Education:
Education in the UK is highly contentious. The same holds true in western Europe, the United States and Australia. [1]Where the UK differs is in the gap between more conservative and liberal attitudes on education. Conservative people generally prefer education to focus on the conveyance of academic skills and to encourage discipline, whereas more liberal-minded people prefer education to encourage creativity. In the UK, the gap is noticeably wider than in other western European countries, though less so than in the US.
Education in the UK has become a political football, a central stage of the culture wars. This may be illustrated in two dimensions: the teaching of morals and the teaching of history.
On morals, the war has been won by neither side. Despite repeated statements by militant atheists that the UK is fast becoming secular, Pew Research reports that 71% of parents in the UK raise their children to identify as Christians. [2]Yet the six last injunctions referring to conduct towards others in the Decalogue -the fundamental law of the Judeo-Christian tradition- have become more optional. This holds in particularly for all things sexual, except for adultery which is viewed rather strongly as a bad. Murder is a bad, but not worth a death penalty. Stealing is bad, particularly not paying bus tickets. Clearly, the secularists have a lot of work ahead of them: 67% of Pew’s interviewees in the UK disagree that science makes religion unnecessary in life. What is particularly noteworthy is that a majority consider there to be a strong link between national identity and ancestry.
Into the 1950s, history teaching was primarily about the histories of the component parts of what became the United Kingdom-from the Romans, through to the Tudors and Stuarts, the Glorious Revolution, and the competition for global primacy with Spain, France, then with Germany, alongside the evolution of British institutions and freedoms. No more. The new historical approach was arguably first spelt out by E.H. Dance, and developed into a national curriculum in the 1980s and beyond. Dance and his successors proposed to downplay the national heritage, open up to world history, and to teach the skills of the historian rather than “facts”. [3]The result has been a two tier system of provision where independent and grammer school pupils are taught the national story, and “young people (who) are more likely to be in areas of great social deprivation”, are taught a porridge of trendy subjects, touching on “cultural, ethnic and religious diversity” and “the changes and continuities within and across different periods”.[4]
By all accounts, they are bored stiff.
Since the 1980s, each incoming government seeks to twist the curriculum to its own preference; history teaching, in the domain of the devolved administrations, is prey to local nationalists; the unity of the United Kingdom is challenged, and a two tier society is promoted where the poor are left ignorant of the community they live in-fodder for demagogues. Where pupils do take the subject further, they are served a diet of Hitler and the Henrys. Jeremy Corbyn has stated, as part of his anti-western and anti-white agenda, that pupils should be taught the history of those whom the British exploited. Corbyn peddles guilt as a subject, but actually he peddles anti-white racialism.
Playing at social engineering with UK education has had very deleterious effects across the board, and not least for the poorer part of the population, the White Trash of this essay. Multiple studies show that the early years of a child’s life are crucial to its life opportunities. The key is “the Home Learning Environment” (HLE). [5]As The Equality Trust states, poor HLE is associated with a low level of the mother’s education, larger families and living in a poorer neighbourhood. Young adults, the Trust reports, raised by single mothers tend to have lower educational, occupational and economic attainment.
A major component of underperforming children are white boys.[6]White boys from the lowest occupational class and from workless households have the lowest aspirations. As the Foundation states, being white, male and working class is a cumulative disadvantage. All ethnic groups are more likely to go to university than white British people.
Social engineering has long been the key inspiration informing progressive educational policy. Margaret Postgate Cole was pushing for comprehensive schools in the early 1950s. The impetus to substitute comprehensive for grammar schools swung into action in the 1960s, Their purpose would be that “children of all types should learn to live with each other in youth”.[7]Many grammar schools, each a complex tangle of social capital with their own cultures, were often centuries old. The policy was to destroy them: “shut down every fucking grammar school in the country”, said Tony Crosland, Jenkins’ buddy. Out of 1400 grammar schools, within a decade less than one tenth were still in service.
