Queasy Kwarteng – Not a Diversity Hire, But a Member of the Tory Hard Right

I’ve got a few interesting remarks from some of the great commenters on this blog about a piece a put up about a video by Simon Webb of History Debunked about Kwarteng. Webb wondered if the man now doing his best to trash our economy was a diversity hire, whose sole qualification for the job was his skin colour. Mark Pattie and Jim Round have pointed out that he isn’t. He was appointed because he was another Old Etonian willing to implement the programme of the Tory hard right.

Mark wrote

‘Kamikaze Kwarteng was *not* a diversity hire. He may be of Ghanaian descent, but he was Eton educated (hence probably why he got the Chancellor job). Suella Charlatan got the Home Sec job because she was more right-wing than Patel, and James Cleverley got his role because of his many years in the Army. Unlike the rest, he seems to be one of the very few (ten or so) genuinely decent Tories I’ve any respect for. It’s a damn shame he didn’t run for the leadership.’

And Jim commented

‘As with quite a lot of Simon Webb’s videos, it is what isn’t said rather than what is.
It isn’t mentioned that groups like The Taxpayers Alliance and The Institute of Economic Affairs had a major influence on this “budget” (Tim over at Zelo Street has covered this)
Also remember that The New Culture Forum, who Webb has been a guest of are based there.
They think that this is a “Conservative” budget but it is unknown whether they thought that the markets would react so badly.
Also not mentioned is the fact that Kwarteng is highly likely to be a millionaire, as well as attending Eton.
But no, let’s feed the narrative that he is only there because of the colour of his skin.’

The Taxpayers’ Alliance tends to turn up on BBC News programmes to give their views on economic policies. They are always presented as if they are a politically independent organisation, but their leaders are all members of the Tories. The Institute of Economic Affairs have been demanding hard-right economic policies since before Thatcher. I don’t think Kwarteng’s a genius by any stretch of the imagination, but this shows that the people at the Arise Zoom meeting on the Tory minibudget were absolutely right: he’s a Thatcherite true-believer, working for arch-Thatcherite think tanks, and so shares the same grotty mediocre views as his leader, Liz Truss. I should say that I haven’t watched Webb’s wretched video, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a section of the Tories is now trying to make him a scapegoat for Truss’ abject economic failure.

Tories Losing Support Through Lack of Action on Immigration and Wokeness

This is very interesting. One of the great commenters on this blog remarked a few days ago that he doubted the Tories would honour their pledge to cut immigration, and that the Labour party had a better policy towards it. I agree. From what I remember, Labour’s policy would remove the barriers that encourage aspiring migrants to cross the channel in flimsy inflatables and put them in with the rest of the asylum-seekers. They would also negotiate and try to find solutions to the problem of migration with the countries of origin. This is undoubtedly much more sensible and humane, in that it makes the crossing safer for the migrants and seeks to end some of the push factors that force them to risk their lives coming to Europe and Britain in the first place. But it’s not as exciting as having illegal immigrants exiled to Rwanda.

I have real doubts that the Tories have the will or the wish to find proper solutions to the migrant crisis. The Rwanda policy looks very much as if Johnson and Patel cooked it up just to take the pressure of Johnson, partygate and his general massive ineptitude. I also wonder if the Tories actually want to keep channel migration going, as it whips up nationalistic anger against immigration, anger that they exploit with promises that they and only they will tackle it while making sure that they don’t, or just tinker with it through malicious policies like Patel’s. The Tories used fears over immigration to boost support by Brexit by deliberately giving the impression that Black and Asian immigration was being assisted by the EU constitution. It wasn’t. In fact EU law stated that migrants, once in Europe, should remain in the countries in which they landed. And the Schengen agreement, which the Tories also claimed were enabling non-White immigration through the EU, actually only affected those countries which signed up to it. And we weren’t one of them. In fact the real legislation enabling asylum seekers to reach this country was the 1950s UN agreement on the rights of the refugee. Mike pointed this out on one of his articles. But the Tories kept very quiet about that, is their lies about immigration and Europe were too useful for pushing Brexit.

