Stark raving...Dr David

Ever since the riots blighted the country back country back in August, historian Dr David Starkey has been embroiled in controversy for his comments about the decay in society being caused by Black culture.

More recently, he has been causing more controversy with his views on British culture and what history should be taught in schools. Here, OBV director Simon Woolley and Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission give their views on Dr Starkey.

Dr David Starkey was not just satisfied with blaming Black culture for the summer disturbances, arguing that English cities have imported 'violent, destructive, nihilistic', Black 'Gansta' culture. He is now facing the wrath of fellow academics by arguing that most of Britain is a mono-culture. Furthermore, he attacked the notion of British children studying world and European history arguing that national curriculum should instead involve "a serious focus on your own culture".

Richard Evans, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, criticised both Dr Starkey and Michael Gove the Secretary of State for Education, for advocating "myth and memory rote learning" to feed children "self congratulatory narrow myths of history". Dr Evans praised school history lessons for reflecting Britain's multi-ethnic composition.

Not only ignorant but rude too, Dr Starkey rounded upon Joya Chatterji, a reader in modern South Asian history and fellow of Trinity College, when she dared to state that contemporary Britain is 'rather diverse'. 'No it's not', he snapped,'You think London is Britain. It isn't. Where I've come from in Yorkshire, where I've come from in Westmorland ...it is absolutely and unmitigatingly white'.

Asked to respond, Chair of Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor Philips wrote this subtle yet blistering attack on a man who increasingly looks like he's losing the plot.

Simon Woolley, Director, OBV

I blame the telly. No matter how he tries, I'm afraid that Dr David Starkey will never persuade me that he is a bigot. I've met him, and he's not a convincing racist. It's just that to stay "the rudest man in Britain", this brilliant, affable and open-minded academic feels he must occasionally utter nonsense that may give comfort to racists.

But who better to help us to understand the dynamics of a diverse society, to remind us that Britain itself is an historic patchwork of different ethnicities and cultures? He could celebrate the extraordinary British streak of toleration, so well articulated by one of his special subjects, Queen Elizabeth I, who left Roman Catholics unmolested, declining to "make windows into men's souls".

Rather than promoting a clapped-out and dumbed-down curriculum for our schools he could be applying his keen intellect to a new and non-Marxist interpretation of Britain's imperial story. This is, after all, an inescapable chapter in world history. In our 2009 book Windrush, my brother Mike and I told the story of Britain's post-war Caribbean migrants as, above all, a British story.

Is David suggesting that I should regard Shakespeare, Dickens, Elgar and Hockney as somehow foreign to me? How absurd when a new film of Wuthering Heights reminds us that Emily Brontë's Heathcliff surely the personification of the untamed Yorkshire moors was the child of some dark-skinned sailor.

It's tragic that the lure of TV notoriety should deprive us of the contribution to racial integration one of our best historians could make'.

Trevor Phillips

Trevor Phillips is chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission