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06/18/2008: "London's annual free anti-racist music festival is too white"

The deterrent effect of this highly politicised atmosphere should not be underestimated. Although the event was supposed to be inclusive and attract people from ethnic minorities, the GLA's own research (conducted while Ken was mayor) shows that 65%-70% of attendees in the last two years were white. That is disproportionately whiter than the population of London. It seems reasonable to conclude that the political baggage and relentless sloganeering was actually putting people off. And no doubt many individuals and families who did come on the day were there primarily for the music or a nice day out.

Londoners deserve a great, free music festival with excellent bands from around the world. They don't need to be hectored about why racism is bad or accosted by activists explaining why Castro is a hero. We don't have anti-racist fireworks on New Year's Eve and we don't need to organise an anti-paedophile concert to prove our moral credentials on the issue. Sectarian political festivals are not the way Londoners want their money to be spent. Most of us, I suspect, just want to be trusted to get on with other people and not be instructed by activists about the dangers of racism.

[ It is probably not much fun for the ethnic minorities to go somewhere that rubs their supposed victim status into their faces. ]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/17/1

Replies: 1 Comment

on Wednesday, June 18th, Dental Plan said

Whites are the least racist group in the world which explains why they comprised the bulk of that festival's audience.

This article reminds me of the "Bush = Hitler" chant (if anything it's an insult to Hitler, not Bush). Liberals have apparently ingested so many drugs that they consider letting the country become darker during your eight years as Freemason-in-Chief to be evidence of Nazi sympathies. Perhaps if he had just come right out and had every married White person who wasn't paired with a non-White executed, they'd have dropped that bone-head comparison.