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

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

Last Orders: should schools be free to indoctrinate?

Alka Sehgal Cuthbert joined Tom Slater and Chris Snowdon on spiked‘s regular podcast about all things nanny state.

UNCANCELLED: Indoctrination or Education?

The crybullies couldn’t stop us speaking…

Following her shocking cancellation from a recent education conference, the Free Speech Union was delighted to be able to give Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, director of Don’t Divide Us (DDU), the opportunity to debate the issue of indoctrination in our schools, along with film studies teacher Toby Marshall, Dr Ruth Wareham, lecturer in Philosophy of Education at the University of Birmingham, and John Marrill, teacher of history and politics.

WHO ARE THE EXPERTS?
An investigation into anti-racist third-party organisations in schools

Watch the report launch with Alka Sehgal Cuthbert in conversation with Allison Pearson.

Our second report zooms in on the third-party organisations who are promoting these radical political beliefs in schools through EDI provision:

  • Britain is an institutionally racist country due to a selective account of its past
  • White people are privileged
  • Black people can only succeed if white people make space for them
  • Colour-blind approaches to inequality are not respectable beliefs
  • Impartiality in schools is a problem

These groups operate in ways that avoid public accountability, political responsibility, and have very little basis in established academic/educational sources of authority. Any government that takes democracy, freedom of speech and tolerance seriously also needs to take education seriously.

Read the full report here.

Read the press coverage here.

New campaign

DDU launches a petition to oppose indoctrination in schools 

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 many others agree. 

“We believe that our common humanity is indivisible.” 

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

DDU complaint about BBC Newsround

The BBC has a public duty, enshrined in its own Guidelines and Framework, to maintain impartiality and balance. Its Newsround programme on CBBC, which includes clips of Professor Kehinde Andrews presenting the concept of white privilege as if incontrovertible fact, with no alternative viewpoint offered, breaches its own standards. We wrote a letter of complaint. Read the correspondence here.

DDU Supporter’s Open Letter to Ministers on
Positive Action Schemes in Universities

DDU supporter Amber Muhinyi’s open letter to ministers explains why racial eligibility in Higher Education student schemes is not just morally wrong, but contravenes the Equality Act itself. The letter has been co-signed by numerous academics and sent to relevant ministers.

Read the letter here.

Anyone working in academia can still have their name added – just drop us a line at: team@dontdivideus.com

Alka Sehgal Cuthbert discusses her disinvitation from an education conference

Alka was a guest on Free Speech Nation with Andrew Doyle on Sunday 24 September. She talked about how the Rethinking Education conference organisers had disinvited her from speaking on a panel about indoctrination in education.

Planet Normal: 2 March 2023

Alka Sehgal Cuthbert joined hosts Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan on the Telegraph‘s podcast to discuss how schools are teaching children that Britain is systematically racist and to warn parents to be alert to indoctrination in schools.

Latest news and opinion

DDU open letter in response to ‘Black Out’ performances at Noel Coward Theatre

Alka Sehgal Cuthbert writes to theatre owners Delfont Mackintosh to denounce the idea of blacks-only performances.

Educational achievement: individual aspiration and effort counts! 

Frederick R. Prete argues that claims that American school exams are biased against minorities don’t stand up to close examination. What really matters is aspiration and rigorous course work.

Book review: ‘Nice Racism: How progressive white people perpetuate racial harm’ by Robin DiAngelo

Robin DiAngelo achieved widespread fame with her book White Fragility, delivering the ideas of Critical Race Theory to an audience of progressives. Here, Graeme Kemp reviews her follow-up, which carries on the same, Catch-22 outlook: if you’re white, you’re a racist – and if you disagree, you’re a racist in denial.

LATEST ON TWITTER

This was recommended to parents of children in years 3-6 in a London primary school 👇

This school is saying racial difference trumps everything, including truth.

Are these the kinds of values we want to instil in our children?

Many schools say anti-racism and equity initiatives matter for quality education, yet specific plans are often wanting.

Many schools are also wrong to say this. Quality education is about good content and good teaching.

The 'diversity' agenda is completely undemocratic.

At its core is the belief that we need to be made equal through top down control.

It affords special privileges to minority groups who conform or stay silent and curbs the freedoms of the majority.

Who’s in charge?
A report on councils’ anti-racist policies for schools

In 2021 we were alerted by concerned parents and teachers to a divisive and partisan teacher professional development course, Racial Literacy 101, being sponsored by Brighton and Hove Council. Our whistleblowers revealed contentious advice to teachers, with the council recommending lesson plans that focused on racial division being taught to children as young as five. Following widespread concern in Parliament, the Education Secretary, Rt. Hon Nadim Zahawi MP, launched an enquiry and we await its publication.

In light of that experience, alongside curriculum examples we have received from parents and teachers elsewhere over the past two years, we set out to develop a granular picture of how Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (“EDI”) and anti-racist policies are being implemented by local councils across England and Wales. Alongside this, we sought the views of parents to test whether public thinking was aligned to the strategic direction being promoted by local councils. What we found is deeply concerning and demonstrates a widening gulf between parents and those tasked with the education of their children.

Partners

Scottish Union for Education