"Class-based snobbery and identity politics" – article by Dr Rakib Ehsan on the arts and heritage sector

You might need a subscription for this, but worth a read.

I know various people who are full-time within the sector across our islands and they have said similar things in conversation. "Luxury beliefs" have always reduced the working classes, or treated the working classes as totemic exotic pets – online here.

I have seen this in my own lifetime in the way that the white collar bureaucracies here in little Northern Ireland have behaved with Ulster-Scots. Generations ago it was the schools which purposefully eroded the Ulster-Scots speech of children; now it's the patronage of funders and departments that control the 'sector' and therefore filters what 'content' is permissible.

The full extract is "The arts and culture sector, along with other spheres of British life, is increasingly characterised by a toxic combination of old-fashioned class-based snobbery and contemporary US-inspired racial identity politics".

"Diversity through homogeneity" is a bizarre concept, one that Orwell would be proud of.