And now we’ve got Brexit, and illegal immigration hasn’t stopped. Indeed, it is claimed that there have been 100,000 such migrants this past year. There are signs that parts of the right are talking about scrapping the 1950s UN agreement, and that part of the hard-right Tory base are ready to desert the party over its inaction on immigration. Yesterday I caught the thumbnail for a video by the Lotus Eaters, which castigated the Tories for the lack of will to tackle immigration. I can’t remember the title’s wording, but the thumbnail featured a photo of one of the prominent Tory politicos with a speech bubble saying that the issue would wait until after the election.

This morning there’s been a video from the New Culture Forum featuring its main man, Peter Whittle, stating that the Tories have to act against the wokeness destroying British society. Critical Race and Queer Theory should be banned in schools, and woke quangos should be cut. This was the subject of a previous video from them, entitled ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’. And I’ve seen the odd video from Farage on GB News stating that it is now the time to act on the UN agreement on refugees.

But I wonder how far the Tories can tackle immigration. Britain needs a certain amount of immigration to get technicians, medical staff and skilled workers. The Tories are also keen to give British citizenship to rich foreigners. But I also wonder if there are diplomatic constraints. For example, the Indian prime minister Modi gave a speech the other year stating that Indian would still provide science graduates to other countries. When Boris announced that he was going to cut immigration from the sub-continent, he got a sharp rebuke from India’s premier. I’ve got the distinct impression that there’s a lack of domestic jobs in India, and so the country and its economy depends to a certain extent on exporting workers, who then send their remittances home. I have absolutely no doubt that other developing countries are in the same boat. I did see somewhere that the country most dependent on remittances is Somalia, where they’re more or less keeping the economy afloat. All this makes the pledge to cut down on non-White immigration – which is essentially what is being meant here – extremely difficult. It isn’t just going to be opposed by domestic anti-racism protesters, but also by the non-White commonwealth countries. I can remember a period a few years ago where tensions between Britain and these nations were so great that some of the newspapers speculated about Britain being thrown out of the Commonwealth as Pakistan and South Africa had been previously. No government would want such a diplomatic catastrophe.

Although, I don’t know though. The Tory right are pushing the idea of an Anglosphere, essentially an international federation of White majority, English-speaking countries – Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Would the fanatics desiring such as union as a bulwark against Black and Asian immigration go so far as to see the Commonwealth destroyed to set it up? Well, the fanatics of the Tory Brexiteers have shown themselves more than willing to sacrifice the Union just to leave the EU, all the while blaming Nicola Sturgeon and the Scots Nats.

I can therefore quite see various papers like the Heil and Depress pushing for an end Britain’s membership of the Commonwealth, if they thought they could spin it that it’s the Commonwealth’s fault and it would stop non-White immigration.

Their Race Is Irrelevant: All the Tory Leadership Candidate Are Rich, Public School and Anti-Working Class

Following Johnson’s un-resignation, in which he resigned but decided to hang on as caretake prime minister until his fellow robber barons and profiteers elect a new leader, a number of leading Tories have thrown their hats into the ring in the hope of being his successor. Very many of them aren’t White – Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Kemi Badenoch and so. The titles of various YouTube videos have proclaimed that this is the most diverse Tory leadership election every. Simon Webb of History Debunked has taken a more racially pessimistic view. He posted a video stating that inexorably power is moving away from the White British. Webb’s views of these events, and his general opposition to multiculturalism and non-White immigration, seems to come partly from the prediction that by the middle of this century, Whites will be a minority in Britain. Such demographic predictions of Whites becoming minorities in their own countries is an integral part of the Great Replacement conspiracy cooked up in 2012 by a French rightist. It has, however, a long prehistory before that in the conspiracy theory of the British and American Nazi fringe that the Jews are behind non-White immigration, which they’re using to destroy the White race. This is just bilge, but the demographic prediction of Blacks and non-Whites becoming the majority in Britain came not from any bug-eyed Nazi, but were, to my recollection, published in the Observer in 2002. Webb clearly sees the ethnic minority Tory candidates in this light, as the beginning of Black rule as the White British dwindle into minority status.

