Capitalising “Black” but Not “White”: The Atomisation of Britain

On 13 August 2025, The Daily Telegraph reported that Edinburgh University Press has issued new inclusive language guidance to its authors. Among other prescriptions, it instructs that “black” should always be capitalised because it denotes “a distinct cultural group and a shared sense of identity and community,” while “white” should never be capitalised due to its “political connotations.” The same guide discourages terms like “Eastern” and “Western,” bans “illegal” in the context of immigration, and suggests that “homeless” be replaced with “unhoused.” It prefers “currently dealing with food insecurity” or “economically exploited” to “poor,” urges avoidance of gendered nouns, and demands “trigger warnings” for everything from animal cruelty to “classism.” Such changes are not the product of chance or mere academic fad. They belong to a programme that runs through most of our state-funded institutions—a programme whose deeper logic serves the interests of the ruling class.

The ultimate power in Britain lies with the moneyed interest: the network of banks, global corporations, and investment houses, plus certain rich families, most of them rooted in or linked to the City of London. This group does not spend its time drafting style guides. Its interests lie in maintaining Britain as a safe and compliant base of operations for speculation, and wars to enforce its rent-extraction. Day-to-day governance is delegated to a governing class—politicians, civil servants, quangocrats, academics, and media operatives—who are chosen not because they receive detailed orders, but because their instincts and prejudices generally produce decisions that align with the needs of their patrons. It is within this framework that the Press’s guidance must be understood.

Capitalising “black” but not “white” is not a neutral point of typography. It is a coded instruction about legitimacy. Certain groups may be treated as political actors with collective identity; others—above all, the white traditional population—may not. By embedding this asymmetry in the style-sheet of a respected academic press, it is made routine. Authors comply if they want publication; editors enforce without question; eventually, the habit spreads into the wider media, and into schools, and bureaucracies. The effect is to normalise the idea that “whiteness” has no legitimate cultural or political expression, while other identities are to be encouraged.

This is not the accidental overreach of well-meaning egalitarians. It is an efficient tool of political management. The British population has already been transformed by immigration into a patchwork of competing groups. In such a landscape, the largest of those groups must be prevented from thinking of itself as such. That is the function of rules like this. A capitalised “black” encourages bloc consciousness; a decapitalised “white” helps dissolve it. The result is an electorate less able to unite around shared grievances, and more likely to turn its frustrations on other fragments of the population instead of on the oligarchy that profits from their mutual suspicion.

The surrounding instructions in the Press’s guide work towards the same end. Forbid “illegal” in relation to migrants, and you blunt the language in which border policy can be criticised. Replace “homeless” with “unhoused,” and you shift focus from social dysfunction to environmental accident. Outlaw “poor” in favour of “currently dealing with food insecurity” or “economically exploited,” and you turn a concrete social fact into a phrase too clumsy to rally anyone. Always the direction is away from plain speech and towards a bureaucratic dialect in which no effective political demand can be made.

It is here that the connection to the moneyed interest becomes clear. Those who control Britain’s real levers of power may have no personal concern with whether “white” is capitalised. But they benefit from a public language that makes coherent resistance impossible. The governing class—self-selecting, ideologically homogeneous, and secure in its own material comfort—carries out the work because it believes in it, and because, consciously or not, it is serving the agenda of its paymasters.

This is why the Telegraph story matters. A few hundred books a year from Edinburgh University Press will not in themselves change the country. But the Press trains, publishes, and influences the Scottish intellectual wing of the governing class. What it mandates in a style guide today becomes the assumption of a civil service department or national broadcaster tomorrow. The detail may seem trivial—merely a keystroke—but every such keystroke is another small denial of one group’s right to the same cultural dignity afforded to others. Accumulated over time, these denials become habit, habit becomes norm, and norm becomes law—even if just shadow law, it will be enforced by the police even so.

The pretence is that these rules make language more inclusive. The reality is that they narrow what can be said, and in doing so, they narrow what can be thought. That is the purpose of the changes. A people denied a legitimate name for itself is a people easier to dispossess. And once dispossessed—of land, of common feeling—it can be taxed and managed without fear of collective pushback. This is the Britain in which the moneyed interest prospers: a geographic expression with no coherent national will, populated by mutually suspicious groupings, each kept under permanent surveillance, and all dependent on state-managed services delivered in the approved language.

To dismiss this as a minor quarrel over capital letters is to miss the point. Language is one of the chief tools by which the governing class, in tacit collusion with its patrons, is reshaping the political terrain. The choice before us is whether to notice what is being done, or to discover—too late—that we have been written out of our own country in lower case.