhetoric and Race – David Starkey
and the 2011 English Riots
Neil Foxlee
Ever since the arrival in London of over 400 West Indian migrant workers –
mostly Jamaican, many of them ex-servicemen – on the Empire Windrush
in 1948, the rhetoric of immigration and race relations has played a signifi-
cant part in British political life. In 1968, the Conservative politician Enoch
Powell gave his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (Powell, 1968a), in which
he dramatically voiced white resentment against coloured immigration and
expressed the fear that it would lead to intercommunal violence. Powell’s
speech received widespread popular support, but he was sacked from the
Shadow Cabinet the next day, and the subsequent Race Relations Act 1968
made racial discrimination a criminal offence. This led to the playing of a
peculiar rhetorical game between liberals and anti-racists on the one hand,
and those who sought to express and/or exploit popular prejudice on the
other.
Faced with the risk of being branded as racist by their opponents, some
politicians resorted to coded language, referring to ‘culture’ and ‘immigra-
tion’ rather than race or colour, a practice that has come to be known as
‘dog-whistle politics’ or ‘playing the race card’. (The fact that the latter term
is also used to describe making accusations of racism for personal or polit-
ical advantage underlines the rhetorical nature of this game.) In a 1978
television interview, for example, discussing the prospect of further mass
immigration from Britain’s former colonies, the then Conservative opposi-
tion leader Margaret Thatcher suggested that Britons were afraid of being
‘swamped by people with a different culture’ (Thatcher, 1978) – a remark
repeated almost verbatim by her close ally Norman Tebbit 11 years later
(quoted by Hiro, 1991, p. x). And in the 2005 UK general election cam-
paign, the Conservative Party used posters with the words ‘It’s not racist
to impose limits on immigration’ above the tagline ‘Are you thinking what
we’re thinking?’. Although the main target of prejudice has shifted in recent
133
Scopri di più da:
- Scopri di più da:
