The UK’s common-sense voice on race


Our beliefs

  • We should treat everyone as an individual worthy of respect regardless of race, religion or the colour of their skin
  • We call this colourblind anti-racism – it is based on freedom and tolerance – and we believe it is the best way to counter prejudice where it does exist
  • Today’s so-called anti-racism sees group identity before it sees a person and risks reinforcing prejudice by dividing us into a world of victims and oppressors
  • Britain is a successful multi-cultural society with a positive story to tell about race relations
  • We won’t benefit from importing divisive political ideas from the US that don’t reflect our history and which undermine our shared values today

“We believe that our common humanity is indivisible.” 

DDU Director Alka Sehgal Cuthbert Introduces Don’t Divide Us to Andrew Doyle

From democracy to identity

The role of public policy in fostering the preconditions for violent social disorder

28 August 2024

One month after the elections – with the lowest share of the population voting since universal suffrage –  Britain saw riots, a minority of which were racist in their immediate targets. Few seem to have given much thought as to whether there might be any connection. Here, DDU director Alka Sehgal Cuthbert argues that the riots of 2024, with their focus on immigration, have become a symbolic pole around which an inchoate anger and resentment are expressed.

The immediate focus is on immigration-related issues, but Alka argues that public sentiments, from unease to outright hostility on the part of many more who protested but did not riot, is not proof of their racism or propensity towards violence. Instead, it articulates, albeit in a fairly inchoate way, the frustrations of people who, over many decades, have found their leaders, from government to local services, increasingly unable to even acknowledge, let alone meet, their minimal aspirations. This is the deeper problem that no amount of turning back boats or imprisoning creators of imprudent and deeply nasty Facebook posts can address. This paper charts key moments in Britain’s social and institutional history – from the first Race Relation Act in 1965 to the present-day Equality Act – that have contributed to the erosion of our democratic social fabric.

Read the paper here.

‘Diversity & Anti-Racism’ and the threat to education in schools

23 August 2024

On 24 July 2024, DDU sent an open letter to a major external educational provider to UK schools, The Key – signed by a combination of scholars, teachers and parents – detailing our concerns about The Key’s Anti-Racism Curriculum Review. This review, knowingly or not, embeds significant precepts from critical race theory. In our view, these precepts are detrimental to educational goals and lack popular consent.

Read our open letter to The Key, a summary of The Key’s response, and our full statement here.

DDU statement on anti-Semitism in the UK

14 October 2023

DDU has supporters from across the political divide. We recognise that people will draw different political conclusions following the events of recent days. Nevertheless, we feel compelled to make an ethical statement. We believe that, if it ever was such, Hamas has now abandoned any claim of being legitimate advocates for Palestinian interests. Its actions seem also to have given the green light to some within Britain to explicitly voice what has, largely, remained implicit. That is to say; identity politics, or more specifically, its race-based variant epitomised by the Black Lives Matter group and other so-called anti-racist groups, is in perfect alignment with the oldest racism in town – anti-Semitism.

While some openly celebrated the massacre of Jews as being decolonisation in practice (in the process grossly insulting previous generations of people fighting for national sovereignty), some Jewish schools in London have closed to ensure their pupils’ safety on this Hamas-inspired ‘day of rage’. If reports are accurate this has already claimed a teacher in France, murdered by a supporter of the Gazan terror group. This is not the crybully calls of the seven people who said they felt psychologically unsafe in the presence of someone voicing DDU’s beliefs, this is evidence that in today’s Britain and on the continent, some people still feel they face a real threat of violence because of their religion. In a secular liberal democracy like Britain, this is unacceptable. DDU aims to expose and challenge all forms of racist ideas in Britain, whatever faux-progressive guise in which they appear.

Update: 23 October 2023
We are glad others are showing solidarity with Jewish people facing anti-Semitism here and elsewhere in the world: see British Friends of Israel.

PUBLIC EVENT IN LONDON
CONTEMPORARY ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE UK

DDU hosted this event on 11 December 2023 in association with The Equiano Project. The speakers were Stephen Pollard, Professor Frank Furedi, Khadija Khan and Daniel Ben Ami

LATEST ON TWITTER

Unfortunately, in a culture where the definition of racism has been so expanded, these spats are performative rather than substantive; and they erode everyday solidarity :

Conduct matters: for a pluralist public sphere; for civility despite deep political disagreement, and also to avoid making yourself look like a racist caricature:

One function of schools is to contribute to a common culture without which integration is much harder. Each push for an 'anti-racist' or 'decolonised' curriculum makes this much harder:

Video

Not the Easy Way: free speech for children

Report

WHO ARE THE EXPERTS?

An investigation into anti-racist third-party organisations in schools

News and opinion

How to push back against DEI policies

Graeme Kemp reviews The Counterweight Handbook by Helen Pluckrose.

Response to Bar Standards Board proposal to amend Core Duty 8

Recently, the Barrister Standards Board (BSB) published proposals to change one of its core duties pertaining to equality. The proposed change to Core Duty 8 is to replace a duty to not discriminate unlawfully (a negative duty) to ‘You must act in a way that advances equality, diversity and inclusion.’ We asked a barrister to comment on the proposal and its implications.

Thank you

DDU petition against indoctrination in schools

Our petition, signed by Lionel Shriver, Toby Young, Claire Fox, Matthew Goodwin, Inaya Folarin Iman, William Clouston, Allison Pearson, Jonathan Sumption, Tim Luckhurst, Tony Sewell, Ben Cobley, Joanna Williams, Eric Kaufmann, Stuart Waiton, James Esses, and around 5,000 people has now closed.

Find out how we’ve used the petition.

Partners

Scottish Union for Education