Except that, colour excepted, all of the Black and Asian Tory leadership candidates are bog-standard and typical of their elite class and party. They are all, or nearly all, public school boys and girls, who believe in free trade, privatisation, destroying the welfare state, privatising the NHS, smashing the unions and generally making life miserable for working people in the name of generating big profits for their class. And despite their colour, they are all anti-immigration. Priti Patel is notorious for the harshness of her immigration policies. He parents were Ugandan Asians, who were expelled by the country’s then brutal, racist dictator, Idi Amin. It’s been said that if this happened today, then Patel would have had them rounded up for deportation. Kemi Badenoch is a Black woman, who has sparred with Diane Abbott and other Black Labour politicos about how racist this country is or is not. But she has declared herself to be a supporter of small government. Which means more privatisation, including NHS privatisation, and more cuts to the welfare state. Rishi Sunak is being hailed by the right-wing press as the supporter of free trade which Britain needs. So, more deregulation and privatisation of the type that wrecked the economy in the first place. And it has struck me that if Sunak was White, he’d be typical of the general appearance of some of the ex-public schoolboys that now haunt the corridors of power. The Triggernometry vloggers said it all in a recent text message that asked if it would really be a win for diversity if all the Tory candidates were rich and public school, so long as they were people of colour.

I suspect that we may well have the first Black or Asian Prime Minister under the Tories, but this won’t do anything for the mass of Blacks and Asians in Britain, in the same way that Thatcher was our first female prime minister, who did precious little for ordinary women. Whatever their ethnicity, none of the Tory candidates have any interest in working exclusively or even partly for their racial group’s benefit, unlike Labour politicians like Abbott and Lammy. And this will probably mean that they’ll find it easier to be accepted. They have exactly the same worldview as the White Tory politicos and supporters. Abbott and Lammy, on the other hand, would put many White voters off because of their focus on working for the Black community. I don’t doubt that many White voters would fear that they really want to flood the country with non-White immigrants and harshly discriminate against Whites under the guise of combating racism.

However positively the number of Black and Asian Tory leadership candidates are viewed, I do wonder how this is going to affect right-wing groups like the New Culture Forum. This group shares the same racial views as Simon Webb, and indeed they even had him interviewed in one of their videos. But one of the Tories’ strategies to attack Labour has been to claim that the Labour party is deliberately ignoring and even discriminating against the White working class. In one video they interviewed Michael Collins, the author of the Demonization of the White Working Class and a more recent video from the Forum has stated this more broadly. It begins with a clip of one Labour politician at one conference stating that he’s upset that there are too many White people in the hall and speaking. But this strategy of playing on the feelings of some Whites that they’re being ignored and vilified by a Labour party determined to promote immigrants and ethnic minorities are their expense is going to be complicated if there’s a Black or Asian Tory prime minister doing precisely the same thing. One possible outcome of this is that politics moves even further to the right as the same White demographic that supported UKIP leaves the Tories to support the fringe populist parties Reclaim or Reform.

Whatever the intentions of the Tory party and the cultural homogeneity of its leaders as the typical rich children of privilege, we could see a rise in racism as some Whites see the cuts and privatisations not in class terms, but racial.

This can be fought by the Labour party going back to stressing its working class origins and policies, for all working people, whether White, Black, or Brown.

But it ain’t going to happen under Starmer.

