Combining the subjects of my last two posts, here’s Guy Halsall commenting on David Starkey’s odious little stunt on Newsnight the other day. In the process he puts together a few simple rules good historians should adhere to when trying to analyse something like the London riots:
As I see it, the skills of an historian, when confronted by a complex phenomenon like this, ought (and this is neither original nor controversial) to include at least the following:
- The evasion of a simple catch-all explanation, of whichever ‘political’ narrative, particularly a doctrinaire explanation
- The avoidance of reliance on untestable notions like ‘innate human nature’
- The avoidance of sweeping generalisation
- The ability to disentangle different elements within the phenomenon; to tease out geographical and other variables
- An aversion to reducing a complex phenomenon to simple cause and effect
If only the various talking heads on the BBC radio and television pontificating on the riots this past week had been using those rules. For example, the fools who I heard on Broadcasting House yesterday morning, who dismissed the idea that the riots could’ve been political in nature because some of the rioters didn’t even know which party was in government — as if politics end outside of the Westminster bubble. There seems to be a deliberate refusal to engage the questions of how and why the riots started, why they persisted so long and why they spread on a more than superficial level, at least in the mainstream media and especially at the BBC. If reporting is the first draft of history, this particular one will be unreadable.