Yet Another Czar

Via TribLive

Government Needs To Know

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Puzzled

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Depression, Inadequacy

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Poor whites: On the edge

The Economist:

POVERTY, Sally Cole knows, has a smell. Ms Cole, who works for the residents’ association of the Castle Vale estate on the eastern edge of Birmingham, remembers how she used to scent the damp from people’s council homes when they walked into her office. Heating was so bad that they would put their children to bed in their clothes. These days the estate is transformed, thanks to £270m ($450m) from the government, which razed most of the tower blocks in favour of homelier buildings and a new library. The only complaints, Ms Cole says, are about rubbish and dog-poo.

Although it is part of a city that, within the next couple of decades, will be more than half black and Asian, over 90% of Castle Vale’s residents are white. Some would prefer it to stay that way. Though open racism has been dwindling in Britain, competition for jobs and state resources makes some whites grumble that they are taking second place. This is nothing new, but a recent rise in support for the British National Party (BNP), a far-right group whose policies include paying non-whites to go “home” to Africa or Asia, has rung alarm bells. The party’s success in June, when it won two seats in the European Parliament and one in the London Assembly, has opened doors: Nick Griffin, its leader, was due to appear on the BBC’s “Question Time” programme on October 22nd.

Few believe that the 1m people who voted for the BNP agree with everything Mr Griffin, a former Holocaust-denier, has to say. But there is a scramble to investigate disaffection among white voters. Think-tanks used to studying ethnic minorities are now preparing papers on whites. The government is looking at them too: a plan to help “traditional communities”, announced on October 14th, sounded like an ethnic initiative but was aimed at poor white neighbourhoods.

White discontent is a puzzle, because white Britons are much better off than others. About a fifth of white children are classified as poor; the figure runs from a quarter among Caribbeans and Indians to more than half among Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Whites earn more than others and employment rates are higher. And they still benefit from discrimination: job applications from people with African- or Asian-sounding names are turned down more often than English-sounding ones, according to a survey published this week.

Some white successes look less certain on closer scrutiny. Though white children in general do better than most minorities at school, poor ones come bottom of the league (see chart). Even black Caribbean boys, the subject of any number of initiatives, do better at GCSEs, the exams that pupils take at 16 or so. And the high rate of employment (rather than self-employment) among whites can be a burden: in Birmingham the closure of factories making everything from Rover cars to HP sauce has left white (and Caribbean) men in a fix.

Read it all.

Scary

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Mild Things

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.