Adieu, Commission for Racial Equality

A fond farewell to the Commission for Racial Equality

19 September 2007

It never grasped that ethnic disparities reflect cultural forces

That brief summary of statistics may have bored you rigid; it is, I suppose, another manifestation of our continual and, I reckon, injurious obsession with race. But it does at least suggest that the CRE report is wrong not merely in substance — that ethnic minority kids are more likely to do worse in life than white kids — but also in its analysis of the problem. If, for example, black African girls do rather well at school, better than white boys, and British Caribbean boys do less well, it suggests that either teachers or the education system are very discriminating about their discrimination, to a quite unbelievable degree, or that something else must be at work here. Similarly, is it likely that the white hegemony, in the form of those who run the economic system and our schools and our property markets, decide that Indians should be given a fair crack of the whip while Pakistanis should be left to stew in their own juices — and fail. Why is it that the Chinese and East Asians do so well out of life in Britain? The logic of the CRE must surely be that if negative discrimination places one ethnic group at the bottom of the pile, it must surely follow that those at the top have experienced positive discrimination — and what’s more, at the expense of our good old indigenous white British community. Is that likely? None of it stacks up.

The argument that discrimination on the part of a predominantly white society is to blame for the underachievement of one or another ethnic group no longer has the remotest basis in fact. If there are disparities in achievement between the various ethnic communities in this country it is solely down to the cultural forces at work within those communities. Chinese kids do well at school because the Chinese community places a very high value upon education. Caribbean boys do very badly at school because of a corrosively macho anti-educationalist ethos among Caribbean boys, which is gradually transmitting itself to white boys. This is something Trevor Phillips — and other black community leaders — have recognised in the past.