As if that was not enough, the Labour government of the 1960s set about destroying apprenticeships. By the mid-1960s, one third of boys leaving schools went into apprenticeships. In 1968, the Royal Commission of Trade Unions and Employer Associations, concluded that “apprenticeship is a farce and provides less training than a properly constituted course lasting only for a few months.” [8]Rather than reform secondary schools, say along the lines of Germany or Austria, and rather than consider how to build on existing apprenticeships in order to improve them, the approach was to denigrate. By the mid 1990s, there were half the number of apprenticeships that had been available in the mid-1960s. Successive efforts to rebrand apprenticeships have faltered on the lack of government funding, reluctance on the part of employers to invest in training, and on the transformation of the British economy to services. As a 2018 OECD report on apprenticeships in England states, “A large proportion of apprenticeships in England still involve low-level skills, acquired in a period of little more than a year, with a limited component of general education, and with most of the training taking place off the job.”[9]
After the accession of eastern European countries in 2004, the Blair government had an open door policy from eastern Europe to the UK. British employers bypassed local workers, and went for the cheaper, hard-working and often very well trained eastern Europeans. No surprise, then, that northern England voted massively to Leave-to get back control of immigration.
The “blob”-the composite progressive alliance to use educational institutions to push the equality agenda-carried on gaily under the Conservatives. The alliance dominates the teaching colleges, the unions and the Ministry of Education. Eighty per cent of university lecturers in the UK are left-wing.
Corporal punishment, for instance, was abolished in all state schools in 1986. Progressive policies continued under New Labour: pressure was placed on the remaining grammar schools to shut; church schools were told they could not select on merit, nor on religion; uniforms were fazed out; exams were made easier on egalitarian grounds.
By 2014, the BBC could report that the 451,000 teachers in state education-about the same number as two decades earlier-were now flanked by 471,000 teaching assistants to help keep order. Violence in schools had rocketed; in that year, there were 93 assaults on teachers recorded in UK classrooms per day. There were also 420 Referral Units to which out-of-control children were sent, costing the tax payer £18,000 a year per child. Bright children got no such support.
The upshot of education becoming a battleground of the culture wars in the UK is that a two -tier system has been created. A 2007 report recorded that one third of adults in the UK did not have basic school leave certificates; 6.8 million adults had problems with numbers, and five million were functionally illiterate. [10]
At the top end, the UK has some excellent state, private, and grammar schools. But there is a long tail of mediocrity and worse. In the OECD PISA tests on maths and science attainments , the UK in 2015 came no 25 in maths, and no 13 in science. Singapore came first in both.
Why does Singapore do so well? All schools charge parents, in other words the service is not free; testing of children is frequent; competition is encouraged, giving children an incentive to migrate to where their talents are; homework starts at six; teachers are well paid and respected. As mentioned, drug peddlars are not found at Singapore school gates. Singapore’s per capita income is twice that of the UK.
The UK adopts identity politics.
Identity politics treats people as members of a group, rather than as individuals. Prior to 1948, and the passage of the British nationality Act, all people under the Crown were British subjects, regardless of race or creed. But following the world war, Canada, India, New Zealand and other countries began to introduce their own definitions of nationality. The 1948 Act created the status of “citizen of the United Kingdom and colonies”, opening up the opportunity for immigration to the UK, in particular from Pakistan and from the West Indies.
Immigrants from Pakistan tended to move to northern England, where there was still an extensive textile industry, while people from the West Indies dispersed around the country in London and the Midlands. Tensions between immigrants and natives prompted Jenkins during his period as Home Secretary to institute the Race Relations Board. Immigration was to be welcomed, he said, “not as a flattening process of assimilation, but as equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance”. In this, Jenkins could claim paternity for what later came to be called the politics of multiculturalism.
When Enoch Powell, the maverick and prominent Conservative politician, delivered his famous “rivers of blood” speech in a Birmingham hotel in 1968,[11]the immigrant population numbered under one million. Within twenty years, Powell predicted, “the black man (will be) holding the whip hand over the white man”. He was immediately dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet by the Conservative leader, Heath, for inciting racialism, but successive governments took steps to tighten access,. This was particularly the case during the Conservative governments of 1979 to 1997. Over the whole period, net immigration hovered around the 50,000 a year mark.
Everything changed with the landslide election of new Labour in 1997. In short order, New Labour opened the doors wide to immigration; introduced the concept of institutional racism;and made multiculturalism a central plank of policy. Together these measures confirmed hate speechin British law.
New Labour decided to open the doors wide to immigration from non-European as well as from European sources.Over the whole period, from 1997 to 2010, non EU net immigration stood at 3.7 million, with net EU immigration at 1.5 million. By 2015, the foreign born population stood at 8 million, and accounted for 85% of the net population growth. The most notable change was in London, where the “white British” population was down to 45% in the 2011 census, from 60% in 2001.