Sajid Javid to Launch Investigation into Treatment of Trans-Identifying Children

After the government passed legislation outlawing conversion therapy for gays, but not for transpeople, here’s another official blow against the trans ideology. According to Sky News, the Health Secretary Sajid Javid is going to launch an inquiry into the treatment of children with problems with their biological gender by the Health Service. This follows the findings by one of his allies, a member of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, that NHS staff are under pressure to follow the affirmation model, in which the doctors and medical professionals treating the child support their identity as a member of the opposite sex.

The Sky article begins:

‘Health Secretary Sajid Javid is preparing to launch an inquiry into gender treatment for under-18s as he is concerned the current system is “failing children”.

Mr Javid believes vulnerable children are wrongly being given gender hormone treatment on the NHS and plans to overhaul how the health service deals with those who are questioning their gender identity.

As first reported by The Times, the health secretary is understood to have been alarmed at the interim findings of a review into NHS gender identity services for children.

The review by Hilary Cass, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, has found staff felt pressured to adopt “an unquestioning affirmative approach” to the issue of transitioning and gender issues caused other mental health issues to be “overshadowed” – two issues Mr Javid is said to be particularly concerned about.

“This has been a growing issue for years and it’s clear we’re not taking this seriously enough,” an ally of the health secretary told the paper.

“If you look at Hilary Cass’s interim report, the findings are deeply concerning and it’s clear from that report that we’re failing children.”

The ally of Mr Javid also said services should have a holistic view of what might be causing problems for the child, such as a mental health issue, bullying or sexual abuse.

“That overly affirmative approach where people just accept what a child says, almost automatically, and then start talking about things like puberty blockers – that’s not in the interest of the child at all,” they added.’

See: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/sajid-javid-to-launch-inquiry-into-gender-treatment-for-children/ar-AAWvod5?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=7aa6aac53cb140c99274ad64a115e968

There’s abundant evidence that this has been going on for years. Whistleblowers at the Tavistock Clinic, for example, have claimed that patients with schizophrenia have been misdiagnosed as trans, and a high proportion of people also diagnosed as trans are autistic. This also suggests that their mental condition is also leading to misdiagnosis.

If left to themselves, 60%-85% of children identifying as trans will eventually grow out of it and settle down as adults secure in their biological sex. I think the evidence also suggests that the majority will turn out to be gay or lesbian, not that this should matter. There are people, I’m sure, whose gender dysphoria is so acute that it requires transitioning, but clearly you need to be absolutely sure that this is appropriate before such radical medical intervention is applied.

Treatment for gender dysphoria – the dissatisfaction with one’s biological sex – in children has also involved the use of puberty blockers. These have been hyped as reversible, and their use justified on the grounds that it simply gives the child time to work their gender problems out. In fact they aren’t reversible. Nobody quite knows what their effects are, but they can lead to problems with physical health. The pause in the development of puberty they create also has neurological, emotional and cognitive effects, as the brain also develops and undergoes rewiring during adolescence. This means that a child given puberty blockers isn’t just physically immature compared to their normally developing peers, but mentally as well.

I utterly despise the Conservative party and what they’re doing to the NHS. But I firmly believe Javid’s right to question trans therapy for children. I also believe that Tory resistance to the trans movement could well be a vote-winner with women. A week or so ago, if I recall correctly, the right-wing New Culture Forum posted a video about this and other issues. One of their guests was a Tory lady, who had launched a group, Conservatives for Women, to fight the trans ideology. This group has made alliances and built bridges with other gender critical feminist organisations. The week before last, the Heil proudly ran a story about three gender critical ladies, who had launched a movement to tackle politicians about the issue. Their slogan was ‘Respect my sex if you want my X’, meaning their vote in the box on ballot sheet. These ladies made it clear that they believed that only biological women could ever be women. The article also included a series of quotes from politicos, largely Labour, failing abjectly to answer the simple question ‘What is a woman?’

