The White Privilege Album: The government sings out of tune with a little help from media friends…
Actually talking about the real problems with education would mean admitting things an Eton and Oxbridge-stuffed media would rather not discuss.
Words can mean anything you want if you push hard enough to change the meaning. That’s what the Education Select Committee — or rather that committee’s Tory members — has done with its report on why white working-class children are being failed by the education system.
They got the headlines they craved by blaming the situation on people mentioning the concept of “white privilege”. It was the perfect culture war framing — allowing newspapers and media outlets to shift the blame from the Tory and Coalition governments that have been in power for 11 years and onto some amorphous Left-wing blob that is apparently shouting at 6-year-olds.
Conservative MPs, members of the same party whose Prime Minister had to be shamed by a Premiership footballer into extending free school meals, were all over the TV and radio yesterday echoing the report’s lines.
As the deliberately divisive debate raged, few were asked about the surge in food bank usage under the Coalition and Conservative governments, the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance, relentlessly cuts to per-pupil funding, the defunding of Sure Start, the swingeing cuts to children’s and adolescent mental health services, and the closure of libraries.
The Tories hooting and hollering about poor children being left behind is like an arsonist, stinking of petrol and standing beside a smoking ruin, shoving a pack of matches into the hands of a passer-by and screaming, “They did it.” And most of the British media, especially the newspapers, will let them get away with it. The Times leader column yesterday began:
Systemic disadvantage in the education system ought to prompt government intervention. There is strong evidence that it exists in schools in England yet policymakers have been reluctant to address it. Those who lose out are white pupils from poorer households who show a stubborn pattern of educational underachievement born of decades of neglect.
Decades of neglect. Decades. Besides the relatively brief interregnum of the Blair/Brown years — 13 years out of the 42 since Margaret Thacher’s election — remind me who was running the country?
There’s no denying that white working-class children, especially boys, are doing worst in the education system. But it’s not academics bursting through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man that put them in that position.
Nor are the stats on their educational attainment the only ones worth understanding. While white boys do worst in school their peers of Black African, Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent are less likely to find good jobs despite performing better academically. There’s that ‘white privilege’ that the Education Select Committee assures us is so much academic bunkum.
When the committee’s chairman, the Tory MP Robert Halfon, appeared on the Today programme yesterday, he was able to say without correction, clarification or query that he didn’t like terms “which pit one demographic against another” while pushing a report that leans so heavily on the term “white working-class children” that it starts to crack.
While Today simply allowed Halfon to broadcast his thoughts from an alternate reality where the anti-racists are the real racists and the Tory government bears no responsibility for failing poor children of all ethnicities, The Daily Telegraph is engaged in actively building that fantasy.
In its feature pages today, David Goodhart — an example of inverse nominative determinism as well as the Eton-educated son of a knighted former Tory MP and a gleeful advocate for the “hostile environment” — writes under the almost unparodyable headline Has wokeism crushed the working class? that:
If you were at school in Barnsley in the 1970s, you would have had a sense of sitting on top of one of the most important coalfields in Europe that was helping to fuel Britain. If you were a boy who was not academically gifted, you would have almost certainly walked straight into an apprenticeship and then into a reasonably well paid skilled or semi-skilled manual job.
A poor white school child in Barnsley today is likely to feel much more peripheral to the national story. They might have every right to feel pessimistic about the transformative potential, or even point, of education in a town crushed under the weight of better yesterdays.
There are many Barnsley-like towns in Britain – and many poor white pupils who feel the odds are heavily stacked against them.
Hmm… who strangled the coal industry to death and failed to provide new opportunities for those communities? Bonus question: Sir Philip Goodhart serves in the government of which Prime Minister?
Two points to you if you answered Margaret Thatcher for both questions.
Building more strawmen than a Wickerman reenactment society, Goodhart delights in the committee’s claim that “so-called ‘woke’ terminology such as ‘white privilege’ may have contributed towards a systemic neglect of white working-class pupils” writing that:
[There is] a growing scepticism about the concept of “white privilege”.
Not that our poorest white groups would claim to feel any such privilege. Indeed, the simple fact of their underprivilege and how bad they are doing is being ignored by the national conversation around advantage, and the needs of their communities aren’t being addressed nor seen as worthy of support by social justice warriors.
