Historian David Starkey, who has come under fire for comments on slavery that he made at the recent National Conservatism Conference, gave a speech to the Cambridge University Conservative Association (CUCA) on Tuesday (23/05).

At the National Conservatism Conference, Starkey claimed that the “Left” are jealous of the “moral primacy” of the Holocaust, which they “want to replace [...] with slavery in order to wield its legacy as a weapon against Western culture”. CUCA announced Starkey’s event two days after Starkey made these comments.

The Cambridge University Labour Club issued a statement on Tuesday responding to CUCA’s invitation of Starkey. The statement called the invitation “reprehensible”, and said that those who invited Starkey should be “held in contempt”. The statement also offered examples from Starkey’s history of “sickening antisemitic and racist commentary”, and argued that platforming Starkey could only result in an “increasingly unsafe society”.

At the CUCA event, Starkey doubled down on his idea that “critical race theory seeks to” delegitimise “the history of the West”. He referred to himself as “the prophet without honour in my own country”, and commented that “there are terrifying analogies to 410 [a major year in the fall of the Roman Empire] in 2023”.

At the event, Starkey also defended his “friend” Douglas Murray’s opinions on nationalism. Murray was accused of downplaying the Holocaust at the NatCon conference when he said, “I don’t see why no one should be allowed to love their country because the Germans mucked up twice in a century.”

Starkey also criticised “the notion of the Scots being colonised”, saying that “the Scots were the most efficient and brutal colonisers of the British Empire”.

Starkey had his honorary fellowship of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge terminated in 2020 after saying that slavery was not genocide because “so many damn blacks” survived. His history of making widely criticised comments goes back further – in 2011 he remarked that “whites have become black” after country-wide riots. In 2012, Starkey commented that a Rochdale sex abuse ring had values that had been “entrenched in foothills of the Punjab”.

Starkey received a warm reaction from CUCA's audience, with prolonged applause both before and after his speech.

Cambridge University Conservative Association was approached for comment.