David Starkey is half right about 'monocultural' Britain

Do we know exactly what Chelsea and England's John Terry said to QPR's Anton Ferdinand during the two clubs' match on 23 October? I certainly don't, though it is suggested by some that it was both offensive and racially tinged, something Terry denies. But is it worth two inquiries, one by the FA and the other by the Met police? I can't believe it is.

Terry was back in the newspapers again, explaining to a pre-match press conference before England play Sweden tonight that he's frustrated in not being able to talk about "it" and that he's glad to have had a lot of supportive messages from around the world all the same. Ferdinand is similarly tight-lipped, as we say in the trade (but not in real life).

Do we need the Terry investigations to tell us what exactly happened or what to think? After all, sport delved into a similar mini-drama only a few weeks ago when Tiger Woods' former Kiwi caddy, Steve Williams, unburdened himself of some choice thoughts about the golf star who had sacked him.

Williams has form in the outspokenness department, having said of another golfer: "I hate the prick." What caused trouble over his animosity towards Woods – expressed at a private dinner – was that he didn't simply want to shove it "right up [Woods'] arsehole" but that he defined the orifice in question as a black one.

The caddy apologised. Woods himself said that Williams is "certainly not a racist". But all sorts of people took offence, not at the earlier prick or the arsehole – though sensitive souls might well do so – but at the colour coding.

OK, I can understand it at a stretch and realise that some people are keen to take offence at all sorts of things which do not trouble others similarly categorised.

When Harriet Harman made what I thought a harmless Scottish red squirrel joke about Lib Dem minister Danny Alexander there was also uproar and hurt feelings. All Hattie had done – and plenty of MUCH nastier things are said about her all the time – was called him another "ginger rodent".

OK again. I can see that "ginger" is sensitive to some people because it's labelling someone for a physical characteristic – hair colour – they can't help and is not always gorgeous.

You take your life in your hands at the Guardian if you describe anyone as "blonde" except Michael Heseltine and – there's a new movie coming out – perhaps Marilyn Monroe, who is with the immortals. But bald blokes, fat blokes, sweaty blokes, even blokes with moustaches (except in Movember) seem to be fair game.

Let's stick to racial sensitivities today. It so happens that Dr David Starkey, that tireless and tiresome academic exhibitionist, is in the news today too. His offence? Asserting at an historians conference in London that most of Britain is a white "monoculture" and that the teaching of its history in schools should reflect that core fact. Immigrants should learn to adjust.

Fellow historians present, people with equally grand academic credentials but not so fiery on the telly, took issue with the old rascal in suggesting that the "Our Island Story" view of history – I still have a copy on my shelf – is an insufficient tool for children growing up in a multicultural and intensely-connected world.

As usual, there is merit in both arguments. Thus I recall being startled when I realised my own children seemed to know more about Mary Seacole than they did about Florence Nightingale, her contemporary in the Crimean wards, but glad to hear from them about Seacole and her remarkable life story.

Starkey's basic complaint, echoed by Michael Gove, the coalition's combative education secretary, is about process and structure. Thus: "The core of history is narrative and biography. And the way history has been presented in the curriculum for the last 25 years is very different. The importance of knowledge has been downgraded. Instead the argument has been that it's all about skills."

There's some truth in that too. I read history at university – still do – but have never quite recovered from not doing the Tudors at any stage of my education. I've been reading to catch up ever since, including Starkey, a Tudor specialist who talks better than he writes.

We need all the social, economic and religious analysis across all classes – think Michael Wood's splendid Story of England on BBC TV – but even he is crafty enough to structure his story of Kibworth in Leicestershire around narrative and individual biography.

I think we can forgive Starkey all sorts of boorish habits once we realise that he was the only child of clever but poor Quaker parents, born in Kendal to a domineering mother, born, what's more with two club feet which had to be fixed. No wonder he has needed a streak of arrogance to become who he is: a telly don in populist times.

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is surely right to chuckle about it all, telling the Times that he knows Starkey – he isn't a bigot or a racist – he's just thinking too narrowly.

I don't think he was quite so relaxed when Starkey blamed the August riots on what he called a "violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture" that has been imported. "The whites have become black," he added.

What interested me about Starkey's latest outburst is his insistence that, far from being "rather diverse" (as Joya Chatterji, a Cambridge don reminded him) "most of Britain is a monoculture. You think London is Britain, it isn't." Westmorland, where he was born, Kent, where he has a home, and the south-west, where he enjoys holidays are "absolutely and unmitigatingly white", Starkey told the Society of Antiquaries conference.

In a week when Andrea Arnold's new film of Wuthering Heights stars James Howson, a black actor, as Heathcliff this is again an argument with two sides. How black was Emily Brontë's character?

As Steve Rose pointed out in yesterday's interesting G2 survey of racial identity in film, the author variously describes him as a "lascar" (Indian seaman) or "a dark skinned gipsy in aspect". Clearly he wasn't Laurence Olivier – and shouldn't that be "Traveller", Emily?

But it's always worth reminding people who spend most of their lives in cities that great swaths of Britain aren't like cities in all sorts of ways, including a shortage of regular buses and ethnic diversity.

I was in East Sussex at the weekend and saw just one black face. Living in a city as I do, I am always aware of monotone Britain beyond it, so I guess the man walking the beach front was too.

I'm glad to report he and his friends seemed very relaxed. Perhaps we should follow their lead more often.