'Most of us hate the boss'

Surveys that tell you what you already know – there are a lot of them around.

Newspapers, magazines, radio and TV all seem to like them. They're good for filling in those awkward little corners. And if nothing else they always get a knowing little shake of the head.

Like this recent (small) headline-maker: “Most of us hate our bosses.”

OK, maybe that was a nod, not a shake. Though “most” may be only just over half, and “hate” may be stretching it a bit.

But hang on. Look at it for a moment from your boss's point of view. Think how much he must hate his boss too. And so on and so on.

Maybe the findings of that other survey aren't so surprising. The one that claimed most really, really top bosses – the ones who actually own or run the big companies and scoop up the big bucks – are clinically psychopathic.

I assumed when I first read that one that a psychopathic personality was a requirement in getting to the top. (I was going to say “in a capitalist society”, but then I remembered Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao.)

But there's another way of looking at it. Maybe the sensation of all those accumulated layers of hatred rising up from below would bring out the psycho traits in anyone.

Now there are various reasons why you might not like the boss.

A lot of people probably just don't like being told what to do.

But it turns out the main reason is lack of respect and appreciation.

People like to feel the boss trusts them and values what they do. And most, it seems, don’t feel that – not often enough, anyway.

Now I'm not a manager (thank goodness), but I have been. In a fairly junior, middle-management sort of way.

When I got the job – a horribly long time ago – the best piece of advice I got came from my father.

He told me that if you're ever going to criticise someone, you have to be prepared to praise them too.

In fact, every telling-off should be balanced by at least eight compliments.

And – in some cases this can be the tricky part – the praise has to be deserved. It's not hard to say “well done”, but it must be said honestly.

Praise where it's due. And plenty of it.

It's a lesson many bosses could do with learning. It might save them from being so hated.

I was reminded of it the other day by another of those little reports on psychological research.

It said the human brain was hard-wired to remember bad things better than good ones. That eight-to-one ratio came up again.

The researchers drew two conclusions.

The first was that children remember the horrid feeling of being told off much more strongly than the nice feeling of a pat on the back. Parents beware.

And the second was about news values.

Bad news sells.

Back in Cold War days there was a journalists' joke about an East German front page headline: “Half the harvest safely gathered in”.

But why was it funny?

It was certainly a contrast with the diet of endless doom and gloom that we got – and still get – from the media in the West.

Yet we are constantly being told that we are the lucky ones. As, in so many ways, we are.

Of course, those who lived under Communism were also told – and in most cases no doubt believed – that it was they who were lucky.

So which would you rather read about? A successful harvest, or wars in parts of the world you'd probably never heard of before things got bad there?

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Rotherham was grim. Ebola is very nasty. The situation in Iraq and Syria is almost too ghastly to contemplate. Ukraine’s worrying. The accidental killing of a gun instructor by a nine-year-old girl armed with a sub-machinegun was just one more example of the madness of America.

But last week’s most touching news item concerned the death of a hippo.

Investigators in Germany are said to be conducting a “murder inquiry” after the incident at Frankfurt Zoo.

Which is news nonsense really. Evidence only of our ridiculous obsession with “murder mystery” stories.

There's not really much mystery about the death of Maikel, a 39-year-old, 315-stone gentle giant.

Someone threw a tennis ball into his enclosure. He ate it. It got stuck in his gut and killed him.

Sadness, yes. Mystery, no. Not once they'd carried out a post-mortem to see why a healthy animal suddenly got ill and died.

I doubt very much whether deliberate murder, or even cruelty, was involved. Just ignorance and stupidity.

The touching thing was the behaviour of Maikel's “lifelong partner” Petra.

As he was dying she kept swimming round him, nudging him to get up. As puzzled as the zookeepers. And grieving.

Some people – including many who really should know better – still cling to the old idea that humans are the only animals that feel emotion.

Which is as ignorant and stupid as whoever chucked that tennis ball.

The law won't stop abuse - but it's good to try

The bullying is mostly verbal, backed by the occasional veiled threat of violence.