The Tory party should now come under real pressure, not just because of Johnson and ‘Partygate’, but also because of the cost of living crisis. This is going to plunge masses of people into terrible poverty and starvation. I think this pressure is the reason they’re turning to culture war issues, although I think this is also due to genuine convictions on many people on the right.

I think Javid is doing the right thing in demanding such an inquiry, but really don’t want this issue to detract from the way the Tories have wrecked our great and noble country and impoverished and degraded its working people.

Adolf Hitler and Black and Asian Anti-White Racists on the Extermination and Enslavement of Racial Enemies

A few days ago I put up a couple of posts showing the very close similarity between far right Labour MP Neil Coyle’s comments about Jewish Voice for Labour and the Nazis’ and British Fascists’ denunciations of ‘communist’ Jews and Jewish influence in politics. But unfortunately it’s not only White bigots who seem to share their attitudes and rhetoric. Many Black and Asian allegedly ‘anti-racist’ ideologues and activists do to.

The Black Lives Matter protests across the world were an attempt to raise awareness about the supposed greater incidence of Blacks being shot and killed by the police. Behind them was outrage and frustration at the continuing material poverty, high unemployment, lack of educational achievement, crime and drugs in the Black community. BLM groups, such as those in Bristol, were keen to present themselves not as racists trying to cause division, but as sincere anti-racists trying to draw people together. The organisation’s Bristol branch put up posters that included the statement that they weren’t trying to start a race war. They were trying to stop one. But unfortunately the protests were accompanied by highly racist, genocidal statements and attitudes from high profile members of the Black and Asian communities. A Black American academic, Britney Cooper, caused outrage when she appeared on the Black American internet show, The Root, declaring that Whites were dying out, and ‘may be we should help them along’. An Asian academic at a New York university, who specialised in the psychology of racism, stated she fantasised about shooting Whites. A recent video put up by the New Culture Forum also contained a selection of tweets from angry Black activists. One of these stated that the poster looked forward to destroying White prosperity and livelihoods, and forcing Whites to endure the same poverty as BAME people. The tweeter’s name is blurred, but it looks like Priyamvada Gopal, the professor of Colonial and Postcolonial literature at Cambridge.

These comments are almost exactly like those of the Nazis, and particularly their attitude to Poles and Slavs. In 1942 Martin Bormann wrote

‘The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we do not need them, they may die. Slav fertility is undesirable. They may possess contraceptives or abort, the more the better. Education is dangerous. We shall leave them religion as a means of diversion. They will receive only the absolutely necessary provisions. We are the masters, we come first.’

Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich, page 204.

In fact there has been a strain of viciously anti-White racism present in Black political culture for a very long time. Afrocentrism holds that Blacks are intellectually and spiritually superior to other peoples, especially Whites, who are supposed to be more stupid, less spiritual, intuitive and cruel. These attitudes are reinforced by Post-Colonial and Critical Race Theory, which see Whites, even when they are opposed to racism, as deeply racist and embedded in and part of a culture which privileges them. A year or so ago right-wing videos on the Net showed a clip of one lecturer, Angela Shackleford, telling a White class that they were not born into humanity, cannot change, and that they were ‘devils’ to her.

And some Black rhetoric and activism has crossed the line into overt Fascism. Marcus Garvey, who held paramilitary parades in New York, once declared that Hitler and Mussolini learned everything from him. In the 1970s his son announced, during the Jamaican celebrations of the great man’s birth, that Garveyism must become Black National Socialism, for Africa also needed its Lebensraum. Before she was shot by a criminal gang, Black activist Sasha Johnson demanded a Black militia to safeguard Blacks against the police, whom she accused of being like the Klan. She duly appeared on platforms with them, dressed alike in stab vests. Johnson fancied herself as ‘the British Black panther’, but her parade violated British legislation going back to the 1930s against political paramilitary uniforms aimed squarely at Fascist organisations like Mosley’s BUF.