Immigration compensated for the high rate of indigenous abortions. Between 1967, the year when abortion was legalized, and 2014, 8,7 million abortions were performed. Statistics on ethnicity were introduced in 2002: in 2015, 75% of those having abortions were white; 9% Asian, 8% Black.
Was this pre-meditated? Probably not is the short answer. There was always the intent to create“an internal empire(via immigration) that would atone for the old”, in Jenkins own words. There was also the intent to slow down the birth rate of the indigenous population, through the promotion of sex unrelated to reproduction, contraception and abortion. The two policies were not contradictory. Simply, an open doors for immigration in effect allowed for population replacement.
Within the first decade of the millennium, the electorate’s top concern was immigration. There were two reasons:
- The first was jobs. Between 1997 and 2010, the economy created a net by 2.12 million new jobs. UK natives took 385, 000 of the jobs; the rest went to immigrant labour. Polls show that voters for the racialist BNP were overwhelmingly among the poorest: the C2s, the Ds and the Es. [12]
- The second was religion. Seventy five per cent of those interviewed considered that immigrants should embrace the British way of life; 79% thought that Muslims should make a special effort to state their allegiance to the country.[13]Sir Trevor Philips, the son of West Indian parents and former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, reported in 2016, that Islam was becoming a “nation within a nation”.[14]
The concept of institutional racism entered the UK’s political bloodstream, with the MacPherson report published in 1999.[15]The report in effect accused the Crown Prosecution Service and the police of being blinded by “institutional racism”, in the case of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager, murdered by two white yobs in April 1994. Although the police strongly objected to the accusation, the report concluded that “institutional racism affects the Met Police Service and police services elsewhere”. The report made seventy recommendations, including the radical statement that “A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other purpose”.
The statement is radical for two reasons: it was first defined by the black racialist leader Stokely Carmichael as originating “in the operation of established and respected forces in society. It relies on the active and pervasive operation of anti-black attitudes and practice. A sense of superior group position prevails; whites are better than blacks and blacks should be subordinate to whites”.[16]In other words, whites are guilty, and blacks are victims-a plainly racialist statement.
The second reason is that by introducing this statement into law, the government overturned a millennial tradition in England that the accused are innocent until proven guilty.
New Labour made multiculturalism a central plank of policy.The Blair government espoused a radical ideology to convert the UK into a multi-racial country.[17] As Owen Jones, the militant Corbynista, writes in his books, Chavs, “multiculturalism is essentially about defending the rights of ethnic groups”. He adds that ethnic groups “make up only one in ten of the population in our overwhelmingly white society”.[18]
Jones is being ingenious. The fact is that the immigrant non-European population to the UK votes overwhelmingly Labour. Migration Watch calculates that 20% of Labour seats are dependent on the Moslem vote. [19]
In the June general elections of 2017, 67% of black minority ethnic (BME) voters cast their vote for Labour.[20]This was almost exactly the same as the June 23, 2016 vote on Brexit. Seventy three percent of BMEs voted to Remain. The northern England, and traditionally Labour, white British electorate, voted in June 2016 for Leave. This trend confronts Labour with a major dilemma: keep recruiting your new voter base from non-European territories, and risk splitting the party along ethnic grounds, or find a mix of policies which can cater to both Labour constituencies, new and old.
A further consideration is that after 17 years of Tory rule, Labour was greedy for office. The class politics of the 1970s had failed. A new synthesis was needed. That is what Blair, Mandelson, and Brown, provided. The continuity with the past was the emphasis on the “group”, except that the new group was not class but race. Labour could then ride to the rescue of racial minorities through legislation favouring positive discrimination, generous deployment of taxpayers money through the benefits system, and equalities legislation. Paradoxically, the policy was adopted as apartheid,- the failed experiment to divide society into racial “groups”-came to an end in South Africa.
Multiculturalism was taken by New Labour as offering one further benefit. Its protagonists clearly thought that here was a stick to beat the Tories. As Andrew Neather, a former New Labour speechwriter, revealed in an article in the Evening Standard, [21]the motive guiding policy was ‘that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.’ Creating a multicultural society would “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.’ In fact, the multicultural stick helped the Leave vote to win, and alienated the white working class.
