White plight

The British dream is very real for new arrivals - but less so white and natives. Why?

Why do areas with the least immigration vote for anti-migration parties? It’s a worldwide trend and a long-running one. There’s no hypocrisy. Concern about migration reflects concern about a system that grows the economy by importing workers, rather than looking to improve prospects for the local workless. All net employment growth in the UK so far this decade has been through immigration. In my latest Times column, I say the “British Dream” described by Michael Howard in his Feb04 speech is alive and well for the children of immigrants, but not so much for working-class whites. The difference is rather striking and I came across it in my own research, which I’d like to share here.

To track social mobility you need a cohort study such as UCL’s NextSteps survey which traces ~7,000 people who it’s been interviewing from the age of 13. Its’ database is quite powerful. You can isolate those categorised as belonging to working-class families as children and ask how many are now in a) upper professional or b) broad professional jobs? This shows whites on a par with Black Caribbean for their lack of social mobility.

Sample size is the drawback: 157 Pakistani, 172 Bangladeshi (all above in notes as n=) but a similar, far-larger database was accessed by the DfE a few years ago, assessing ‘good outcomes’ by ethnicity. This means being in sustained work: in effect, not Neet. This was a massive study (~4.5m pupils) whose earnings were tracked. The DfE sought to adjust for all factors (socioeconomic, demographic and education).

The result: deprivation drags down White British children harder than it does any other ethnic group. They finish near the bottom for later earnings: below their Indian, Chinese, Bangladeshi and Black African peers. The only group consistently below whites is Gypsy. Look at this:-

Click on ‘Richest fifth’ and you can see why Rishi Sunak was scratching his head when folk asked him about his being disadvantaged as an ethnic minority. Indians are killing it in the UK: it’s the field of dreams. Britain is a pretty good country to be young, gifted and Hindu. Kemi Badenoch famously said Britain is the best country in the world to be black. Sadiq Khan says it’s the best country in which to be Muslim. I think all three of them might be right. But Britain is a pretty poor country in which to be working-class white.

But why? The DfE study says it’s all down to education: when you control for that, the BME advantage vanishes. In other words: the Chinese, Indians, Black Africans etc do well because they do best in school - and what you learn decides what you earn in the UK more than perhaps any other country. “Much of this disparity is explained by differences in education levels across the two ethnic groups,” says the DfE. “Post-16 education is very important … those with at least degree-level qualifications contribute to increased good outcome.”

This, of course, is precisely what a Department for Education would say. This was the point of its study. But my takeaway was a different one: in the UK system, poor Whites do especially badly.

This point is made now and again: I ran a Spectator cover on it six years ago. But nothing is ever done. Nigel Farage’s recent attempts to present this as a conspiracy and get white-victimhood going miss the mark: this is not discrimination. It’s something else: perhaps cultural. Conflating racial minority status with disadvantage has been part of the problem. Perhaps our system works well for those with ‘immigrant optimism’ but we lack the tools or interest to properly help the natives. We call them ‘hard to reach’ when we mean we’re hard to flex. To fix a problem you need to see it clearly; to understand it. I fear we’re still quite far away from that.