David Starkey attacks ‘victim status’ for disabled people and ethnic minorities
Gay historian David Starkey has claimed that minority groups and disabled people should stop acting like “victims”.
The right-wing pundit made the claims in the Telegraph, attacking the mother of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence for “constantly treating blacks as victims”.
Mr Starkey claimed: “All forms of liberation – and I speak as gay and I was in all this when it wasn’t fashionable, when you didn’t get your CBE for being a prominent poofter, when there were actual penalties for doing it – all of them depend upon you taking control. About you refusing to be victim.
“I find it very, very sad the way there is now this perpetual procession of people – group after group – wanting to assume the status of victim. It’s catastrophic.
Mr Starkey, who has been described as a Katie Hopkins for the upper-class, continued: “I was born quite seriously disabled. The constant way in which far too many people with physical and mental disability… again, it’s presented perpetually as victims rather than saying, ‘You have this problem, you’ve got to go out and master it.’
“Freedom can only come from inside. The whole cry of Islamophobia, it’s trying to make Muslims into victims and therefore somehow privileged and exempt.”
Writing in The Telegraph in June 2012, Starkey questioned whether equal marriage was really necessary at all.
In a discussion on Newsnight about the riots of 2011, Starkey said: ”The whites have become black”.