Finally, hate speech is the one remaining sin recognized by the UK’s militant secularists. It benefits by cross-party support. The Public Order Act of 1986 prohibits “the stirring up of racial hatred”, and has been amended in 1994, and again in 2000, in 2006 and in 2008. The police may now arrest a person for saying or doing anything that may stir up religious hatred, or be interpreted as stirring up hatred against gays and lesbians. The legislation begets a slew of non-governmental organisations, and has come to absorb police time and resources away from ensuring that law and order prevails between individuals in society.
In 2009, the House of Commons examined the alleged progress to eliminate racial prejudice ten years after MacPherson’s report. [22]Trevor Philips thought things were going the right way: the reporting of hate crimes was now up to 60,000 a year. But Mrs Lawrence, the mother, of the murdered teenager, Stephen, thought that black families continue to think they are worse treated than white families.
Easy Meat.
This may well be what black families think; but poor White Trash have a case that they are treated worst of all. The phrase “easy meat” was first used by Jack Straw, the former New Labour Home Secretary, who accused men of Pakistani heritage as regarding white girls as “easy meat” for sexual abuse.[23]Straw made his comment after The Times had published[24] a carefully documented report that for 25 years a culture of silence-they call it omertà in Sicily- “has facilitated the sexual explopitation of hundreds of young British girls by criminal pimping gangs.” “For more than a decade, the report went on, child protection experts have identified a repeated pattern of sex offending in towns and cities across northern England and the Midlands involving groups of older men who groom and abuse vulnerable girls aged 11 to 16 after befriending them on the street.” “Most of the victims are white and most of the convicted offenders are of Pakistani heritage”
On further investigation, police representatives were reported as saying the figure of underage rape victims was in the hundreds of thousands. [25]Andrew Norfolk, The Times journalist, went on to state that police and child care personnel had known about what was going on for at least a decade, and done nothing about it. Organised gangs of men were able to “groom, pimp and traffic girls across the country with virtual impunity. Offenders were identified to police but not prosecuted.”
“The internal police and social services correspondence, research papers, intelligence reports and case files are a detailed history of alleged child sexual exploitation in South Yorkshire since 2000, focusing on Rotherham. They include a confidential 2010 report by the police intelligence bureau warning that thousands of such crimes were committed in the county each year.”
A Home Office-funded research project, dated 2002, criticized police for treating young victims “as deviant and promiscuous” while “the men they were found with were never questioned or investigated”.
Norfolk concluded his article by pointing out that Rotherham council, in Yorkshire, had not referred to the religion or ethnicity of the gangs for fear of being accused of “racism”. “Throughout this period, Rotherham council has failed to accept the role of ethnicity and culture …. Earlier this year, this newspaper (The Times)revealed how the town’s safeguarding children board censored a report into the murder of a 17-year-old girl to conceal the ethnicity of the British Pakistani men suspected of using her for sex from the age of 11.”
Underage girls from Sikh, “Asian”, and black backgrounds were also victims. “Asian” is the insulting and official epithet used when describing the members of these gangs, despite the fact that members of the gangs tend not to be people of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino or Hindu and Sikh origin.In a report entitled ‘Group Based Child Sexual Exploitation: Dissecting Grooming Gangs’,[26]and published by the Quilliam Foundation- an Oxford-based Muslim organization calling for the integration of Muslims into British society-, the author noted that of the perpetrators they investigated, 84% of rape gang members were Muslim. “When David Cameron,(the Tory Prime Minister) spoke of the failings of multiculturalism in 2011,” the report pointed out, he was attacked from all sides,.What these critics failed to see was the numerous self-segregated northern towns, the plethora of organisations that preached problematic attitudes towards women and other faiths, and the hundreds of young men and women being radicalised right here on British soil.”
In response to the breakdown in the maintenance of law and order-the state’s prime responsibility-vigilante groups formed. The first groups were Sikh, as Sikh girls had been targeted. The spread of vigilantism, rape gangs and hooliganism occurred on the watch of all governments, whatever their political colouring. This was a collective failure of epic proportions, and rooted in simple official cowardice.
Here is the timeline of events during which employees of the British state-police, social workers, educators, politicians, government officials, the judiciary- failed to defend the elementary rights of underage girls, in large part white, but not exclusively white girls. The timetable is based on information published by Peter McLoughlin, in his book, Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal, New English review Press, 2016.
1988: Violent Sikh on Muslim violence.
1989 : Sikh on trial for vigilantism
1991 : Norfolk 2011 article: gangs known about in Bradford
1995: Barnardo’s, the child charity, publishes “Puppet on a String.”[27]
1996: Rotherham investigation into child prostitution
1998: Sikh Awareness Society formed in West Midlands.