Goodhart, the son of a Tory grandee and great-great-grandson of the founder of Lehman Brothers, does know a lot about privilege. But he should perhaps ask his ex, the FT journalist turned teacher, Lucy Kellaway, about the reality of the UK’s schools rather than just spouting the usual right-wing rhetoric.
Goodhart’s piece continues with yet another example of a commentator coming close to a realisation then swerving at the last moment when they realise they are about to smash right into the hard limits of their ideology. He writes:
White working class educational failure is hardly a new story, but it has become more visible and started to attract more attention for two reasons. First, because it compares so badly with the educational success of ethnic minority Britons, including poor ones, all of whom (excluding Roma) do better than poor whites in the Progress 8 scores that measure progress made in secondary school. And all of whom progress to university in higher proportions.
The second reason is that, in too many places, there is no longer a decent alternative for those who do not succeed academically. A generation or two back, there were various ways of leading an achieved life that was recognised by the wider society in skilled manual labour, conscientious office work, the armed forces, or just being a good parent or member of the wider community.
Again, Goodhart assiduously avoids mentioning who took away those “decent alternatives”; a big girl did it and ran away, it seems. Curiously though, he finds the answer is the same one he has suggested in article after article and several unreadable books — immigration is the problem:
More open immigration – at least until the Brexit vote – has also reinforced a sense of displacement for many poor whites and a sense that one’s national citizenship confers less value than it used to.
I thought I heard something but it was drowned out by all those dogs barking.
Policy Exchange — the deliberately grey-sounding but reliably blood-thirsty Tory think tank, where Goodhart is head of the demography, immigration, and integration unit (ah, that whistling sound again) — infamously suggested in 2007 that people in ‘struggling’ cities such as Bradford and Liverpool simply move South. It has also been highly influential on Conservative education policy for years, pushing moves like reducing Ofsted inspections and stripping vocational qualifications out of league tables.
In that context, it’s clear that Old Etonian Goodhart and the members of the Education Select Committee alike are opportunistically latching on to the prospects of white working-class pupils because they scent the opportunity to stoke and exploit the division. They barely made a squeak about the previous parliamentary report on white working-class educational underachievement back in 2014. It just wasn’t as politically expedient back then.
It’s no coincidence that on the same day that the Education Select Committee’s report was released, the Department for Education was promoting One Britain, One Nation Day, a privately-created ‘patriotic effort’ that comes over like a ‘one volk, one reich…’ rebrand for the modern era. We mock the prefabricated patriotism of North Korea but are any of their songs even remotely as embarrassing as One Britain, One Nation getting schoolchildren to chant “Strong Britain, great nation”?
A government that wants us to believe it’s not possible to address systematic racism — actually it wants us to believe there’s no such thing — while also fixing the problems that stop white working-class children from achieving their potential at school is a government fuelled and fired up by culture war posturing.
When I saw the DfE tweet about One Britain, One Nation Day, Admiral Akhbar appeared on my shoulder shouting, “It’s a trap!” Just like the ever-increasing forests of flags in ministerial offices, positioned to feature prominently during TV appearances, One Britain, One Nation serves two purposes: 1) To stir up the Tory base for whom the flag is more arousing than any PornHub playlist and 2) To give the Right another thing to whine about when the Left unsurprisingly mock it.
Along with the wave of columns about ‘the myth of white privilege’ crashing in, you can expect to see plenty of faux-outrage at ‘horrible lefties who have no respect laughing at our country’ because people on Twitter said a stupid song was stupid and laughed at some plastic patriotism.
It doesn’t matter what’s true, just what the Tories and their tame media pals say is true, so we see the meaning of ‘white privilege’ being twisted into unrecognisable shapes, and blanket coverage for stories like the confected tale about censorship at the Oxford student newspaper (there is no censorship but there might be so that’s good enough for columnists).
Class and poverty are the real causes of grinding educational inequality and underachievement, but a media class over-stuffed with Oxbridge grads — guilty— and ex-public school pumpkinheads is never going to address that. Much better to claim, with straight faces, that it’s all the fault of some academic ideas and a few words that trigger right-wingers than decades of neglect, ‘experimentation’, and disdain.