The Hangover News

AN OLD MAN MADE SOME BORING COMMENTS

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In the tussle to own the truth at the root of last week's riots, 66-year-old historian David Starkey wandered recklessly out into no man's land and promptly had his silly head blown clean off his shoulders.

"The problem," Starkey said on

Newsnight, in reference to Britain's young poor, "is that the whites have become black."

He then revealed that he'd been re-reading Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech and reduced the cultural contribution of the entire black race to a "particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster[ism]."

The most embarrassing part [CLICK] was when he read out a message posted to Facebook by a girl whose position as an Olympic ambassador might be untenable now she's been caught on CCTV throwing traffic posts at a police car.

“pigs shuldnt ov killed dat last nyt init. Den dey wuldnt gt blown up….galz r goin to steal weavee. Bt is it stealin doeee. Cozzz da shop keeper aint fuckin derr. Mugs.”

It would have been hilarious if BBC3 hadn't already looted the "LOL, AREN'T CHAVS FUNNY?!" gag-bank.

When attacked by the two other guests on the show – black crime novelist Dreda Say Mitchell and white author Owen Jones, as well as the chair, Emily Maitlis – Starkey complained that it was time for "plain-speaking."

But the notion of "plain-speaking" is only so attractive in regards to the recent riots because, in truth, the matter is so clouded. Starkey's grab for the scruff of the nation's neck was as opportunistic in its own way as a young estate kid's grab for a pair of new TNs.

Starkey's reward's been a ton of ridicule and scorn, but his career-ending moment shouldn't have as many shitting themselves as Powell's did. I remember footage of Enoch's speech leaking out of the TV when I was kid, and always feeling like I'd stumbled into some secret meeting between lizard-skinned old men discussing how best to keep their remote village's habitual cannibalism swept under the carpet.

The only scary thing about the Newsnight footage is how rote the liberal response is – Jones only able to fumble for "er, music" as something black people have contributed to society, Mitchell's right-on line about how she's 'been using hip-hop to speak to da kidz.'

In the time of round-the-clock media coverage, that sense of overbearing class conspiracy's lost, especially on Sky News, where Starkey's face and the words that came out of it vied for viewers' attentions with a family of meerkats and a fat Italian waiter selling car insurance.

As such, there's no real need to wring hands, and some of what Starkey said was accurate enough – much of the unrest was superficially motivated (it was looting, how could it not be?), and many young people do talk like morons.

Nevertheless, it's still funny to me that those two representatives of the compensation industry, the meerkat and the waiter, will do more to help Britain clean up after the riots than the Toad-of-Toad-Hall-looking white guy struggling with ebonics.

Some more stuff happened this weekend, it's on page two.

MORE THINGS THAT YOU HOPE WILL NEVER HAPPEN HAPPENED

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A 30-year-old man is being held by police in Jersey after six people, two of them children, were killed in a knife attack at a flat in St Helier.

The police were called to the residential area at around 3PM.

A witness named Andre Thorpe told the media that he believed all those who died were members of the same family, and recalled seeing "police come running out with a child. It was a small child, I just saw the legs. They went off in an ambulance. When the paramedic came back, her shirt was covered in blood."

Last week seven members of the same family were killed by a gunman in Ohio.

ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK WENT BACK TO UTOYA

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Norwegian police took Anders Behring Breivik back to the island where he killed 69 people so he could reconstruct what happened for them.

Breivik was lead around on a rope while wearing a bullet-proof vest as he described the shootings in detail.

"The suspect showed he wasn't emotionally unaffected by being back at Utoya," said prosecutor Paal-Fredrik Hjort Kraby. "But [he] didn't show any remorse."

Breivik has admitted to the killings, but continues to deny criminal guilt because he thinks he needed to shoot all those people and bomb dead eight more in order to save Europe from Muslims.

THE FEMINISTS ARE ARMING THEMSELVES…

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…with riot know-how!

500 people went to Birmingham this weekend to learn how feminists should conduct themselves in the vicinity of cosh-wielding police.

The UK Feminista summer school was a two-day event that trained feminists how to "go floppy" when police tried to arrest them so that they're heavier to carry, and other things.

"I don't like the fact that as a woman I have to feel scared when I walk down the street in funky dresses and funky tights," said one attendee, a 24-year-old teaching assistant from York.

The Guardian says several men went. I wonder if they got laid?

MAC HACKETT