Farage and Trump have a vicious trick to deceive voters – and it’s working

When I started presenting radio phone-in shows, almost 25 years ago now, one subject provoked an almost uniquely unanimous response on the switchboard. Black boys, caller after caller would contend, performed badly at school because their parents were feckless, disengaged and, in the case of fathers, disproportionately absent.

The contributors, and I doubt this needs a spoiler alert, were uniformly white, often elderly, and possessed of little or no personal experience of the demographic under discussion. So, of course, were the majority of presenters and columnists nodding along and fomenting these prejudices.

Exactly the same thing would happen with questions about a rather different disproportionality: “stop and search“. It was during a conversation about the practice being horribly skewed towards usually innocent young men of colour that I stumbled upon a key to unlocking the truth about both issues: confine contributions to the people the statistics described. Don’t call unless this story is about you.

The main answer to both supposed mysteries – and again I doubt you need to sit down to absorb this news – was the entrenched and institutional racism that historically beset our education and justice systems. The testimony of lived experience made the conclusion irresistible.

These days, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and his ilk would doubtless describe discouraging white people from contributing to a phone-in about black people as “anti-white racism” or some such nonsense. But the reason I love my day job as much today as I did then is because I remain fascinated by perspectives I could never arrive at unaided.

And so it is today with white working class pupils, a demographic described in this week’s Independent Inquiry Into White Working Class Educational Outcomes as being the least likely to achieve a Grade 4 or above in English and Maths GCSE. Just 36 per cent of this group, defined as white British pupils on free school meals, reached the threshold compared with 72 per cent of non-free school meal pupils.

And it is not an issue of ethnicity: only 48 per cent of white working-class children reach a good level of development by age five, compared with 75 per cent of white British middle-class children.

Dig deeper into the findings and it becomes clear that these are the children of parents who, through no fault of their own, simply do not see the point of education. It did not “help” them and so it follows that it will not help their children.

Missing from the analysis, and surely much more pernicious, is the way right-wing rhetoric has sought to undermine the value of learning for learning’s sake and make sections of our society actively suspicious of education.

Teachers are routinely demonised in almost all corners of our media, and not just when they have the audacity to take industrial action in pursuit of better terms and conditions. An act that is, ironically, a rare cornerstone of “working class” power in capitalist societies.

Former Conservative education secretary Michael Gove and former Downing Street chief adviser Dominic Cummings strove to mould the system into one that would even better recognise and reward their own, erm, eccentricities and so introduced a tyranny of gradings and assessments that mechanised the magic of learning, depressed teachers and alienated pupils.

Meanwhile, the right-wing has spent years denigrating knowledge, education and expertise in favour of feelings, vibes and bogus victimhood. Gove’s infamous disdain for “experts” during the Brexit referendum paved the way for a world in which you do not have to explain, account for or even understand your own “opinions” for them to be considered “legitimate” by commentators, politicians and racist grifters.

Speaking of which, there was an under-reported moment at the last rally held by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (the real name of the man who otherwise calls himself Tommy Robinson) that showed where all this can lead. Other members of the crowd abused a bespectacled woman for, as one put it, having “a right f**king lefty look on her face.” They demanded her removal. Yaxley-Lennon’s goons obliged.

Two very different politicians nail the real issue here. In 1952, Nye Bevan, key architect of both the NHS and the Welfare State, explained right-wing politics thus: “How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power?”

Today, one answer to Bevan’s question trumps all others: deny “poverty” a decent education by persuading “poverty” that it has no value. Only a deliberately uninformed electorate, after all, could believe that Brexit, former prime minister Boris Johnson or Farage could be the solution to their problems.

Farage’s hero, Donald Trump, gets it. During his 2016 victory address, the US President listed, with varying degrees of accuracy, the people who had contributed to his electoral success: “We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated,” he intoned, his warmest words reserved for just one group, “I love the poorly educated.”

Of course he does and so does every politician whose success depends on persuading “working class” people to vote against their own interests, however much hand-wringing they undertake in response to reports like this week’s. They won’t be blaming themselves, though, and this time they can hardly blame the parents.