For years he has humiliated, intimidated and belittled her. He does it to the children too – and he is raising them to behave the same way towards her.
He’s very skilled at persuading people that she is the one who mistreats them. Sometimes he almost has her believing it herself.
Now here’s another family.
He goes out to work, does the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning and most of the childcare.
He stays purely for the sake of her child, whose real father abandoned them.
The child is seldom allowed into “Mummy’s room”, where she spends most of her time watching TV or playing computer games.
Another.
She earns as much as he does, but all her money goes on paying the bills and putting food on the table. His goes straight into his personal savings account.
And another.
He’s happily married, a loving dad to his stepchildren. He can’t have children of his own because of the vasectomy he was pressured into during a previous relationship.
Next.
She’d love to feed herself and the kids more healthily. But he insists on a diet of pizza, bacon and sausages (see separate story below). If she brings fresh fruit and veg into the house, he throws it away.
And finally.
He earns the money, she drinks it.
When, after putting up with years of abuse, he talks of leaving, she cuts herself and threatens to say he did it.
All these people are real. They are all people I know or have known. And I could go on.
Which is why I welcome the Government’s proposal for a specific law against domestic abuse.
And why I’m glad to hear it will apply to emotional and psychological as well as physical bullying.
Home Secretary Theresa May was for once spot on when she announced the planned legislation, now entering its eight-week consultation period.
“Abuse is not just physical,” she said.
“I want perpetrators to be in no doubt that their cruel and controlling behaviour is criminal.”
Amen to that.
She also said: “Victims who are subjected to a living hell by their partners must have the confidence to come forward.”
And therein lies the problem. Worthy though the goal is, I’m not sure any new law is going to give those victims that confidence.
Some of the abuse cases I’ve known of have involved alcohol. Several involved money. Some involved violence or the threat of it.
Most included an element of deceit – and not just by the perpetrators.
In every case the confidence and self-esteem of the victim was steadily, inexorably sapped.
Often they end up blaming themselves for their seemingly inescapable situation.
And more often than not they conceal what’s happening, deceiving themselves and others.
Every domestic abuse case, whatever its nature and circumstances, is really about power. One person exerting control over another.
And it is never easy for a controlled person to turn publicly against their controller. Whatever the law says.


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Michael Mosley is the most interesting person on television.
In 2012, after an investigation that involved some pretty extreme experimenting on his own body, he concluded that a 5:2 diet – two days a week of near-fasting – was a healthy way to live.
He was persuasive enough for me to try it. Two years later I’m still following it, happy with it as a lifestyle that works.
Almost incidentally (the point is health and longevity, not weight), I’m a steady two stone lighter than when I embarked on it.
Now Dr Mosley’s giving me serious thought of adapting my regimen again.
It follows his absorbing two-part BBC series last week, “Should I Eat Meat?”
As before, he interviewed various experts, who didn’t all agree. And as before he put his own body to the test, this time taking on a high-meat diet, with some shocking results.
One of his conclusions confirmed what I already believed.
That humans evolved to eat some meat – but nowhere near as much as most of us now do.
Which, incidentally, is bad for animals, bad for the world’s ecology and bad for the rest of humanity as well as being bad for us.
Some of the shots of intensive farming might be enough to put a sensitive person off meat for good.
I lived for eight years as a vegetarian, so I know I can do it.
I don’t intend to return to an entirely meat-free diet, but I could do with eating less of it. As could nearly all of us.
In particular, I’m now considering cutting out the bacon and sausages which have become our family staples.
Because it’s those processed meats that are now fingered as high risk factors for both heart disease and cancer. Neither of which I’m particularly keen on inviting in.
If it’s true that on average every bacon sarnie cuts an hour off your life expectancy, I can do without it, thanks.

The real legacy of Gove

One national headline last weekend claimed the A-level results as a triumph for departed Education Secretary Michael Gove.

Well, we can guess which end of the political spectrum that particular paper occupies, can’t we?

The exams were a triumph for all those hard-working students who passed them.

For all those who got into the universities of their choice despite falling slightly short of the target grades set.

And for all the teachers whose professional expertise and dedication got them there.

That all the years of grade inflation have at last been halted is perhaps good news. Especially, maybe, for all of us whose long-ago grades don’t look quite as good now as they were back then.

But the idea (that paper again) that Gove has a “legacy” to be protected will have caused the entire teaching profession to splutter into its cornflakes.

Apart from his obsessive, staggeringly ignorant and nostalgia-imbued tinkering with the curriculum, his most radical “reform” amounted to a rampant privatisation of education.

Or, in the euphemistic terms he employed, “freeing” almost 4,000 secondary schools from local authority control.

And allowing 174 so-called “free schools” to be set up, with no regard for where new schools were actually needed.

The truly devastating thing – and what does indeed make this a legacy of sorts – is that the next government is unlikely to be either able or willing to take back what Gove has given away.

