David Starkey Tells National Conservatism Conference ‘White Culture’ Is Under Threat

Historian David Starkey has told the populist National Conservative conference attended by Tory MPs and cabinet ministers that “white culture” is under threat.

Speaking at the event in Westminster, Starkey attacked the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and critical race theory as “not what they pretend to be”.

“They are attempts at destroying the entire legitimacy of thew Western cultural tradition,” he said.

“The idea that we are they are there to defend black lives is preposterous.”

“They do not care about black lives. They only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture.”

He added: “The narrative of BLM is Western culture and Anglo-American culture in-particular is fundamentally morally defective.”

The academic said be believed there a “determination is to replace the Holocaust with slavery”.

“This is why Jews are under such attack by the Left,” he said. “There is jealously fundamentally. There is jealousy of the moral primacy of the Holocaust.”

Starkey added that there was “jealousy” among some anti-racism campaigners who wanted to highlight the impact of slavery about the “moral primacy of the Holocaust”.

The academic said conservatives had to defend the “uniqueness of the Anglo-American tradition” against “barbarians”.

His speech on Wednesday morning was met with applause from the audience. 

Black Lives Matter was founded in the US in 2013 in response to police violence against black people and grew as a movement in the UK from around 2016.

Critical race theory is an academic theory that examines the role of institutional racism in American society.

Republican politicians have attacked it for being “woke” and it has been banned from schools in Florida by governor and likely presidential candidate Ron DeSantis.

It comes after Starkey used an appearance on GB News to claim Rishi Sunak was “not fully grounded in our culture” in the UK.

The National Conservative conference in London is organised by the US-based right-wing Edmund Burke Foundation.

It has heard form leading Tories including home secretary Suella Braverman, levelling up secretary Michael Gove and former business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Lee Anderson, the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, will close the event later today.