2001: Muslims propose to seduce, convert Sikh girls to Islam
2003.Bradford Labour MP says abuses part of “Asian culture”.
2004:Channel 4 documentary on gangs banned. “Edge of the City”.[28]
2005: Luton: article on Muslim rape activity.
2007: Journalist Julie Brindel points to police do-nothing policy.
2008: BBC Panorama: Teenage Sex for Sale. Questions in parliament.
2009: EDL founded: Murder of schoolgirl Charlene Downes [29]
2011: Norfolks pivotal The Times article published
2013: House Affairs Select Committee Report, Child Sexual Exploitation & Response to Localized Grooming.[30]
2013:Muslim girls raped .[31]Muslim Women’s Network.
2014: Alexis Jay report on grooming gangs in Rotherham.[32]
2014, Association of Chief Police Officers stated that the number of men involved in rape gangs is possibly 100,000.
The saga has continued since then with a constant stream of reports, and now trials about these rape gangs’ activities. Despite condemnation, reported by Norfolk in his investigations, and exemplified by the Muslim Women’s Network report footnoted above, the attitudes of Muslim preachers has been less than impressive. Only 500 of the reported 2000 or so mosques in the UK read out what was supposed to be a joint sermon in the mosques, condemning gang behavior. Naz Shah MP, and supporter of Corbyn, was reported as saying that the victims should shut up “for the good of diversity”.[33]
So much for the self-proclaimed representatives of the “working class”. Let’s be frank: Naz Shah defends the interest first and foremost of her co-religionaires.
This is what Peter McCloughlin, the author of Easy Meat, concludes. “We have shown that there has been systemic failure from the local level (schools, councils, police) to the national level CPS-Child Protection Service-, the courts, the SOCA-the Serious Organised Crime Agency- , the Children’s Commissioner, Parliament, and even children’s charities like Barnardo’s. The failure can be attributed to political correctness, used to protect the incoherent doctrine of multiculturalism, which meant that individuals and organisations felt they would be persecuted by allegations of ‘racism’ if they treated Muslim (Asian) offenders the same way they would treat offenders who were Caucasian.” McCloughlin includes academics in his list of cowards.[34]
Some concluding remarks.
I started these three essays listing four explanations for the existence of the UK’s “White Trash”-the left behinds, those who voted on June 23, 2016 to Leave, not least as a shout of despair. Those four reasons were: that the political parties demonised the nothing to lose voters; Labour in particular substituted class for identity politics; centralised government attracted Utopian social engineering.
Let is tick off the list one by one: political parties have demonised the underclass, which are not really interested in the social liberal agenda of gender, climate change, diversity, or the restrictions of political correctness; their voices were most definitely not heard is distant London, or even more distant Brussels; the vote was most definitely a protest vote.
The poorest in the land used the privilege of the voting booth to draw attention to their plight. Whether or not their votes were cast on the subject of the EU, there can be no doubt that they voted in order to remind their fellow citizens that their concerns had not been listened to by successive governments, for decades. Had the UK political system functioned better, it is reasonable to expect that they would have been heard. But they were not, either by neutered local governments with their discretion and budgets tightly controlled from a jealous centre, or by arguably the most centralised government in Europe. That centralised government since the 1972 European Communities Act had lived happily with a neutered parliament, as its mandarins became part of the Brussels establishment, legislating in the Council of Ministers, which is also the EU’s executive. The voices of UK’s White Trash were heard neither in London nor in Brussels.
The most egregious example is the laissez faire attitude of successive governments, all political parties, local government officials, social workers, teachers, police and judiciary in allowing rape gangs of Muslim men to ply their activities for decades with impunity. I would take issue with McCloughlin in saying that omertà over rape gangs is “systemic”: it is much more serious than that. It is better described as moral delinquency of those responsible for the government of the country.
My argument has been that these are all partial arguments, and that the heart of the matter has been the cultural wars between the traditional tribes of British politics.
One fundamental reason why the voices of the poor were not heard is the change in political culture in the UK from 1945 to the present. I have synthesized public attitudes on morals in 1945 in the following way: “Divorce was rare; traditional marriage was prized; patriotism was widespread; Empire was appreciated as a force for good; corporal punishment was meted out in school and home, and the death penalty sanctioned as a vital corollary to the criminal code. The colour bar in the US armed forces during the second world war was not appreciated, and Labour’s supporters welcomed India’s independence in 1947.” Yes, racialist attitudes were there. But those attitudes were scarcely sanctioned by the Decalogue or by the Sermon on the Mount-the broad principles guiding public morality at the time.The militant secularists of post-1945 UK have not put into place anything approximating the moral teaching of what used to be a Christian country.