So that – just like what once really was a National Health Service – much of the education system may be lost to the profit motive for a generation or more.

It remains to be seen whether all those teachers who celebrated Gove’s sacking will come to love his successor more. Frankly, I doubt it.

Nicky Morgan’s only apparent qualification for the job is her gender at a time when David Cameron was being pressed to bring more women into the Government.

A qualified solicitor and expert on corporate law, her previous Government roles (only since last October) were in the Treasury and as Minister for Women.

She still has that latter job (who is the Minister for Men?) as well as the education brief, which doesn’t suggest her full attention will be on either.

That may be a blessing in disguise. But don’t expect her to stray far from the lines laid down by Gove.

Like all five of the ministers under her, she went to a private, fee-paying school.

That team line-up hardly bodes well for the care of the state school system.

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It’s a distressing fact that each time Israel embarks on the kind of murderous campaign seen lately in Gaza, anti-Semitic attacks in Britain and Europe increase.

Too many people, it seems – particularly the thick and nasty kind – can’t tell the difference between Israel and Jews.

It really shouldn’t need pointing out, but here it is.

Israel is a small country in the Middle East with a right-wing racist government.

Jews are people, most of whom are not Israelis.  Some are right-wing and some are racist, but most aren’t. Pretty much like other people.

A great many of them find the policies of Israel’s government as repugnant as most of the rest of us.

And that – despite some of what you may have seen or heard – applies to many Israelis too.

A minority, possibly, but a substantial minority. And that despite decades of apartheid-style immigration policy.

I can illustrate that policy by my own case.

My Jewish grandmother means I would have been a candidate for Hitler’s death camps.

But I wouldn’t be eligible for Israeli citizenship even if I wanted it. Wrong grandmother.

For Benjamin Netanyahu’s government – and for all those who mistake Israel for the Jewish people – the current grisly conflict contains a huge irony.

So many Jews around the world – particularly in America – are so horrified by what they see in Gaza that their support for Israel is wearing thin.

One slogan from a massive recent Jewish demonstration in New York states it clearly: “Israel is a Zionist state, not a Jewish state”.

If Israel loses the support of America’s Jews enough to lose the support of America, it really is in trouble.

I wouldn’t bet anyone’s life against it.

East is east and west is west, and when it comes to travelogues Twain is best

Shopping as a leisure activity seems to me one of the most idiotic aspects of our deranged society. Unless it’s shopping in bookshops.

A good secondhand bookshop offers probably the greatest time-erasing pleasure to be had in any high street.

And all with the prospect of a jolly good read, and maybe something really eye-opening, to come later.

The lately under-fire Oxfam may not be perfect. Heck, of course it isn’t, it’s a large and necessarily bureaucratic organisation operating in a capitalist world.

But it does a lot of good in its crusade against poverty, whatever Tory twit Conor Burns may say. (He’s the numpty who complained that the message was “too political”, instantly casting his party as the ones who want other people to stay poor.)

And for those of us not in poverty, but with leisure to read, Oxfam provides some terrific bookshops.

Places where you can browse and pick up the very volume you didn’t know existed until you discover you need it.

E-readers that you can slip in a pocket are all very well and may signal the end of the “airport novel” sooner than you’d think.

But no electronic gizmo could replace the pleasure of holding in your hands (you need both) the Portfolio of Photographs of Famous Cities, Scenes & Paintings that I have in mine. (Or did have. I had to put it down to type this paragraph.)

Promising “a rare and elaborate collection of photographic views of the entire world of nature and art”, it contains 256 full-page images of the world as it then was.

Or nearly full-page, for each one leaves room for a generous paragraph of description in John L Stoddard’s purple prose. But they are still good-sized pictures.

And utterly absorbing – as are Stoddard’s words – in their depiction of a world now mostly vanished.

It admits to being published by The Werner Company of Chicago, but not when. Careful scrutiny of the text, and reference to known history, dates it to 1897 or ’98.

Which means, of course, that pictures of Germany, Russia, the Middle East  – everywhere, really – are presented in happy ignorance of what the 20^th century was to bring.

It was a world much of which was still dominated by the British Empire, not the undeclared American one we now subsist under (or the Chinese one we appear to be entering).

In fact, it’s a slightly strange “entire world”, containing 12 pictures of London, 26 of France (including 17 of Paris), 37 of Italy, and one of China. The only actual Chinese people to be seen are a man and boy in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

The selection is just one of the ways in which Stoddard reveals the attitudes of his time, class and nation.

