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get 12 weeks of the spectator in print and online for just 12 pounds and we'll give you a 20 pound amazon gift voucher absolutely free go to spectator dot co dot uk forward slash voucher hello and welcome to spectator out loud every week we pick a few of our writers for them to read out their articles to you this week christopher snowden from the institute of economic affairs writes about just why white working-class boys are falling behind in their studies we're also bringing you our leading article of the week which talks about the government's inconsistent messaging on easing the lockdown and at the very end you'll hear toby young our status anxiety columnist who writes about why his name is in jeffrey epstein's little black book first up here's christopher snowden you can argue about the merits of pulling down statues but it's hard to make the case that mass protests are of no useful purpose at the very least they can provoke debate and draw attention to uncomfortable topics that might otherwise be ignored the recent protests have forced everyone to have difficult discussions about race class poverty entertainment any serious examination of the statistics shows that we're still far from equal but what the figures also show is that it's wrong-headed and damaging to lump very different groups together in these discussions politicians often lazily assume that all black asian and minority ethnic or being people are the same and that all white groups are equally privileged but a proper look at the data shows not just that there are striking differences within bain groups but that the very worst performing group of all are white working class boys the forgotten demographic it might seem divisive to compare different groups but attainment in education and in life is relative and if we're to help the worst off we have to know who they are it is vital to be able to compare groups to know who's falling behind bangladeshi brits earn 20 less than whites on average for instance but those with indian heritage are likely to earn 12 more black britons on average and 9 less but chinese earn 30 more these differences suggest that employers are not systematically discriminating against people on the basis of their skin color and that we have to look elsewhere to see the roots of inequality ucas the university admission service can provide unique insight into these issues it is the only outfit in the world to gather detailed information on all university applicants including their age gender neighborhood and school type this is collected along with data on who applied for which courses and who was accepted and it is renewed in huge detail every year much of the data shows predictable results there is a gap between rich and poor as you might expect in a uk state system where the best schools tend to be located in the most expensive areas but there are surprising discoveries too nearly half the children eligible for free school meals in inner london go on to higher education but in the country outside london as a whole it is just 26 black african british children outperform white children whereas black caribbean children tend to do worse poor chinese girls that is to say those who qualify for free school meals do better than rich white children but the ethnic group least likely to get into university are whites with the sole exception of gypsy roma every ethnic group attends university at a higher rate than the white british and of the white british who do attend most the middle class and 57 are female the least likely group to go on to higher education are poor white boys at just 13 this is a trend that can also be seen in the gcse data only 17 of white british pupils eligible for preschool meals achieve a strong pass in english and maths students categorized as bangladeshi black african and indian are more than twice as likely to do so in 2007 the state sector saw 23 percent of black students go on to higher education this was also true for 22 percent of whites so about the same but at the last count in 2018 the gap had widened to 11 points 41 for black students 30 for whites the children of the white working class are falling away from their peers in danger of becoming lost now going to university is not the golden ticket it once was but it requires stupefying naivety to believe that seven out of eight poor white boys take a sober look at the economics of higher education and choose to set up their own businesses instead the trail of hard evidence runs cold once they leave school but the prospects for those who can barely read and write are dreadful and we can get some idea of the consequences by looking at the left behind areas where unemployment crime and deaths of despair is significantly higher than the national average angus deaton a nobel laureate based at princeton university came up with the phrase deaths of despair when he looked at the demographics of those suffering from alcoholism depression and drug abuse suicides among whites he found were soaring and those who took their own lives tended to be poor and low educated his recently published book on the subject deaths of despair and the future of capitalism co-written with ann case tells a devastating story of what he calls the decline of white working class lives over the last half century yet while white working-class males are the largest disadvantaged minority their cause is the least fashionable in the intersectional pyramid of victimhood white males are at the bottom tarnished by ideas of toxic masculinity and white privilege despite the fact that in britain class has always been the most significant indicator of true privilege it's worrying then that anyone who attempts positive action on behalf of poor white boys faces a hostile reaction last year dulich and winchester colleges turned down a bequest of more than one million pounds because the donor sir brian thwaites wanted the money ring fence for scholarships for white working-class boys peter lampell founder of the sutton trust a charity whose stated mission is to improve social mobility described kuwait's offer as obnoxious when ben bradley the conservative mp from mansfield tried to ask an equality's question about white working-class boys in parliament earlier this year he was turned down by the table office because they do not have any protected characteristics the concept of protected characteristics was wheeled into uk law by harriet harmon's equality