What We’ve Been Up To Don’t Divide Us hosted a lively session on the Sewell Report at the Battle of Ideas Open For Debate festival on Saturday 31 August with Tony Sewell on on film (pictured), who was joined by Professor James Tooley, Kunle Olulode, Patrick Vernon and Zara Qureshi with DDU’s Dr Alka Sehgal […]
Utopian Dreams & Totalitarian Nightmares: the Coerced Morality of Identity Politics
At the root of the identitarian Left’s politics is a form of self-contradictory morality
Civil Service, Government & Impartiality
Writing for Briefings for Britain, Nick Busvine, former member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, reflects on how sections of the civil service’s commitment to cultural politics in the name of stewardship is incompatible with its public duty to be impartial and is subversive of democratic norms: It is still not ok to go for […]
New Runnymede Trust report promotes the myth of a systemically racist Britain – DDU responds
The Runnymede trust has just submitted a new report to the UN’s International Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). The Trust’s submission concludes that Britain has failed to meet its ICERD obligations, is ‘deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities’ and that ‘racism is systemic in England and impacts the enjoyment of rights of BME […]
Microaggressions: In the Eye of the Beholder
Carole Sherwood introduces the concept of microaggressions, explores what critics have to say about them and finds out why they have created such controversy. Read on…
Microaggressions: In the Eye of the Beholder
by Carole Sherwood, psychologist Cambridge University was recently embroiled in controversy over a Report & Support’ website launched for the anonymous reporting of microaggressions by students and staff. The university claimed this was to encourage a ‘safe, welcoming and inclusive community’ but academics expressed concern that they could be reported for ‘offences’ such as raising […]
Newsletter 2021-06-18: Incurable whiteness / Bad knees / Maya Forstater / Not Oxfem / Rhodes strike / Kids and privilege / Overt flags / Adichie’s essay / Loury on culture
What We’ve Been Up To The Academics Group recently held a discussion on the concept of ‘microaggressions’, which was introduced by Carole Sherwood. The theme had been in the news in the context of the University of Cambridge, where some academics had pushed back against the imposition of guidance and a reporting tool. Among the […]
Who needs ‘intersectionality’?
by Philip Hammond on behalf of DDU academics The concept of ‘intersectionality’ seems omnipresent today. Human Resources departments in public institutions and businesses miss no opportunity to trumpet its significance. HR Magazine emphasises ‘the importance of intersectionality in HR’, while Personnel Today warns that failure to take proper account of intersectionality could mean that ‘organisations […]
Let Many Voices Bloom in the Public Sphere!
Ash Hirani, founding signatory of Don’t Divide Us, writing here for The Conservative Woman, considers some of the unhelpful and corrosive features of our current public discourse – features that close down and oversimplify when we need plurality, complexity and tolerance: The most disconcerting of all recent behaviours is the willingness, and even zeal, to […]
We Need to Defend the CRED Report And Its Authors
The hysterical and vicious reaction to the simple point that labels of ‘institutional, systemic and structural racism’ need to be supported by a wider range of empirical evidence and logical reasoning tells us that more of us need to be brave and speak out – we need to publicly defend both the report and its […]