“I’ve just been re-reading Enoch Powell,” he said. “His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber didn’t foam with blood, but flames lambent wrapped round Tottenham and wrapped round Clapham.”
Now, that statement is vintage Starkey. He almost says something inflammatory – “Enoch Powell was absolutely right” – but, after pausing for a nano-second, pulls back from the brink – “in one sense”. He then went on to say what he thought Powell had got wrong – “But it wasn’t inter-communal violence. This is where he was completely wrong” – without saying what he’d got right (apart from the lambent flames). So it’s difficult to say which parts of the Rivers of Blood speech he was agreeing with.
In any event, that wasn’t the particularly controversial bit. It was the next thing he said that set the cat amongst the pigeons:
What’s happened is that a substantial section of the Chavs that you wrote about have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion. And black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.