act ten years ago and the tories then in opposition took the rare step of voting for it the nine protected characteristics include race sex and sexual orientation but the table office is not alone in interpreting these as non-white female and gay under the equality act positive discrimination remains technically unlawful but the barely indistinguishable concept of positive action is explicitly legal firms cannot have quotas but they can set targets employers cannot refuse to look at job applications from people who lack protected characteristics but by stating that applications are particularly welcome from bam female or lgbtq plus candidates they can send a message that certain people need not apply in 2016 the bbc pledged that half its workforce and leadership would be female by 2020 despite less than 40 percent of britain's full-time workers being women it also set an eight percent target for lgbt employees although only around two percent of the population identify as such this target has been comfortably exceeded as has the target of having 15 of employees from a background in the wake of the black lives matter protest last month the corporation raised this target to 20 the bbc admits that people from low and intermediate income households are hugely underrepresented in its workforce but what does it do about it earlier this month oxford university proudly reported that it was making steady progress in its efforts to make its campuses representative of wider society of its most recent intake of british students only 14 percent came from the poorest 40 of households this fits a pattern at a push we can hear acknowledgement of the poor white male problem but that's as far as it ever goes the underperformance of white boys and men is not considered to be a problem worth solving when figures come out showing the stunning attainment gaps between boys and girls the interest lasts for about a day it always got a few headlines says mary kerner cook the former head of ucas where it never got any traction at all was in policymaking in government i began to think the subject of white boys is just too difficult for them given the politicization of feminism and women's equality when i asked a teacher why white working-class boys have fallen so far behind he gave me a short answer girls are better behaved and immigrant parents are stricter this is a generalization but nonetheless interesting if it is the case that parenting is a problem then it's not clear how much the government can do perhaps the reluctance to discuss the subject stems from fear that such a discussion would lead to difficult territory about family structure quality of parenting and in short culture perhaps politicians think it better to let the problem fester and the children suffer than to risk discussing it last month the government announced that its commission on racial inequality would include an examination into the underperformance of white working-class boys at school will it look deep into the causes it might look at recent studies that suggest poor reading levels in schools is a huge part of the problem and it might ask whether positive action in the name of diversity has left white working-class boys behind that was christopher snowden and now our leading article the mask slips when michael gove delivered the ditchley annual lecture last month he spoke about why citizens feel that the political system has failed them he said the compact leaders offered trust that we are the best trust that we have your best interests at heart and trust that we will deliver was broken it was a powerful message voters have a right to expect honesty and competence from their leaders not just decisiveness so mr gove will have thought carefully before saying on television last weekend that face masks should not be mandatory and people should instead be left to use their own judgment no one it seems told him that the prime minister was hours away from asking the police to enforce the wearing of masks in shops with a hundred pound fine for failure to comply paul suggests sixty percent of the public support this move but the proportion of government scientific advisors who agree is harder to ascertain here's chris whitty the chief medical officer in march our advice is clear that wearing a mask if you don't have an infection really reduces the risk or almost none not at all so we do not advise that his deputy professor jonathan van tam was also emphatic there is no evidence he said that the wearing of face masks by healthy members of the public slows the spread of the virus at one stage companies who advertised masks as a tool against the virus were prosecuted by the advertising standards authority for making misleading claims dr jenny harris another of mr wittey's deputies argued that masks can make things worse because they can be stored in dirty places and become containers for infection she said in march and in fact you can actually trap the virus in the mask and then start breathing in and yes dr harris did acknowledge there was disagreement between experts about the efficacy of masks but what does that tell us the fact that there is a lot of debate means that the evidence that either isn't clear or is is weak at the height of the pandemic number 10 was keen to say that it was taking the advice of experts and would not be swayed by manias panic social media or opinion polls the prime minister rightly pointed out that if governments feel they need to be seen to act they can cause harm his broader point was to give the public confidence that in times of crisis the government would not act as a weathervane and that when the virus subsided things could go back to normal yet now it seems as if focus groups are as influential to this government's decision-making as scientific advisors there is little rationale for the quarantines for overseas visitors but this polls well there have been u-turns over the test and trace system the now-abandoned app and the return of schools it is this accumulation of leadership failures which erodes confidence that the government can deliver the decision to embark on a large shake-up of the civil service midway through a pandemic has only added to a sense of drift this as mr gove says goes back to trust there has been talk for example that masks will now be made compulsory even in offices government sources say this is improbable but as mr gove can attest things change fast and the confusion goes beyond face masks last week the prime minister