OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND:

Old and Busted: Rock Against Racism.

The New Hotness? 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.”

Fortunately, American punk rock is a much more welcoming and diverse environment: My Celtic-Jewish Punk Rock History. “In his book The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, Steven Beeber chronicles the Jewish lineage that led to New York punk rock. It goes from Lenny Bruce, ‘the patron saint of punk,’ to Lou Reed, to Jonathan Richman, to Suicide, to Richard Hell to Joey and Tommy Ramone. ‘As it originated in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early 1970s,’ Beeber writes, ‘punk rock was the apotheosis of a Jewish cultural tradition that found its ultimate expression in the generation born after the Holocaust.’”