The permissive society, launched after the war by all political parties, has had a particularly deleterious effect on the poorest in society. There is no coherent set of views about what is right and wrong. This elementary underpinning of a political culture has become part of the culture wars, raging over religion, education, crime and punishment, and sexuality-a particular focus of militant secularists. Divorce rates have soared, along with the phenomenon of single motherhood—recognised as the single best indicator for criminality, the lack of skills in the household, and a poverty of expectations. Blind eyes have been turned to rape gang activities, to the expansion of polygamy, or to violence perpetrated on defenceless teachers in schools. Crime rates since the 1960s have soared. Sentences have become lenient. The majority of prisoners are members of the underclass, our White Trash. Figures released by the police in 2014 showed that only 29% of all crime are solved. White unborn children are the vast majority of the 8.7 million abortions performed since 1967.
The underclass has, as indicated on my blog, [35]congregated on council estates, had access to bog standard education, been deprived of the ladder to a better life by all-party neglect of education and apprenticeships. Multi-culturalism has led to the spread of positive discrimination policies, where the white underclass are most definitely not positively treated. The size of that underclass may be taken as broadly defined by the Leich report on skills, referred to above: “one third of adults in the UK, it reports, do not have basic school leave certificates; 6.8 million adults have problems with numbers, and five million are functionally illiterate.” [36]
Let’s put some figures on this statement. According to the Leich report, about 5 to 14 million adults in the UK are either illiterate or barely so. It is worth pointing out that about 3 million voters, who had not voted for decades, turned out to vote on June 16,2016 in the biggest vote ever in UK history. As the opinion polls showed, the most ardent Leavers were the poorest in society.
Carrying such a long train of underperformance costs the UK dearly. Take for instance, the study from the Institute of Economics and Peace, and entitled “ The UK Peace Index: Exploring the fabric of peace in the UK from 2003-2012”. The Institute estimates that the cost to the UK of violent crime amounts to an annual bill of £124 billion per annum, or 7.7% gdp-ten times the net contribution of the UK to the EU budget. Or take the study on obesity by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence: it estimates that the cost to the NHS of treating diabetes type 2 amounted in 2012 to £ 8.8 billion, and if the costs are accounted for of premature death, illness, loss of productivity, tax revenue the costs are over £ 13 billion-£4 billion more than the UK EU contribution. Smoking costs the NHS £ 6 billion a year-all covered for the smoker, as for the obese, free of charge. The government calculates that 12% pf 16-24 year olds, ie 794,000 people are not in education, employment or training (Neets). Add to that, the size of the benefits budget of £110 billion per annum, we are facing a price tag for the permissive society somewhere in the range of £230-240 billion per annum.
In the three articles I have written, the first on policies on housing, health and the economy; the second, on the secularist wave, and the third on education, identity and the weaponisation of race as central to the the cultural wars raging in the UK, there are two outstanding conclusions to be taken.
One is that the expansion of the centralised state has met with a plethora of unintended consequences. Top down policies in a host of areas-housing, welfare, education, the economy-have disappointed. Bevan’s vision of social housing for all became overtime housing for the underclass; welfare outlays grew faster than the economy; education expenditures have risen along will near illiteracy and innumeracy; the economy is highly imbalanced in favour of London and the service sector.
The second is that the élites in charge of the UK do not have far to look if they ask how come there is such a wide gap between the governors and the governed. They created it. Their self-satisfied mantra that the UK is advanced and liberal translates into the real life of the poor white trash into one, German,word: Schlamperei. The June 23, 2016 vote to Leave blew the cover on a less than mediocre UK leadership, whose denizens have become accustomed to spin as a substitute for leadership. June 23, 2016 found them out, and continues to do so.
The two areas which intersect most forcefully in the UK are the question of EU membership, Leave or Remain, and domestic affairs, political accountability or not.
In the UK and since 1972 and EU membership, the first in effect took precedence over the second: the lesson is that far more important than whether or not Whitehall has “influence” on the world stage, is whether the government is legitimate at home. It still is…but only by the skin of its teeth.
