Social justice

The latest spark to ignite the culture wars is a report from the parliamentary education committee on the underachievement of working-class white boys. But this isn’t about race. The boys don’t underachieve because they are white. Their skin colour is merely a marker by which we can see that a certain cohort is doing worse than another. And despite received wisdom, it’s not just about poverty, school funding or investment. Children of other ethnicities who are equally poor, and even potentially at the same school, will likely do considerably better. It’s not even about class, which seems to be the latest factor on which the fickle finger of blame is

GB News is the most interesting experiment in British television news since Sky in 1989. The brainchild of Andrew Neil (who is also chairman of The Spectator), the channel is pinning its hopes on there being an audience for something different. The thinking goes that the mainstream broadcasters reflect the progressive pieties of London rather than the values of the rest of the country. Critics have characterised the channel as ‘right-wing’, though Neil and his team have been careful not to embrace the label. Of course, GB News isn’t the first broadcaster to cover the news with a particular slant — Channel 4 News has been doing so for a

The concept of equality has been redefined, at least according to the minister responsible in a speech last week. But on closer inspection, the government has still not unshackled itself from all the entrenched assumptions of the more collectivist understanding of fairness. Liz Truss’s speech marked a break from identity politics, with its pernicious division of society into victims and their oppressors, but it left untouched two other linked ideas. The first is social determinism: the idea that outcomes such as poverty are the result of social and economic forces beyond individual control. The second is faith in the ability of government to transform these external forces. Both ideas leave

You can’t discuss racial inequality without using the N-word. And you can’t debate social justice without adding the C-word and the F-word as well. In this case the N-word is Nepotism, the C-word is Credentialism and the F-word is Favouritism. What is often overlooked in the debate about social justice is that inequality of opportunity need not arise from the exercise of negative preferences but from a mildly positive, unintended bias operating in reverse. Inequality of opportunity need not arise from the exercise of negative preferences Q. What is, at birth, the best predictor that you will become a doctor? A. Having a parent who is a doctor. Hence there