The Decline of the English Working Class

White working-class boys have become the new “underclass”, a report by Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, warns today.

Boys from low-income white families are bottom of the heap in school performance, trailing behind every other major ethnic group.

A teenage boy on an estate in Glasgow. Duncan Smith says we risk creating a class of unemployable young white males
The report argues that family breakdown, parental breakdown and peer pressure that it is not “cool to study” are the key factors in the collapse in educational achievements. It also cites drug and alcohol abuse by parents.

The bleak findings are spelt out in a study published by the Social Justice Policy Group that Mr Duncan Smith was asked to lead by David Cameron, the Conservative leader. The report stresses that only 17 per cent of white working-class boys managed to gain five or more A to C grades at GCSE.

This contrasts with the 19 per cent recorded by black Caribbean boys from poor backgrounds, who are traditionally seen as the ethnic group with the worst educational achievement.

advertisementOther groups have significantly better results. Around seven out of 10 boys from working-class Chinese families get at least five A to C grades at GCSE, while the figure for Indian boys is around 40 per cent.

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Britain’s Crusading Atheist

Reviews have been mixed. The New York Review of Books accused Dawkins of “scattershot reasoning” and “rhetorical excess,” while Britain’s leading Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton, dismissed The God Delusion in the London Review of Books as “a vulgar caricature of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” Yet the book ranked number two in Amazon’s worldwide sales list, and is fueling an antireligious campaign in Britain, which Dawkins himself is leading, canvassing government ministers and promoting atheism in state schools. This effort has already notched successes in restricting religious rights, most notably in a new British law requiring Catholic adoption agencies to place children with gay and lesbian couples.

Peace Prize Winner Wants to Kill Bush

“Right now, I could kill George Bush,” she said at the Adam’s Mark Hotel and Conference Center in Dallas. “No, I don’t mean that. How could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that.”

About half the crowd gave her a standing ovation after she called for Mr. Bush’s removal from power.

Evangelical Dads

Religious men, especially evangelical Protestants, are more involved and attentive husbands and fathers than men who are not religious, new research shows.

Pentacostals in Africa’s Bible Belt

In Africa all churches are booming, but Pentecostalism is overtaking traditional Catholic and Anglican faiths brought by European colonizers over a century ago.

Pentecostals and charismatics now account for 147 million Africans, 17 percent of the continent’s people, compared with 5 percent in 1970, the World Christian Database says.

Christians say the ecstatic experiences offered by Pentecostals are more exciting than the subdued worship — complete with silent congregations and soporific organ music — that the continent’s first missionaries brought here.

“Africans want things done powerfully,” said Rev. Nathan Samwini of the Christian Council of Ghana. “You meet white evangelicals from America, they behave like Africans. They are vibrant, everything is done with vigor.”

For Pentecostals, the Holy Spirit — the third person of the Christian Trinity — plays an active role in life, performing miracles and answering prayers. This appeals greatly to a continent beset by poverty and sickness.

Thoughts on the Libertarian Dems

Here are a few thoughts on the Democratic call for libertarians to become Democrats.

Let’s quickly move past the obvious point which is that the case for libertarian Democrats is deeply incoherent. If Moulitsas (AKA DailyKos) knew anything about Public Choice Theory and regulatory capture, he would know that corporations today are powerful not despite government regulations and taxes, but because of them. The more effective case for libertarian Democrats stems from the fact that social issues are more important than economic issues, despite the incoherent protestations made by the What’s the Matter With Kansas crowd. Given this, I expect that most libertarians will become Democrats.

Immigration, Catholicism, and First Possession

There is a good post on the Acton Institute’s Power Blog that captures many of my feelings about immigration. The concept of first possession – that whoever owns something first gets to keep it – is anathema to the political left. But it is essential for societies to be friendly to newcomers. Here is an example of a town that does not respect first possession:

Imagine a town with one hundred people. Each has a one hundred foot wide lot. If someone new shows up, we redraw property lines. Each lot shrinks by one foot, to make room for the new person’s equal share (and so on as more people arrive). Question: How friendly will that town be?

…

It seems that the latter is exactly what many political liberals in America are doing by guaranteeing various kinds of entitlements to immigrants, whether legal or illegal. In that sense, a statist ideology that emphasizes government provision of various social entitlements seems to promote and foment rather than minimize xenophobia.

The Village Voice Queer Issue

There are two interesting articles in the Village Voice’s recent queer issue. Christians and conservatives would be well advised to read them. The first article is about babies and small children that might be gay:

“When I took my kids to the science museum to learn about birthing, my daughter, who was five at the time, decided that she would marry another girl and let her have the baby,” says one mother at a playground in Boston. (“Oh, how cute!” exclaimed another mother nearby.) “My son has a very close friend,” says the mother of a five-year-old boy. “He calls him his ‘godbrother’ and he does want to marry him. It’s just kind of like that’s what you do.”

That’s no surprise to Elaine Winter, principal of the lower school at the Little Red School House in Manhattan. “There absolutely is dramatic play in early childhood,” she reports. “They’ll say, ‘This can be a house with two mommies,’ because that’s the book we read yesterday, or that’s what Susie’s family is like.”

An Assault on the Constitution?

A mildly popular blogger liberal blogger named Digby made this recent speech on behalf of bloggers at the Take Back America conference.

You will not find anyone amongst us who believes that the Bush administration’s executive power grab and flagrant partisan use of the federal government is anything less than an assault on the Constitution.

This is a standard talking point from the left. But what exactly does it mean? How can someone who believes in a Living Document theory of Constitutional law say that something is an assault on the Constitution? If the Constitution evolves, then why can’t it evolve to make the Executive more powerful?

This underscores what the slippery slope of the Living Document theory of Constitutional Law. Textualism or even originalism would be far superior.

Episcopal Priest … and Muslim

The sad decline of the Episcopalians continues. Their rejection of Christianity for universalism now seems more like self-parody (article link here:

A veteran Episcopal priest says she became a Muslim just over a year ago and now worships at a mosque Fridays – but that hasn’t stopped her from donning her white collar Sunday mornings.

“I am both Muslim and Christian, just like I’m both an American of African descent and a woman. I’m 100 percent both,” Rev. Ann Holmes Redding told the Seattle Times.

Did I mention self-parody? Four years ago the satirical website Scrappleface posted the article Episcopal Church Appoints First Openly-Muslim Bishop

The Islamic cleric, who rejects the deity of Jesus Christ, received an overwhelming majority of the vote.

A spokesman for the Episcopal Church said the move demonstrates, “Our church is open to all people, regardless of their beliefs, or whether they accept the teachings of the Bible.”