During exam result season you will have read headlines that blasted out what educational thickos the white working classes are:
- The Economist: 'England’s white working class falls further behind in exams'
- The Telegraph: 'State has failed white working class pupils'
- The Mail: 'Governments have ‘failed white working-class students and Britain is falling behind as a result, Bridget Phillipson claims'
All of the above are cowardly untruths and grossly insulting to the working class of this country.
What’s it all about then? Only 19% of ‘white working-class students’ received a strong pass in English and Maths GCSE according to Education Secretary Bridget Philipson against a (dire) national pass rate of 59.7% in English language and 59.6% in Maths. But the terminology is wrong; these dreadful figures do not concern the white working-class but the literal opposite: the offspring of the non-working class. The decision by politicians and media pundits to ignorantly or wilfully write inaccurately around this subject ought to infuriate the white working class, whose children do very well at school thank you very much. Just ask our local plumber whose son got a string of 7s, 8s and 9s in his GCSEs, or the town mechanic whose daughter plays the bassoon in the county orchestra, or the cleverest boy in Year 6 whose dad is a builder… and so on across the country. No, it is not working class educational failure, but… What? Who? The subject is too squeamish for the meek political
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Replace benefits with modern work houses. Immediately you save millions on housing benefit. Put all long term (more than a year) non-working individuals and families into high security, safe, clean, comfortable (but not luxurious) workhouses.
Do not give them any money or allow them outside the workhouse.
Give them three healthy meals a day – ban tobacco, alcohol, drugs and fast food.
Watch how their health, concentration and energy levels improve.
Give them a simple, manual job 40 hours a week – cleaning, kitchen work, gardening, laundry.
Offer optional education and training outside the 40 hours.
Offer sports facilities for fitness and recreation.
Monitor their internet usage.
At first most will be desperate to get out but there’s only one way – into full-time work or full-time education or training.
There is no longer a ‘just-give-them-cash’ system which rewards idleness.
There is no chance to make a living out of crime.
In the long run this system would be much cheaper and better than the current one.
And the NHS would benefit as the health of the least healthy in society would dramatically improve – saving millions.
The crime rate would plummet also saving millions.
Must be institutional racism… innit.
Excellent article by Joanna Gray, and excellent photograph to illustrate it.
See those cheerful lads, all with one of the most endearing genetic traits of Ethnic Europeans, especially in England: “Mousy Hair”. Just as we should celebrate redhaired people, we should also celebrate the classic darker blonde hair usually referred to in derogatory terms as “Mousy”, or “dull light brown” (it is not), more accurately “dark blond”.
I thought of this crucial fact after watching the wonderful “Rule Britannia” video featured in yesterday’s Round-Up, because the Artificial Intelligence that made it was evidently programmed to insert as many Third World Ethnics as possible into the “English crowd scenes”, one with a single blond boy squashed amongst rows of Third World Ethnics holding the large sign “This Is England”.
I wish someone would write a poem or song “In Praise of Mousy Hair”. 🙂
The advent of ‘in-work benefits’, introduced primarily by Gordon Brown was a another utopian disaster.
It subsidised low payer. No longer did it matter if Tesco or Sainsbury didn’t increase your pay, the taxpayer topped it up.
Flexibility disappeared from factories. No one wanted to work overtime if it meant having to spend 2 hours on the phone adjusting your expected pay.
Worst of all it de-stigmatised receipt of benefits & blurred the line between work and benefits.
Sunak’s furlough scheme put the tin lid on this & now so many swim in a precarious soup of benefits & work.
Formerly known as the Speenhamland system after the Berkshire parish which introduced it in 1795. It benefitted employers (mainly farmers) who paid starvation wages at the expense of local ratepayers who had to foot the bill. The drastic solution to this mess was the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834….workhouses! Are there no proper historians to advise our deluded politicians?
Exactly.
And people like me warned of this at the time – i am ex DWP – Brown was employing as he thought, perfect vote buying tactics, it backfired on him but the legacy was embedded.
Bliar and Brown two of the biggest Next Tuesdays to walk England’s streets.
Depends what you mean by thick.
My experience of the white working class is fairly limited because of where I grew up, went to school and where I work – funny how easy it is especially in certain areas to go through life having little contact with a group that were once a substantial majority of our country everywhere.
Anyway, more recently I have had more contact and my findings are that many are far from thick, many are politically a lot more aware of what’s going on, a lot more sceptical, many are doing financially well for themselves in various trades. So while many middle class people I know are articulate and “educated”, they virtue signal to the point of seeming obtuse, which is a form of being thick.
Spot on in your comment particularly about the ‘thick’ virtual signalling pseudo intellectual so called middle class individuals. This short article by Joanna Gray clearly lays out the proper interpretation..
Thank you for pointing this out.
As all economists know (so excluding the chancellor) incentives matter.