said that the stay at home if you can advice should be changed to go to work if you can but was he talking ex-officio or off-the-cuff it was hard to tell as the official advice remained unchanged robert buckland the justice secretary later sought to clear up the confusion work from home if you can if you are able to do things remotely then carry on but also work with your employer or the firm or the particular entity you're with and you increasingly we will see more and more people coming back to work in a staggered way but in a safe way as well i think the message is yes come back to work talk to your employer make your own judgment or a workplace judgment how is any employer supposed to make plans on this basis masks it seems are not being made mandatory for public health reasons but to inspire confidence to get people out and about but there is a risk that this will backfire that masks will reinforce the idea that the virus is still very much at large covid19 has now receded in the vast majority of the country but rather than publicize this ministers introduce edicts and restrictions that were deemed excessive at the height of the pandemic this risks sending another message that the threat is perhaps larger than is being let on surely it would be better as mr gove originally suggested to have an honest conversation over the data the risks and the extent to which masks are likely to help reluctance to do so would suggest a lack of respect for the electorate or people's ability to draw their own conclusions the prime minister recently said that the public could forgive ministers making mistakes on the way into the pandemic but would not forgive blunders made on the way out of it he may be about to test the second part of this theory that was our leading article and now toby young on why his name appears in jeffrey epstein's little black book every time jeffrey epstein is in the news i start getting calls from strangers wanting to scream abuse at me this happened a lot when the billionaire financier was found dead in his jail cell last year after being arrested on sex trafficking charges and it started again following the arrest of his ex-girlfriend elaine maxwell a couple of weeks ago the reason is that my contact details were in epstein's little black book and whenever his name pops up some kindly soul takes it upon themselves to post a picture of the relevant page which shows my mobile phone number on twitter i may have to change my number so frequent of the calls become on one level it's quite flattering in a piece about the book last year the new york times described it as a symbol of the exclusive world of the very famous and very rich and it does read like the modern day equivalent of the 400 the creme de la creme of international society compiled by the social arbiter ward mcallister and printed in the new york times in 1892 among the names of the little black book are donald trump bill clinton prince andrew mick jagger ted kennedy alan dershowitz courtney love peter mandelson and ray fines my details appear opposite those of yugoslavia prince michaelov i can honestly say hand on heart i've no idea how i ended up in epstein's address book i never met him and never set foot in any of his houses let alone on his private island not that anyone believes me when i say this ever since the contents of the book were published on a gossip website in 2015 the people in it have been frantically protesting their innocence charles finch the film producer told the new york times he had no idea why his name was there as did vanessa von bismarck the founder of a pr company joan juliet buck the former editor of french vogue said as far as i know i have never met epstein i never went to any of those famous parties at the biggest house in new york city to the conspiracy theorists piecing together the web-like connections between the dramatis personae these denials might as well be admissions of guilt my best guess is that in reality the address book belonged to gillane whom i do know slightly when i lived in new york between 1995 and 2000 i bumped into her occasionally at parties and the london address listed as mine dates back to that period i sometimes worry about a mob of enraged pedo hunters turning up outside my old shepherd's bush bedsit and demanding justice rather unhelpfully the daily mail recently ran a picture spread showing gillane out and about in society and included a photo of me saying something funny to her in a nightclub making her howl with laughter ever since that picture has been posted dozens of times on twitter alongside the relevant page in the little black book as if it were proof that i was a member of epstein's inner circle its guilt by association although as i point out to the screamers on the other end of the phone gillane hasn't actually been found guilty of anything needless to say the concept of innocent until proven guilty doesn't cut much ice with them the little black book first surfaced in 2012 when alfredo rodriguez epstein's former housekeeper was arrested by the fbi while trying to sell it for fifty thousand dollars somehow it fell into the hands of an investigative journalist called nick bryant as did the passenger logs of epstein's private jet nicknamed the lolita express and he published them both three years ago on gorka and now defunct gossip website happily my name isn't on the manifest of the lolita express although the company there is even more exalted than in the address book in addition to bill clinton prince andrew and alan dershowitz the names include naomi campbell chris tucker and kevin spacey had gillane offered me a lift to london on it back in the mid-1990s before epstein was suspected of any crimes i would have accepted thank god for small nurses i sometimes wonder why none of the other people in the little black book have had their personal details shared on twitter there's at least one other ex-labor mp in there in addition to blair and mandy i dare say it's because i'm a tory in the eyes of the basement dwelling left we're all suspected pedos that was toby young thanks for listening to this episode of spectator out loud as ever do send over your thoughts and suggestions and who else you might like to hear on the podcast to podcast spectator dot co dot uk do join us again next week get 12 weeks of the spectator in print and online for just 12 pounds and we'll give you a 20 pound amazon gift voucher absolutely free go to spectator dot co dot uk forward slash voucher