You get your own house in order as a priority, and the rest falls into place. The last way to do that is by embracing political correctness.
The so-called progressive policies of successive post-1945 UK governments have crashed. They are no longer serviceable. That is why a politically liberal (understood as equality before the law, not identitarian apartheid, and free speech, not hate speech) and national(in the case of the UK, a colour-blind nation of nations) should be the starting point for a new departure. There is little sign of that happening under the present leadership of any political party.
[1]« 4 Charts on how people around the world see education », Pew Research Center, August 28, 2017.
[2]“Being Christian in Western Europe », Pew Research, May 29, 2018.
[3]E.H Dance, History : the Betrayer,London, Hutchinson, 1960.
[4]Cited in « Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, History : The National Curriculum for England”,1999.pp.21-2.
[5]The Equality Trust, Childhood, https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/childhood
[6]The Social Market Foundation, The Commission on Inequality in Education. http://www.smf.co.uk/publications/commission-inequality-education/
[7]« What is a comprehensive school », London, Labour Party, 1953.
[8]The Donovan Report, Cmnd 3623. 1968.
[9]OECDn Apprentiships in England, 2018; p. 19.
[10]World Class Skills: Implementing the Leitsch Review of Skills, The Department for Innovation, the Universities and Skills, 2007.
[11]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw4vMZDItQo. The full text of the speech is at : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/36438
[12]“Who voted BNP and why?”Channel 4 News.Hune 8, 2009.
[13]“Britain UnCovered Survey results: the attitudes and beliefs of Britons in 2015,” The Guardian, April 19, 2015.
[14] Trevor Philips, What British Muslims Really Think, Channel 4.com
[15]Sir William MacPherson, Report of an Inquiry, Cmd 4262-I. February 1999.
[16]Stokely Carmichael, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, Penguin, 1967, pp.20-21
[17]“Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural”,Daily Telegraph, October 23, 2009.
[18]Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, Verso, 2016. p. 234.
[19]https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/mar/24/how-immigration-came-to-haunt-labour-inside-story
[20]Table 3, p.9 http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/GE-post-vote-poll-Full-tables.pdf
[21]“Don’t listen to the whingers-London needs immigrants”, The Evening Standard, October 23, 2009.Tom Bower, Broken Vows: Tony Blair-The Tragedy of Power, Faber and Faber, 2016.
[22]The MacPherson Report Ten Years On, 12thReport of Session 2008/9. House of Commons, July 14, 2009.
[23]White girls seen as « easy meat » by Pakistani rapists, says Jack Straw, The Guardian, Jan 8, 2011.
[24]« Revealed : Conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs », The Times, January 5, 2011. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/revealed-conspiracy-of-silence-on-uk-sex-gangs-gpg5vqsqz9h
[25]Andrew Norfolk, “Police files reveal vast child protection scandal”; The Times, September 24, 2012.
[26]https://www.quilliaminternational.com/shop/e-publications/group-based-child-sexual-exploitation-dissecting-grooming-gangs/
[27]http://www.barnardos.org.uk/resources/research_and_publications/puppet-on-a-string-reveals-the-urgent-need-to-cut-children-free-from-sexual-exploitation/publication-view.jsp?pid=PUB-1454
[28]“Channel 4 pulls abuse film after police fears” The Guardian, May 24, 2004.
[29]See my blog artticles on Tommy Robinson. https://storybookreview.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/tommy-robinson-the-product-of-officialcowardice/
https://storybookreview.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/tommy-robinson-enemy-of-the-british-state/
[30]https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmhaff/68/68i.pdf
[31]http://www.mwnuk.co.uk/go_files/resources/UnheardVoices.pdf
[32]https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmhaff/68/68i.pdf;https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmhaff/68/68ii.pdf
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cmhaff/203/203.pdf
[33]“Shut your mouth’Corbyn ally shares message telling Rotherham sex abuse victims to be quiet ‘for the good of diversity’ The Sun, August 22, 2017. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4299167/corbyn-ally-shares-message-telling-rotherham-sex-abuse-victims-to-be-quiet-for-the-good-of-diversity/
[34]Easy Meat, p.296.
[35]https://storybookreview.wordpress.com/2018/07/24/white-trash-in-the-uk-the-revenge-of-the-june-23-2016-vote/
[36]World Class Skills: Implementing the Leitsch Review of Skills, The Department for Innovation, the Universities and Skills, 2007.
Writing about history, politics & economics 