DAVID Starkey has claimed the BBC is forgetting its role as a national broadcaster when dealing with issues of race and slavery.

DAVID Starkey has claimed the BBC is forgetting its role as a national broadcaster when dealing with issues of race and slavery.
The historian was responding to a recent report which questioned if the BBC had been showing impartiality in its historical documentaries.
Asked if he believed the BBC were trying to rewrite history through the choice of people they were featuring in history dramas, Mr Starkey told : “Yes, there’s no doubt about it. The problem is, it’s been done in a very particular way, for very particular reasons. All of the programmes deal one way or another with questions like slavery, race relations and this kind of thing.
“They present a simple, fundamentally wrong and one sided message. They say that Britain has a unique responsibility for the slave trade, that the enormous economic success of Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries is founded, largely, if not wholly, on Black slavery, and therefore we owe repentance and we owe reparations. And every one of these points is simply wrong. It’s not actually supported by fact. So there’s a terrible problem.
“The BBC has forgotten that it’s a national broadcaster on this sort of issue. We urgently need genuine debate on the Empire, on race relations, on slavery, but it needs to be a debate. It needs to be honest. It needs to present both sides of the argument. It needs to be scrupulous about information. It shouldn’t be Netflix, Harry and Megan style propaganda. The BBC should not be doing this. It’s fine for Netflix, but not for a national broadcaster.”
Mr Starkey’s comments come following remarks in an article by David Abulafia, the professor of Mediterranean history at the University of Cambridge.
Commenting on a recent report, called History Reclaimed, by Alexander Gray, he said: “History Reclaimed has brought to light serious problems in recent BBC history documentaries.”
Writing in the Spectator he added: “While there are indisputable errors of fact in several programmes, even more significantly there are skewed interpretations which ignore important facts. Above all, this critical race theory is casting its shadow, obsessively presenting the history of the world as the seizure of power by white Europeans, capitalists and imperialists who built their success on the backs of black African slaves transported in their millions across the Atlantic from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.”