And Black British politicians have encouraged and extended a welcome to deeply racist Black American activists. Back in the 1980s ‘Black radical’ Labour politician Bernie Grant invited over here Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam demands a Black-only state. Now more or less a science fictional space cult, it believes that Whites were created by an evil Mekkan scientist, Shaitan, to destroy the purity of the Black race. It is also very definitely opposed to the welfare state. If this had been a White politician, he would have been denounced as Fascist and his visit accompanied with protests from the Left. But Grant excused him, saying he didn’t agree with everything he said, but regarded him as an elder statesman.

The Left tends to turn a blind eye to such racism. It is fixated on the real threat of White racism and fascism, to the extent that it ignores anti-White racism and refuses to accept it. Matthew Collins, the author of the Demonisation of the White Working Class, in an interview on the New Culture Forum YouTube channel, remarked that when his book came out it was bitterly criticised as itself racist by the left-wing press because of its discussion of Whites forced out of Black majority areas due to anti-White racism. The publication of Ed Hussein’s book, Among the Mosques, about Muslim anti-White hatred, was also greeted with accusations of racism and Islamophobia by the left.

This attitude is itself profoundly racist and a mistake, because anti-White racism in the past has at times reached and exceeded the same extent as White racist crimes against people of colour. In 2006 the Independent report that the racist murder of Whites was almost at the same level as the racist murders of Blacks. And back in the 1990s the newspaper also covered a report, published by the then Committee for Racial Equality, written by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, that racist attacks on Whites now amounted to 60 per cent of the total number of such incidents. This was the first time it had done so. Since then I’ve no doubt that it’s been overtaken by assaults against people of colour, especially Muslims after 9/11. But the threat of a revived, violent anti-White racism is still there in my opinion, especially as it could be encouraged by the anti-White rhetoric and ideologies of Post-Colonial and Critical Race Theory and its adherents.

I don’t believe that the extent of these pernicious ideologies should be exaggerated. Such people don’t speak for all Blacks or Asians by any means, just as the real Nazis never represented the vast majority of Whites. But these attitudes and ideologies do need to be fought. They should not be indulged in or promoted by the left because they come from the left and are supposed to be about defending and promoting persecuted, marginalised peoples. Rather the left needs to unite against them. There needs to be left-led anti-racist marches, with both Blacks, Asians and Whites, against Muslim grooming gangs. There needs to be a no-platform on campus against Post-Colonial and Critical Race Theory racists, just as there are for White supremacists and Fascists. But there isn’t. And so such issues are left to the right and genuine racists like the Islamophobic Tommy Robinson.

This needs to be stopped and radically changed now. Racism and Fascism can appear in all peoples and colours, including Black and Asians. And it needs to be fought be all races together.

Black and White, unite and fight!

Radio 4 Comedian Next Sunday Discusses Working Class Male Culture

It seems that Radio 4 and the Beeb might be discovering working class men. On Sunday, 21st March 2021 at 7.15, the channel’s broadcasting Jacob Hawley: Class Act. The Radio Times blurb runs

Stand-up comedian Jacob Hawley, who grew up near Stevenage, dissects his journey from working-class banter boy to oat milk latte-sipping, inner-London feminist.

The additional piece about it on the facing page by Tom Goulding states

Having deftly touched the thorny issues of sex and drugs, Jacob Hawley returns ot the BBC with this politically charged comedy special. Class Act deals with another taboo subject: working-class male culture. Hawley charts his journey from banter boy to inner-London feminist and asks whether working class men have been dismissed as hopeless cases: excluded from the UK’s cultural discourse on topics as diverse as women’s rights and mental health. Hawley won plaudits for his On Drugs podcast, in which he interviewed friends and experts on the UK’s attitude towards recreational drug use. Here, he again proves capable of bringing a light touch to heavyweight subjects.