Take this well-meaning but toe-curling description of the native Australians (pictured below):

“These Aborigines are a wretched race. Like most savages, they are fond of liquor, and were it not for strict laws prohibiting the sale to them of intoxicating drinks, they would doubtless soon become exterminated through their own excesses.

“Like the North American Indians, they are disappearing rapidly before a new and sturdier race.”

He doesn’t mention the sturdier people’s sturdier weaponry, or the sturdiness of their acquisitive aggression.

Just at the time Stoddard’s dismal early epitaph for a people was being written, another American traveller was on the Australian leg of his round-the-world tour. A better writer, a keener observer, and a much sharper commentator on human nature.

Probably the finest newspaper columnist ever: Mark Twain.

In his riveting ragbag of a read, Following the Equator, Twain has much to say about the Aborigines, their inventive brilliance, their amazing physical abilities and powers of observation –  and their treatment by the white settlers.

Of the last, he concludes: “It is robbery, humiliation, and slow, slow murder, through poverty and the white man’s whisky.”

He remarks acutely and poignantly, too, on one way in which he considers the Aborigines superior to the invading Europeans. “The tribes,” he says, “had no comprehension of the idea of transferable ownership of land.”

Which, of course – as with the native Americans – made it all that much easier for the settlers to take possession and evict the former dwellers.

It’s not exactly the most rib-tickling section of a book that is often laugh-out-loud funny. But Twain does end the chapter on a characteristic wry note.

“There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”

Some things have changed since Twain and Stoddard’s day. Sadly, that isn’t one of them.

Traffic on London Bridge, with a London skyline very different from today’s

Pics from John L Stoddard’s Portfolio of Photographs of Famous Cities, Scenes & Paintings

Blame Balfour. But blame Netanyahu too

It is depressing to see barriers going up again blocking off the streets around the Israeli embassy in London.

Depressing to see the same protesters massing, the same vanloads of police waiting, the same slogans shouted and placards waved.

It’s depressing to see a cartoon I’m sure I saw in 2008 being recycled as if it was new. Which it might as well have been.

In it an Israeli soldier points to a single missile embedded in a massive defensive wall. “See,” he says. “We’re just defending ourselves.” While overhead the sky is filled with planes, rockets and bombs delivering mayhem and murder on a cowering Palestinian community.

As cartoons go, it’s not very funny. It’s too close to a very grim reality for that.

I do have some sympathy for Israel. It cannot be easy to live your whole life knowing that the nations that surround you would rather you weren’t there.

Even if – no, especially if – your standard of living is so very visibly a lot higher than theirs.

But it’s hard to retain much of that sympathy when you see the effects of Israeli weaponry on the children and civilians of Gaza.

When you compare the two sides’ respective casualty lists.

Or when you contemplate the maps that show how Israel has gradually “settled” – ie taken over – more and more of what used to be Palestinian land since grabbing the so-called West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Ultimately, like most wars, this is a battle for land.

Land the Israelis claim – very tenuously indeed – to have been “theirs” until they were thrown out by the Romans in the first few decades after Christ.

Can you say where “you” were living 2,000 years ago? And if you could, would it give you more right to the territory than anyone who might have lived there since?

Give East Anglia back to the Angles, I say. France to the Gauls. And North America to the Apache, the Sioux, the Cherokee – or whichever were those tribes’ predecessors’ predecessors.

Real blame for the latest outbreak of hostilities in Gaza belongs, in a very real sense, with Arthur Balfour.

“His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”

That was Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, in 1917. The words, in a letter to the British Zionist Federation, came to be known as The Balfour Declaration.

The Zionists were looking for a “return” to a place most of them had never been as refuge from the horrors of Europe.

Not that Europe at that time was a haven of bliss for anyone. But for the Jews, persecution had been a fact of life for generations.

After the Nazis turned persecution to industrialised genocide, the calls for Balfour’s promise to be kept seemed undeniable.

Especially with the connivance of the most eager and prominent of all non-Jewish Zionists, Winston Churchill.

In the curious way the world was still divided up then, Palestine – a.k.a. The Holy Land – was a British “mandate”. Which gave Westminster the right, or responsibility, of deciding who to hand it over to.

And so, in 1948, the Zionists got the land they had craved since the Hungarian Theodor Herzl came up with the idea in 1895.

