HarperCollins UK called Starkey’s views “abhorant”. “His comments are completely unacceptable and totally go against our university and community values,” the university said in a tweet.

Javid’s tweet was picked up by British media and Cambridge University’s Fritzwilliam College accepted Starkey’s resignation the next day.Ĭanterbury Christ Church University in southeastern England also terminated Starkey’s contract as a visiting professor. “But David Starkey’s racist comments are a reminder of the appalling views that still exist.” “We are the most successful multiracial democracy in the world and have much to be proud of,” Javid tweeted on Thursday.

The remarks prompted Sajid Javid - a former finance and interior minister who has talked about how his Pakistani father faced discrimination after coming to Britain - to call Starkey a racist. We don’t go on about that because it’s part of history, it’s a question that’s settled,” he added. “We had Catholic emancipation at pretty much exactly the same time that we got rid of slavery in the 1830s. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived,” Starkey said. He said in a June 30 online interview with the right-wing UK commentator Darren Grimes that the BLM movement represented “the worst side of American black culture”. Starkey is an expert on Britain’s Tudor period - a time in the 1500s when the slave trade was growing as European colonies across the Caribbean and the Americas expanded. The Black Lives Matter movement that gained momentum after the death of George Floyd in US police custody in May saw the statue of a major slave trader dumped in an English harbour as protests hit cities across the UK. The comments from Professor David Starkey came during a period of soul searching in Britain over its colonial past. LONDON - A British royal historian who said slavery was not genocide has quit his honourary position at Cambridge University and been dropped by his published HarperCollins.

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