Poor white boys are victims too

It was the tight suits that first alerted me. Or maybe the fact that they abruptly fell silent as we passed.

I had just given a speech – on the future of immigration, diversity and good relations in Britain – at the Birmingham hotel where 40 years earlier Enoch Powell had chosen to talk of the River Tiber “foaming with much blood”. As I made my way out of the hotel, one of my colleagues nudged my elbow and mouthed silently: “BNP.”

Hearing that we were in town, the British National party had arrived at the hotel, complete with an Enoch Powell lookalike, to deliver the same speech as Powell had made decades earlier.

In the flesh the BNP always feels like a pompous, self-regarding comedy turn – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a serious political force. Extremists gain leverage when the Establishment, or what the public believes is the Establishment, fails to talk about the issues that bother it.

My own speech had been squarely about the two questions that are at present top of the political charts – race and immigration. But I also wanted to deal with a wider question: at a time when our society is wealthier and better educated than ever before, who’s being left behind – and why?

To be sure, the problems of racial discrimination against minorities haven’t gone away – black and Asian young men are still up to seven times more likely to be arrested by the police; Pakistani men will earn more than a quarter of million pounds less than their white equivalents over a lifetime; and young Bangladeshi women are having to settle for jobs for which they are overqualified.

But we are also confronting for the first time in my lifetime an equality deficit not much talked about at Westminster. I am referring to the growing underclass of poor white boys – a forgotten group who also face a kind of institutional racism. I am deeply worried that they will grow into poor, disillusioned, alienated white men.

Why should the Equality and Human Rights Commission care? Many people, including our friends, think that it exists largely to shout the odds for anybody who is not male, white, straight and able-bodied. But that is wrong on every count.

We aren’t a minorities’ pressure group. We work for the whole of society, not just those at the margins – though those who suffer most disadvantage have a right to come first in the queue for our support. (And let’s remember that some of those who face systematic inequality aren’t small minorities – women are a majority, most of us will become parents and virtually all of us will get old.)

What we are is a body that attacks unfairness wherever it sees it. That’s why some of the wider trends that may be leading to greater inequality are right at the top of our agenda – economic change, the skills gap and, above all, migration.

Let me be unambiguous about this last issue. I am pro-immigration. The British people’s experience is that managed migration has brought great advantages to the country, not the tide of hate that Powell prophesied. But immigration has also raised important issues – not least that if we aren’t careful, the benefits from it will fall into the hands of employers, shareholders and middle-class professionals, while any burdens are left to be borne by the poorest in society.

So we have to ensure that the positive impact of migration is not offset by the costs – such as public services under increased pressure and an infrastructure that is struggling to cope. Let these issues languish in the tray marked “too difficult to talk about”, and resentment will grow. We also need to be clear that worrying about the consequences of immigration does not make you antiforeigner. And we must tackle a vital question: why are some groups in society not getting the chances they deserve? Last week two reports highlighted again the issue of underachievement. A report by the Bow Group, the Conservative think tank, showed that in the past 10 years almost 4m pupils left school without gaining the basic qualifications of five good GCSEs.

The cost to the economy of low educational attainment – and low social mobility – is £32 billion a year, or £1,300 to the average family, according to Reform, the independent think tank. Its report spoke of the “why bother?” generation – people who feel shut out by the system. If people feel shut out, they will try to find someone easy to blame: the outsider, the immigrant.

At the commission, we are doing research on educational underachievement and its link to ethnicity. Initial findings reveal that, for example, Bangladeshi and black African students at school outperform their white peers from comparable economic and social backgrounds. Statistics also show that black African, Bangladeshi and Pakistani students achieve higher GCSE scores than equivalent white students.

We know that it is not only white children from poorer background who are struggling. Black Caribbean children are also underachieving.

In the autumn, after our research is published, we will host a conference on white working-class boys. We want to listen to the pupils themselves, the teachers and the parents. And we need to demonstrate that fairness is about equal treatment for all – black, white or Asian.

It is only in tackling these issues that we take the toxicity out of debates on immigration, race and socio-economic underachievement. Fair treatment and equal chances are everyone’s right. No one should feel the work of the commission is “not about me”.

Trevor Phillips is chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission

Times Online