Which might not have been such a bad idea if no one had lived there already.

In fairness to Balfour, his Declaration went on: “…it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

Some hope.

And some cynicism too. Because those words make clear that he knew the land was not unoccupied.

Ironically – considering how his name is still revered in Israel – Balfour was an anti-semite.

He wanted a homeland for the Jews “over there” because he didn’t want more of them “over here”.

So blame Balfour. Blame Churchill. Maybe blame Herzl – though his vision was for a much more peaceable, inclusive and tolerant Israel than the one we now have.

None of that absolves the leaders of modern Israel – Peres, Netanyahu and the rest – from blame for the attacks on Gaza.

Murderous attacks on poor, over-crowded communities of mostly innocent people.

Repeated attacks on communities whose poverty and over-crowding is already Israel’s responsibility.

The present holders of the once-honourable Zionist flame have turned a people who once had the world’s pity into the world’s villains.

Thereby threatening the future existence of Israel at least as effectively as anything neighbouring states might do.

By waging war on the people who used to live on the land they now occupy, they have made Balfour’s Declaration look a bigger mistake than ever.

The man whose goals for Uruguay are really worth celebrating

The great man was talking passionately and movingly the other day about his goals for Uruguay.  And no, I don’t mean Luis Suarez.
The now former Liverpool striker may be an extravagantly gifted footballer, but by no stretch of the imagination could he be called a great man.
The description is entirely appropriate, however, for the president of his country, Jose Mujica. Or Pepe, as he is unaccountably known to his friends – who seem to include most of Uruguay’s 3.4million people.
It’s hard to think of any president of any country who is easier to like than Pepe Mujica. Largely because he is so, well, un-presidential.
No White House, Kremlin or Elysee Palace for 79-year-old Pepe. When he took office in 2010 he declined the option of moving into the presidential mansion, where a staff of 42 were ready to wait on him.
Instead he remains in the run-down house in O’Higgins Road, on the outskirts of Montevideo, where he and his wife have lived for years, growing chrysanthemums to sell in the local market.
His personal security force apparently consists of two plain-clothes officers parked on the road outside.
His own transport is not a limo with police outriders – and certainly no Air Force One.
Giving a lead, perhaps, to his fellow South American, Pope Francis, he still drives around in a battered old VW Beetle.
Unlike most leaders, of whatever political hue, this is a man who practises what he preaches. And he believes that for democracy to work, politicians should be taken down a notch.
“We have done everything possible to make the presidency less venerated,” he says.
Pictured at high-level meetings, scruffy, tieless, in old sandals, he looks every inch the peasant among office-workers.
His official presidential salary of about £4,600 a month would seem like small change to Luis Suarez. But Pepe gives 90 per cent of it away to charity.
“I have a way of life that I don’t change just because I am a president,” he says. “I earn more than I need, even if it’s not enough for others.
“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.”
There is something of Mahatma Gandhi about this man.
He hasn’t had to resist the rule of a foreign empire, as Gandhi did, but he did spent 14 years in prison – a decade of it in solitary confinement – for resistance to a previous government.
The country he now heads is officially one of the least corrupt in the world, which hardly fits the Latin American stereotype. The gap between rich and poor is also unusually small.
So what about those goals?
“My goal is to achieve a little less injustice in Uruguay, to help the most vulnerable and to leave behind a political way of thinking that will be passed on.”
Better and more honourable goals than any scored by Suarez.

The wisdom of Pepe Mujica

·        We have sacrificed the old immaterial gods, and now we are occupying the temple of the Market God. He organises our economy, our politics, our habits, our lives and gives us the appearance of happiness. It seems we have been born only to consume and to consume.

·        Businesses just want to increase their profits – it’s up to the government to make sure they distribute enough of those profits so workers have the money to buy the goods they produce.
 
·        I’m not the poorest president. The poorest is the one who needs a lot to live. There have been years when I would have been happy just to have a mattress.
 

·        If we lived within our means, the 7billion people in the world could have everything they needed. Global politics should be moving in that direction. But we think as people and countries, not as a species.

