Labour is treating the white working class with contempt

The controversy over last week’s Commons vote was dominated by what the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill did not do. By failing to force a national inquiry into the rape gangs, the legislation rammed through Parliament created completely justified uproar. This will almost certainly result in a climbdown by the Government, which will present ministers with precisely the political dilemma they have desperately tried to avoid. It will no longer be acceptable for Labour, either locally or nationally, to avoid confronting its anxiety about holding onto Muslim voters. But quite apart from any electoral consequences, we need to look at the sinister effects of what that piece of legislation actually did do.

You will notice that the Bill had two distinct parts: first Children’s Wellbeing, and then Schools. The intention of the first was to protect children from abuse (which makes the omission of any specific recommendations for dealing with the Asian rape gangs so noteworthy), but the second was about limiting the freedoms of a phenomenally successful sector of state education created by Tony Blair’s government and then reinforced by Michael Gove.

It is impossible to overestimate the significance of the liberation of academy schools from local education authorities and central government control. It permitted them to hire the teachers they wanted – including those who had not been through the indoctrination of official teaching qualifications – at whatever salaries they chose and, most importantly, it allowed them to deviate from the national curriculum dictated by the education establishment with all its notorious biases.

That’s all over now. Academies will have to follow the same subject content (which will be revised to represent the latest politically acceptable thought) as the council-run state school system, and their most gifted headteachers will no longer be sent in to rescue failing schools. So a system which had offered the parents of state school pupils something like the choices and options which only private school pupils had once enjoyed, is gone. Educational content, and who is permitted to teach it, will now be controlled by government agencies over which the teaching unions and their bureaucratic allies have enormous influence.

As I say, this second half of the Bill (now an Act) concerning schooling seems quite distinct and separate from the aims of the first, which is concerned with child protection. But, in fact, there is a common thread. The fury that the child wellbeing provisions provoked was about their failure to specifically address the rape gang pattern involving mainly Pakistani men, or even to cite it as a unique phenomenon which required special attention.

That anomalous omission was enforced by the “liberal” orthodoxy which forbids any suggestion that some patterns of intolerable behaviour might be associated with particular groups. In other words, there is an officially acceptable way in which patterns of child abuse may be discussed – and it does not include reference to the nationality or religion of the perpetrators.

Why? Because we cannot even entertain the possibility that certain communities, having established themselves in this country, are behaving in ways so outrageously unacceptable that they cannot be allowed to persist. But it is absurd simply to describe this as a failure of “multiculturalism”. The gang rape, torture and kidnapping of children is not an example of cultural difference.

It isn’t an exotic form of dress or foreign cuisine, or a ritual holiday observance: species of difference that might be tolerated in any stable, cosmopolitan society. This is a wave of monstrous, inhuman crimes – carried out on a flagrant, organised scale which should be prosecuted to the greatest degree that the law permits. So can we please stop talking about differing “attitudes to women” or incompatible sets of values?

There is no competing value system being acted out here: no alternative ethical standard to measure against our own. This is not about encouraging migrant communities to integrate and so adopt our own peculiarly British ways of thinking and behaving. It is grotesque to pretend that this is simply a relativistic matter which can be resolved by reasonable persuasion. It is a crime wave – and we have an unequivocal obligation to demand that everyone who chooses to live here accept the rule of law. Whatever legitimate cultural differences do exist can only be dealt with within those limits. The torture of children and young girls is not a matter for sensitive negotiation or social accommodation.

On the face of it, there is an odd contradiction between the two parts of this new legislation. On the one hand, it insists on uniformity. Educational content and method must be standardised across all the nation’s schools with no possibility of disagreement or dissidence. But on the other hand, no one in authority must single out for condemnation even the most odiously unacceptable acts if they are committed by minority groups whose social habits might differ from the mainstream. So cultural “diversity” is still being treated with excessive sensitivity while educational diversity is being stamped out. Is there any common logic here?

Well, yes I think there is. In both matters, it is the white working class which is victimised. In the obvious case of the young girls who were being so outrageously abused, there can be no doubt any longer that they were regarded as beneath the notice of the authorities. The callous indifference and contempt with which they were treated – and the fact that no one in a position of power was ever held accountable for it – is simply monstrous. But it is not inexplicable when you know how easily girls from such backgrounds can be dismissed. What is most horrifying about this whole tragedy is how unsurprising it is.

And what of the schools which might have offered working class children an escape route from the low expectations of their neighborhoods? The best academies had something of the quality of the lost grammar schools: they opened possibilities that reached beyond standardised schooling and, in their individuality, offered an opportunity for pride in their different achievements and specialisms. It’s difficult to say who was meant to win in that infamous parliamentary conflagration but it’s certainly true that the usual people lost.