A few years ago the BBC broadcast a series of films on race, one of which asked the question of whether the White working class was being overlooked. It’s been reported that the most underprivileged group in the UK is actually White working class boys. UKIP’s core vote were White working class people who felt overlooked and ignored by the mainstream parties. This campaign by right-wing populists to capitalize and exploit White working class discontent continues. The right-wing New Cultural Forum has a video up on The Demonisation of the White Working Class. On the left, Owen Jones wrote a very good book on the subject a few years ago and the left-wing of the Labour party is consciously trying to appeal to White working class voters with policies that will benefit all of the working class as well as criticising the way the Tories are trying to divide them from Blacks. One of the serious points the Private Eye strip ‘It’s Grim Up North London’ made through its humour was the alienation of its north London heroes from the White working class. Aesthetes with a taste for the latest international fads, to them ordinary White working class Brits were an exotic species they didn’t understand and wondered at. In one cartoon the pair are seen in a cafe or pub listening with wonder at the exotic conversation of the two on the next table. In fact, they’re a pair of Geordies wondering what the two are doing staring at them. Following the series Tom Mayhew Is Benefit Scum, it looks like Radio 4 is rediscovering the British working class and its issues.

‘I’ Article on Academic Underperformance and Social Deprivation of White Working Class

The most deprived section of the population according to some measurements is the White working class. There have been any number of articles written about this. Working class White boys perform less well at school compared to Blacks and Asians, have higher rates of unemployment and hold poorer paid jobs. And according to an article in last Wednesday’s I for 14th October 2020, the rhetoric used by Black Lives Matter and other pro-Black anti-racist activists may make this deprivation worse. The article states that working class Whites believe that they have little chance of improving their conditions due to their communities lacking status and this is potentially going to be made worse through talk of ‘White privilege’. The academics interviewed in the article also state that their communities are still suffering from the decline of Britain’s manufacturing industry.

The article’s by Will Hazell, and is titled ‘White working-class pupils think academic race is unwinnable’. It runs

White working-class pupils are falling behind at school because their communities suffer from a “status deficit” and talk of “white privilege” could make things worse MPs have heard.

An inquiry by the Commons Education Select Committee is examining why white children from disadvantaged backgrounds perform worse than any other group in education.

Only 17 per cent of white pupils on free school meals get a strong pass in English and maths GCSEs – the lowest of any ethnic group.

Meanwhile just 13 per cent of white British boys on free school meals progress to higher education, compared with 42 per cent from a Pakistani heritage, 51 per cent of black African boys and 66 per cent of Chinese ethnicity.

Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at Kent University, told MPs that there were “cultural explanations” with white working-class families suffering a “status deficit”.

White working class families were left to feel “as though they’re not being given as much recognition and esteem as others”, Professor Goodwin said.

He said the idea of “white privilege”, along with references to “toxic masculinity”, had demoralised white working class families. He added: “If we are now going to start teaching them in school they not only have to overcome the economic and social barriers within their community, but they also need to start apologising for simply belonging to a wider group which also strips away their individual agency, then I think we’re just going to compound many of these problems.”

Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility at Exeter University, said white working class communities were “still recovering from the demise of the manufacturing industry”, and a “narrow academic race” in schools which felt “unwinnable” for poor white families.

The problem could only be fixed by providing improved vocational education routes for young people as well as jobs in their local communities, he said.

I think the class background of some of the children of other ethnic groups may help to explain why these generally perform better at school, and get better jobs and opportunities. than working class Whites. Not all Blacks, Pakistanis and Chinese are working class. Many of them are businessmen or professionals, who may have emigrated to Britain as part of their jobs or came over here because of the greater opportunities offered when immigration was being encouraged or at least less restricted. These children therefore already enjoy social advantages and opportunities through their parents’ higher status and education than working class children.

