The war against intelligence

Two weeks have passed and somehow James Conway is still in a job. He is the director of the English Touring Opera, despite having fired 14 of its musicians because they were born with the wrong colour of skin. These middle- to late-career musicians were presented with a letter from James informing them that henceforth the ETO was no place for goddam honkys. Well, OK, it didn’t quite say that — it thanked them for their excellent work and told them they were out on their ears because Conway wanted to make the orchestra more ethnically diverse.

The ETO claimed they had carried out this cracker pogrom at the behest of the Arts Council — which wouldn’t have surprised me terribly. But the Arts Council reacted with commendably apoplectic fury and said it had made no such demands and announced it would be investigating the issue. Since then there has been radio silence from Conway and the ETO. What he did was the very quintessence of racism, of course, but then across the country there are managers — especially in the public sector — desperately trying to outwoke each other with ever more obnoxious policy statements. What we need to do, as a country, is sack them all and send them to that Scottish island I mentioned last week to commune with the cormorants and great northern divers.

The culture war is sweeping through classical music at the moment, as each institution engages in escalating bouts of virtue-signalling. So, the Royal Academy of Music is debating whether it should set fire to its priceless collection of pianos and violins because they are tainted by the colonial trade in ebony and ivory.

Meanwhile, a black American academic, Philip Ewell, is leading another vanguard in pursuit of the destruction of western classical music which, the chippy idiot avers, is rooted in racism.