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Big farmer versus the bees

This being summer, shouldn’t we be basking in the pleasant hum of bees? I’m sure that’s how summer used to be.
Comparing present experience with nostalgic memory may not be very good science. But it still leaves me wondering where all the bees have gone.
And if the dire reports of their worldwide disappearance are anywhere near accurate, we could end up missing a lot more than summer’s sweet droning sound.
Like most of our food supply, for instance.
It was good news last year that the EU banned the use of pesticides linked to what amounts to bee genocide.
And good news last week that Britain turned down an “emergency appeal” from manufacturers Syngenta to overturn that ban.
The EU ruling only has another year to run, though.
It’s vital that the scientists come up with a definitive answer by next year on whether neonicotinoids are indeed responsible for wiping out bees. In which case they must be banned forever.
Unhappily, it’s the big manufacturer that has all the cash to spend on research, and on lobbying politicians. As ever.

Britain becomes an outpost of the new Chinese empire

Some events appear at the time in all their historical significance: D-Day, Hiroshima, 9/11 spring to mind. Others reveal their importance only with the perspective of passing time.

What will stand out when the history of early 21^st century Britain comes to be written a few decades from now? I suspect last week may be seen – even if only symbolically – as a major turning-point.

There was a time, starting in the 18^th century with the opium trade, when imperial Britain exploited China and the Chinese mercilessly. It went on well into the 20^th century.

My grandfather’s naval posting to Shanghai between the world wars was part of the final flourish of that imperial relationship between the rich, confident West and the poor, exotic Orient.

Now – if you can bear the mix of metaphors – the worm has turned and the boot is on the other foot.

The three-day visit to Britain by Chinese premier Le Keqiang had the unmistakable look of an imperial progress. An emperor visiting his newest, farthest-flung dominions.

Out came the red carpet. Out came the local royalty to kow-tow.

Out came Messrs Cameron and Osborne, rubbing their hands, bowing their heads and fawning like Pooh-Bah and Pish-Tush in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado.

And what exactly was all this servile diplomacy about?

Like Britain two centuries ago, forcing opium on the Chinese, China is now preparing to take a big stake in Britain’s future infrastructure and power-generation.

Presumably in the expectation of future profit.

Profit you might reasonably have thought should have been Britain’s – and might have been if we had a government that wasn’t ideologically allergic to state enterprise. Its own state enterprise, anyway.

So here we have a nation in thrall to the idea of private enterprise giving away control of its key assets to a foreign government. A far-distant Communist government, at that.

Strange but true. And still not the whole story.

Let’s leave aside the question – still highly controversial – of whether nuclear power-stations are a good thing at all.

Even if you class yourself as “pro-nuclear”, it must still make you a little uneasy, surely, to have them built on our shores by Chinese expertise and Chinese money.

For long enough, Britain has exported waste of all kinds, especially the toxic variety, to poorer parts of the world. On the principle, presumably, that “their lives don’t matter as much as ours”.

Do I detect a similar attitude to us in the Chinese?

Or are they now looking on us as they have looked on much of Africa for decades – and much as we looked on that continent for so long?

As a struggling people ready to be helped/exploited (strike out whichever doesn’t apply).

So maybe this is how June 2014 will stake its claim to historic landmark status. As the month when Britain became part of the Chinese empire.

It’s the sort of thing that can go unnoticed as it happens.

 

 

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A news story last week put an old Bob Dylan song in my head. A very old Dylan song, in fact: Only a Pawn In Their Game.

In particular the lines which go: “And the poor white remains / on the caboose of the train / but it ain’t him to blame / he’s only a pawn in their game”.

You’ve probably guessed what the story was, even if you didn’t happen to hear it. As news stories go, it’s not the newest.

A select committee of MPs reported – or noticed, or remembered – that white working-class pupils, particularly boys, leave school less qualified than equally poor black and Asian pupils.

This immediately, and inevitably, caused a couple of leaps to different but equally predictable conclusions.

Depending where you heard it, it was presented as evidence either that

a)      the system gives black and Asian pupils preferential treatment; or

b)      there’s a “cultural” difference involved.

Both views contain a subtle (or not so subtle) element of racism.

The first can, I think, be dismissed as nonsense. The second is obviously true, up to a point. But it comes freighted with a couple of stereotypes:

a)      “Asians set a high value on education.” In my experience, this is generally true, but probably not in all cases;

b)      “the white working class are a feckless bunch.” A widely-held view that is a particularly toxic mix of racial and class prejudice.

There is, however, a totally different inference that can be drawn from the MPs’ observations.

I haven’t heard anybody in any of the media mention it any time this subject has come up. Yet it seems to me to the most glaringly obvious conclusion of all.

It is this.

In this country, intelligent, motivated black and Asian families are more likely to be poor than equally intelligent, motivated white families.