David Starkey

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. youtu.be/C27UXFdz0sA?si=bhPq…

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. youtube.com/watch?v=C27UXFdz…

The scenes from Ceuta and Melilla in Spain this week were the most visceral possible reminder of the migration crisis that is besetting Europe. Tens of thousands of Moroccons, almost all of them young men, streamed past a completely undefended border into a town whose population is only slightly larger than their own number. Immediately on entry, they began to fight, litter and loot. Two people in Ceuta have been stabbed. There may be more. The powers that be in Europe tell us most of the invading migrants have left. In fact many remain, camping out on beaches now strewn with rubbish, intending to do whatever it takes to stay in Europe and claim asylum. Never have we seen so openly the contempt with which these people treat Europe's borders and Europe's sovereignty. But that contempt is simply the mirror image of the contempt with which Spain's own leaders have treated their own borders and their own sovereignty. Indeed it is hard to argue that this migrant invasion would have happened if it hadn't been for the disgraceful laxity, indeed the embrace of uncontrolled immigration, by Spain's socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez; who earlier this year regularised hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants by executive decree. Today, we read that Mr Sanchez has jetted off on holiday amid this crisis, but not before posting a playlist of his favourite songs on social media. That is the seriousness with which he treats the welfare of his people in Ceuta and Melilla. And if you think the Left in this country are any more concerned about the violence inflicted on British people by migrants, I invite you to observe their total silence on the case of a Sudanese failed "asylum seeker" who, it was revealed this week, broke into a primary school carrying a hammer, a hatchet, a kitchen knife and a canister of petrol. My guest this week on David Starkey Talks is @AdaLluch, a Spanish political commentator whose denunciations of Pedro Sanchez have made her famous throughout the country and further afield. Listening to her gives one a taste of the sheer fury many Spanish people feel about what happened to their country this week, and towards their Prime Minister, who thumbs his nose at his own people and goes on holiday while his country is beseiged.

There is something Trumpian about Burnham’s vibes-y willingness to simply trot out thoughts and ideas that he’s “thinking about” and hang the consequences. “Fully-funded social care? Great idea, might do that…” “Raising the personal allowance. So important. Definitely thinking about it…” “Bringing back the 50p tax rate? Certainly can’t rule it out…”

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, @michaelmurph_y , 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.

As I often do after a significant electoral contest in this country, I turned to my trusted correspondent and political analyst @MarkJLittlewood to digest what has happened. The Makerfield by-election represents a huge setback for the political Right in this country in a number of ways. We have grown used to seeing Reform on the march since the election of 2024. Labour's collapsing polling and credibility has appeared for the last two years to play straight into the hands of Nigel Farage. But a confluence of factors has stalled that progress. First things first, Andy Burnham was always by far the most likely winner of this by-election. Many analysts with an axe to grind against Reform presented the Makerfield constituency as theirs to lose because of the friendly demographics, totally ignoring that it is slap bang in the middle of Burnham's home ground, where his popularity is (deservedly or not) stratospheric. Reform didn't help themselves by talking up their chances at the beginning of campaigning, like Gawain Towler did on my channel. It was only towards the end of campaigning that they began to recognise what they were up against in Burnham. Secondly, Reform's methods have been tested by this contest and found wanting. They relied once again on the unpopularity of Sir Keir Starmer, not considering that Andy Burnham was running on exactly the same message and providing a much quicker means of dispatching the Prime Minister. And they failed to articulate clearly and confidently what it was they stood *for* and how it is applicable to this constituency. Thirdly, though Restore performed very poorly and demonstrated that their online predictions were completely illusory, even the small fraction of votes they did pick up in this most favourable of regions is enough to deny any party of the Right many seats during a full general election. Supporters of the political Right in Britain are in danger of falling into the same trap of all disenfranchised peoples; that is voting for parties who are big on performative antics and emotionally satisfying bold statements, while totally ignoring the tactical reality they're facing. Let me be clear, Andy Burnham will fail as Prime Minister once he inevitably takes over from Starmer. He has no better answers to the problems facing this country than his soon-to-be predecessor. But that will not stop him doing enormous damage and potentially rigging the electoral system in his favour to further disenfranchise the political Right, who really do have the answers. We're entering dangerous times, and must choose our path with great care.

Henry Nowak was a white boy, that’s why he was disbelieved. Young white men look at his murder and are repelled not just by the awful violence, but by knowing it could have been them lying on the ground, drowning in their own blood, with the police standing over them mockingly disbelieving their pleas that *they* were the victim - because how could a young white man possibly be the victim? This is the society that treated Adolescence as a documentary, in which government information campaigns on everything from sexual harassment to tax dodging only ever depict one demographic as the guilty party. There must now, finally, be a reckoning for officialdom.