29th August 2011

I used to sit on a committee with a Bishop called Bill Westwood.

He was the Bishop of Peterborough.

He once accused me of striking a posture to reinforce a point I was making.

I think he said something like, ‘It’s all very well trying to appear to be a radical, Geoff, but you’re a Church of England Vicar, just like me.

Some years later I was listening to this down home, black sounding DJ on the radio, urging me to ‘get down’ and ‘get with it’ and ‘make peace with the brothers’ or some such down in the ghetto language, as the programme ended I recognised the name, Westwood.

It turned out that this cool sounding faux ‘black’ dude was in fact the extremely white son of the extremely white Bishop who accused me of striking a posture.

David Starkey got into PC trouble over his comments on News Night on the BBC.

Maybe it was the mention of Enoch Powell.

I thought he was actually disagreeing with that old Tory but then ………… H’mm.

But he said that white folk now sounded black.

Perhaps he had been listening to the Bishop’s son also.

Whilst I hold no particular brief for David Starkey it does seem to me that he was right.

The argon of modern communication is a variation on Jamaican patois, direct from Kingston, that’s on Thames, of course.

When a friend of mine was made Bishop of Kingston, he told me, he received a letter wishing him a successful ministry in Jamaica.

Of course its music and rap, which passes for music (showing my age there a bit I suppose), but when an academic makes an observation which is clearly based on listening to what is happening to our language it does seem fairly churlish to throw the book at him.

As the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s alter ego Ali G didn’t actually ask ‘Is it ‘cos I’m white?’.