Under the banner “Performing arts remain “White-dominated” the Sunday Telegraph published on 25th July, extracts from a document circulated by the management of the “Conservatoire of dance and drama”. Our comments on this document, which have also been sent to the Sunday Telegraph, are given below:

One wonders which country the managers of the Conservatoire of Dance and Drama (CDD) believe they are living in (25th July).

Declaring that “power is held by white people” in a public institution, in a country, England, whose natural-born citizens are 92% white (2011 census), newly circulated CDD documents declare that the “the white supremacist structure” of this public institution must be “dismantled”, as if we were living in Apartheid South Africa, and the curricula “decolonised”. This nonsensical phrase, also being used in some other higher education institutions, appears to mean the removal of all references to practices, discoveries and knowledge systems originating in Britain and countries of British settlement overseas including the USA.

From personal experience I know that the parents of foreign students, particularly Chinese, pay huge sums of money precisely for their children to receive a traditional British university education. They have no time at all for so-called “decolonisation” of the curriculum which they see as another American fad which it is. Moreover the language in which the CDD documents and others are couched, talking about “white complicity” for instance, as if the native people of our country were engaged in some sort of crime, is extremely insulting. Section III of the Public Order Act 1986 specifically outlaws “abusive and insulting words” directed at particular groups of the population.

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