Taxpayers Fund Festival That Won’t Let White People Run It

Taxpayers are funding a music festival that bans white people from its leadership, The Telegraph can reveal.

The annual “Decolonise Fest” music event for “punx of colour” aims to undo the harms of colonialism and “dismantle white supremacy” in the punk music scene.

Grant funding from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has propped up Decolonise Fest, which informs prospective supporters that “white people cannot join the organising group” that leads it.

Leaders are instead drawn from members who can boast one or two parents descended from the “original inhabitants” of continents outside Europe, or from Roma and Traveller groups.

Arts Council cash has supported the London festival, whose “militant” leadership has pledged to “put the threat back into punk” – while also banning any rhetoric that could stray into “fatphobia”.

The festival has in the past hosted acts including Bob Vylan, whose lead singer led chants of “death to the IDF” during a Glastonbury set, a show that was supported by Decolonise Fest with the social media message: “Free Palestine and up the Vylan.”

Funding distributed by the Arts Council included £7,793 in Covid emergency funding to keep the Decolonise Fest going through the pandemic, and a grant of £18,808 in National Lottery funding this year.

Bipasha Ahmed, the festival’s organiser, was given a grant of up to £3,500 in 2024 for the purposes of “growing Decolonise Fest through training, mentorship and partnerships”.

This grant was distributed by the PRS Foundation, the UK’s main charitable funder of musical talent development, and supported by funding from the DCMS.

Public funding has supported the work of the festival team, whose manifesto states: “We are reasserting our place in punk and want to showcase the amazing, creative and talented contributions punx [sic] of colour have made to the punk scene since its inception.

“We are uncompromising and strong and will dismantle the white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, ableism and Islamophobia that infests the punk scene.”

The festival’s team claims to be “rewriting the rules” and “truly putting the threat back into punk again” and says it will “not tolerate racism, ageism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia, classism, ableism, homophobia” or any “anti-immigrant rhetoric”.

However, the festival will “talk about racism but not in a way that centres whiteness or prioritises the feelings of white people. No white tears.”

While white people cannot be members of the festival’s organising group, “white allies are welcome” but also urged to “remember this event will focus on people of colour”.

The festival was founded in 2016 as a DIY punk collective, and in 2018 released a documentary about the purpose of an event for “punx of colour”.

In the documentary, a contributor states: “It can be a bit isolating sometimes, going to gigs and being surrounded by white people, and looking on stage and seeing only white people.”

The issue of white audiences has been identified as a problem in other arts. In the West End, a series of “black-out nights” has been trialled, in which white people were asked not to attend a given play so black ticket-holders could enjoy the show without their presence.

In 2024, the production of Slave Play held two such nights for an “all black-identifying audience” to ensure they could be “free from the white gaze”.

A spokesman for Rishi Sunak, the prime minister at the time, described the concept as “divisive”.