In a recent post on Education and Poverty I commented on the dismal educational performance of the White ‘underclass’ in Britain.
Coincidentally, today’s Sunday Times has a feature article on the new underclass, known in Government circles by the acronym ‘Neet’: Not in Education, Employment or Training. Here’s the article…
Depressing stuff!
Addendum
In comments several people asked about ‘race’.
The Sunday Times article doesn’t mention race or ethnicity, but the photos, etc, all involve young Whites. No doubt some people covered by the official definition of ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ must be from ethnic minorities, but simply on numerical grounds it must be a predominantly White group. According to the ST, there are 1.1 million Neets aged 16-24. In the 2001 Census data there are only in total about 120,000 ‘Blacks’ in this age group. (Of course there are also South Asians, Chinese, etc, but no-one will imagine that they are significant in the Neet phenomenon.) As to young ‘Blacks’, they have a slightly higher unemployment rate than Whites, but they also have a higher rate of continuing in full-time education or training. The only significance of Blacks that I see in the Neet phenomenon is that young White uneducated kids have a tendency to ape the worst aspects of Black urban culture: gangsta rap, crack, petty crime, and general insolence. In London, especially, white yobbos often speak with a touch of Jamaican patois, which sounds comical coming from some skinny pale-faced runt.
Addendum 2
I should have learned by now to be cautious of any statistics I read in the Sunday Times. The ST claims that ‘According to official figures, there are 1.1m Neets aged 16-24 in Britain today’.
There are about 5.6m people aged 16-24 (both sexes) in England and Wales (2001 Census). Let’s bump it up to 6m to allow for Scotland. 1.1m would therefore be about 18% of the age group. This is suspiciously high. The Youth Cohort Study gives only 12% Neets at age 18. It is possible that the proportion increases substantially in the years 19-24, sufficiently to raise the average over the years 16-24 to 18%, despite the fact that the proportion of people actually in jobs also increases after age 18, but if so this is probably for the boring reason that in Britain, as elsewhere, women in their early 20s are often having babies. By no means all of them will be ‘Neets’ in the derogatory sense used by the ST. A better test of the size of the problem would be the proportion of males in this age group who are Neets.
This is not to deny that it is a serious problem, but maybe not quite as bad as the ST’s figures suggest.
Posted by David B at 04:57 AM