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The Principle of Origins
Here's Rod Liddle on the Commission for Racial Equality as it is merged into the Commission for Equality and Human Rights:
"For the first 25 years of its 31-year existence, the CRE was cheerfully wedded to the notion of multiculturalism, wherein Britain’s disparate communities were encouraged to remain apart and preserve their own cultural values, which were every bit as valid, in a very real sense, as those of the indigenous white majority. At the same time, of course, white working-class communities were urged not to remain apart, but to embrace change, or risk being called racist. It was only with the arrival of Trevor Phillips at the CRE (and coincidentally, the growing suspicion that quite a few members of the Muslim community weren’t entirely on board with this old democracy, equal rights for women business) that this uniquely damaging policy was, almost overnight, reversed. The imperative now is for everyone to integrate, smile politely, and try to share in their collective vision of what society should be like. But having promulgated precisely the opposite view for the last quarter of a century, it seems a bit rich of the CRE to blame the rest of us for having allowed segregation to occur."
The CRE wound up with a report claiming that much needed to be done to fight discrimination in Britain:
"Britain, despite its status as the fifth largest economy in the world, is still a place of inequality, exclusion and isolation", the CRE said, 'Segregation - residentially, socially and in the workplace - is growing. Extremism, both political and religious, is on the rise as people become disillusioned and disconnected from each other. Issues of identity have a new prominence in our social landscape and have a profound impact upon race relations in Britain."
Liddle retorts: "To which we might say: well, yep — and whose fault is that, then?"
A central claim of the report is that a baby born to ethnic minority parents is on average likely to do less well than one born to "white contemporaries". Liddle questions this. "The evidence would seem to suggest precisely the opposite."
He writes of cases of immigrant or ethnic groups - Indians, Chinese, Irish, Afro-Caribbean girls - who do, he says, better or as well as indigenous white boys at school and afterwards. He contrasts other groups - black males, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis - who do less well: "A boy born to a white British working-class family will do worse at school than every ethnic minority other than those from the Caribbean, Bangladeshi and travelling communities."
What do the statistics say? Well, the CRE's claims are wrong, says Liddle, and moreover, so is their analysis. If white boys do better than Caribbean boys and African girls do better than both, then teachers much have very finely-honed skills in targeted discrimination. And how does the white economic system favour Indians over Pakistanis? And how do indigenous whites end up under the Chinese if the system is so biased towards the British?
"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", Liddle concludes, "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."
Performance, he writes, depends on "the cultural imperatives of the community from which (children) originate." Unfortunately few seem willing to address this.