Also, there has been enormous effort put into improving conditions for ethnic minorities. This obviously includes affirmative action programmes. About a decade ago the former head of the Council for Racial Equality, as ’twas then, was quoted in an article in the Heil as suggesting that their should be similar programmes for working class Whites. Nothing further was then said, and I think the gentleman involved left his position shortly afterwards due to a completely unrelated matter. If he’s the fellow I’m thinking of, he was accused of making up accusations for racist abuse or something similar against a policeman at a football match.

The ideas interesting and probably necessary, but it has major problems. Not least is the way it contradicts, or appears to contradict, much contemporary anti-racist and feminist discourse and policies. The contemporary concern for equality is centred around providing better opportunities and social and economic improvement and advancement for ethnic minorities and women. Left-wing, anti-racist and feminist criticism of traditional western society is that it’s dominated by White men. This is obviously true, but it needs to be remembered that it’s dominated by elite White men. But any programme aimed at specifically improving the conditions of Whites, and especially White boys, may appear reactionary because it’s directed to improving the conditions of a gender and ethnicity – but not the class – that some view as already having too much power.

And I do think also that there’s now a lack of glamour about the White working class compared to other ethnic groups. Blacks and Asians have the glamour of the exotic, and so they can be promoted by celebrating their cultures’ achievements, as Black History Month does. But the White working class is much harder to celebrate because of their ordinariness. And the fact that the socially deprived sections are likely to be sneered at as chavs or rednecks.

The concept of White privilege has been subject to extensive criticism by people on the right. As a generalisation about society as a whole, it’s obviously true that Whites generally perform better academically, and enjoy better jobs and opportunities than many, but not all, ethnic minorities. But it ignores the fact that many Whites don’t share this privilege, and may be as disadvantaged or more than some other deprived ethnicities. I think the reason for this is that the whole concept of White privilege was formulated by middle class radicals thinking specifically about the White middle class, and lumping all Whites in with it.

I think we’re probably going to hear much more about the problems of the White working class as time goes on. The right-wing internet host and YouTube Alex Belfield has already put up a video about the plight of White working class boys. Another right-wing outfit – I think it’s called the New Culture Forum or something like that – has also put up a long video about ‘The Demonisation of the White Working Class’. I think the intention here is to exploit working class White discontent as a way of attacking the anti-racist affirmative action programmes.

Because the Tories certainly don’t care about the working class, whatever it’s colour. The Tories smashed the coal industry partly as a way of destroying the trade unions. It was the miner’s union, remember, that defeated Ted Heath. Thatcher had no interest in manufacturing, and her Labour successor, Tony Blair, blandly assumed that its role in the economy would be taken over by the financial sector. Since David Cameron’s election victory, the Tories have insisted on austerity, holding down wages, promoting zero hours contracts and attacking workers’ rights, as well as cutting the welfare benefits working people need to keep body and soul together. It’s all in the name of creating an impoverished, cowed, demoralised workforce that will take any job, no matter how poorly paid or insecure. Most of the people claiming benefits and using food banks are now people actually in work. But instead of doing anything for them, the Tories simply drum up jealousy against those even more disadvantaged. You think of the rants the Tories screamed about how they were going to cut benefits to the unemployed in order to make work pay. The unemployed were scroungers, malingerers and layabouts, who shouldn’t earn more than working people. But in all too many cases, the benefits system does not provide enough for the people who need it to live on. And how seriously the Tories take their slogan of making work pay is shown by the fact that they’ve done nothing to raise wages. ‘Cause it’s all the working class’ fault they’re poor.

In contrast to the Tories’ posturing, the people who are serious about protecting and advancing the White working class are the Labour left. The very people the anti-immigrant, racist Brexiteer right despise as traitors. But left-wing Labour activists like Richard Burgon have made it very clear that they will work for improving the conditions of White working class communities as part of their commitment to bettering conditions for all of Britain’s working people, Black, brown, White or whatever.

And you can believe them.

The Tories, however, will do nothing but patronise the White working class, drumming up racial resentments and jealousies while pushing through policies that will make them, and the rest of the working class, even poorer and more miserable.