Another voice
Welling Up
Auberon Waugh
T remember hearing the late Richard
Grossman, when he was Secretary of State for the Social Services, express the view that somewhere in the Central Statis- tical Office was to be found a cell of fascists, or at least right-wing militants, whose purpose was if not to falsify figures, at least to present them in such a way as to suggest unacceptably right-wing conclu- sions. Harold Wilson had similar suspi- cions, voiced in private, about the exist- ence of a fascist cell in the Security Services, but his anxieties, I feel, come under another heading.
With the frantic collation of statistics on every conceivable subject, and their instant retrievability through what has been called the revolution in information technology, it is easy to see how a few dedicated information technologists can put a span- ner in the works of any left-wing or even vaguely progressive philosophy. One be- gins to understand why home computers will never be acceptable in the Soviet Union, and why even those computers allowed in industry and administration must be kept under lock and key. All that information must be dangerous, unless it can be rigidly controlled and released only when it has been digested into the current political and philosophical orthodoxies.
Two undigested lumps of information surfaced in the West last week. At first glance they would seem to be abhorrent to the anti-racialist philosophy — perhaps one should call it creed — which we all espouse nowadays. Let us see how we can reconcile them to the prevailing orthodox- ies and make them acceptable to the Benign Computer in the Sky whom Dean 'Don' Cupitt has described as 'the Sum of our Highest Values', preparing a new Kingdom of Heaven which he describes as 'the Welling Up in Each Person of Dis- interested Love of One's Neighbour.
The first appeared in a research study undertaken by Mr Colin Guest, an assis- tant prison governor, into the pattern of youth custody sentencing in the South-East of England. He discovered that whereas young Asians outnumber young blacks in the area by a factor of three to one, young blacks outnumber young Asians in the youth custody centres by 22 to one.
Armed as we are by our faith in the non-existence of any racial or ethnic weighting in the incidence of criminal propensity, and knowing as we do that crime is the product of social deprivation and racial bias rather than of any natural inclination to be bad, or inability to be good. the only useful lesson we can learn from this otherwise completely irrelevant piece of information is surely that blacks are discriminated against more than Asians by a factor of 66-1. In fact it would appear that Asians are discriminated against even less than whites. In the population of the area they are outnumbered 20-1 by whites, but in these youth custody centres they are outnumbered 70-1. This would appear to give an anti-white discrimination factor of 3.5, but perhaps we should not dwell on that possibility as it might prove unhelpful to the great Welling Up, or, even worse, irrelevant to our inquiry.
The suggestion that young blacks might actually be more prone to crime than young Asians by virtue of the greater neglect or incompetence of their parents, or by virtue of any inherited characteristic is, of course, repugnant to all morality and right reason, not to mention the law and the prophets. But in the unlikely event of anyone being able to show that young blacks actually commit more crimes than young Asians (as opposed to being charged with them), it occurs to me that there might be a psycho-chemical explanation which would be acceptable to the theory of Britain as an anti-black conspiracy.
One hates to generalise, but I believe it is true that young Asians, by and large, have a lighter bone structure and smaller bones than blacks. This would mean tht their bones store a smaller deposit of the deadly fluoride poison which local author- ities have been adding to the water supply for over 20 years in the form of sodium flouride. There is no proof that fluoride poisoning is a cause of academic failure, indiscipline or delinquency in the young, but these extremes of indiscipline are a recent phenomenon and seem to have affected blacks worst. If if it reasonable to suspect the existence of fascist cells in the Central Statistical Office and Security Ser- vices, I do not see why they should not also exist in the Department of Health and National Water Authorities. But perhaps the nation's blacks are already too be- mused and stultified by all the poison pumped through them to take action against what begins to look like a diabolical plot against the black community, to make them fail their exams and keep vast num- bers of them in prison.
The second undigested piece of informa- tion to emerge last week concerned the dismal performance by black officers of the New York Police Department in examina- tions for promotion to sergeant. Out of 11,583 officers who took the exam, which had been drawn up by a specialist consul- tancy firm under instruction to eliminate racial or sexual bias from the questions, only 23 of those who passed were black. Effectively, one in ten of the white candi- dates passed, one in 50 of the blacks, answering straightforward multiple choice questions about police procedures. _ The New York Guardians Association immediately demanded that the results of the examination should be scrapped, and promotion to sergeant should be organised on a quota basis as is already applied in recruitment. This may be in line with SDP/Liberal Alliance.thinking, as enunci- ated by Mrs Shirley Williams at the first Alliance education conference in Febru- ary. There she said that the exam system was the biggest single barrier to achieving a classless society. What we needed was profiles, assessments etc, she said.
But there is no reason to suppose that blacks would do better under a system of profiles and assessments, given the almost universal racism of whites. In any case, this daft woman went on to argue that 'the line between academic and vocational educa- tion was at least as serious — and in some cases worse than — the old line between grammar and secondary modern schools. I do not see that anything useful can be served by listening to her. My objection to scrapping exam results and applying a quota system to everything — including, perhaps, admissions to prison
— is that this solution tackles the symp- toms without tackling the cause of appa- rent racial disparities. It is always possible that I am entirely wrong in my suggestion of fluoride poisoning as a possible cause, although it would surely be worthwhile to give the idea a try. In any case, I feel that applying quotas to everything must have the effect of drawing attention to the problem and therefore aggravating it. Such positive discrimination is unlikely to h,e. conducive to the great Welling Up in Eac," Person of Disinterested Love of One s Neighbour. But there surely is a case to be made against the racial analysis of exal results, against inquiring into the raci composition of the prisons. This informa- tion is neither helpful nor relevant in an intelligent discussion of racial problem Let it be expunged from all informano. technology immediately. Nothing is more important than that our children should be able to eat as many sweets as they want'
Previous page
