From racial bias to the gender wars, things are not as bad as they seem

Amid doom and gloom, we must not forget the great strides we have taken in recent years

There are invisible gravitational forces in society that direct our attention towards certain facts or trends and away from others. A combination of the natural “bad news” bias of the media and a welcome sensitivity to injustice and discrimination means that in many areas of public life – particularly in relations between the races, sexes and generations – we are often encouraged to believe that things are worse than they actually are.

Commentators, TV anchors and even Government officials will state things as fact that are simply not true, or at least are highly contentious. Those things have, in the old language of newspaper offices, entered “the cuttings file”, and once there, they can be very hard to move. So here is my current “little list” of things I have recently heard described in the media as self-evident truths, which are anything but.

First, let us consider race. Hardly anyone would claim Britain is free of racial discrimination, but the provision of detailed evidence has not been a strong point of the UK Black Lives Matter movement. The two pieces of evidence most often cited are, first, the CV test, which finds that those with ethnic minority names have to send more applications to get a job interview and, second, the fact that black people are eight times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than whites.

Both of these claims carry weight, but it is worth pointing out that one group with typically minority names are British Indians, who do considerably better than the white British average in terms of labourmarket outcomes. On stop and search, much of the disproportionality falls away once you look at where stop and search is actually happening: in inner-city areas with high levels of violent crime.

Meanwhile, on the positive side, you will almost certainly not be aware that 35 per cent of British Caribbean men are now found in the top two social classes (in the eight-class schema), up from an average of 11 per cent in the Eighties and Nineties. This is only slightly less than the white British proportion (though there are more whites in the very top class). And you will certainly not know that hate crime has been falling pretty steadily for the past 20 years. The hate crime that you are always told is going up is policerecorded hate crime, which rose by 10 per cent from 2017/18 to 2018/19. That is a rise from 94,121 to 103,379. But, unlike 20 years ago, the police today rightly encourage the reporting of all kinds of hate crime, and it is much easier and more convenient to do so.

Fortunately, we have a more reliable source of crime data that is not subject to the changing priorities of police forces and politicians. The Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) is a huge survey that asks people what has actually happened to them – and the most recent data show that between 2015/16 and 2017/18 there were an estimated 184,000 hate crimes on average per year (which includes the real but short-term hate crime blip just after the 2016 Brexit vote). That is down from 266,000 between 2009/10 and 2011/12 and down further from 307,000 between 2007/8 and 2008/9.

What about relations between the sexes? Much has been made of how much more domestic labour women have been doing compared with men in lockdown – at least, for those with school-aged children. But in fact the gap between male and female domestic labour has been narrowing in recent years.

According to the Centre for Time Use Research, men’s share of all unpaid work in the home has risen from 27 per cent to nearly 40 per cent since the Seventies, and around two-thirds of fathers are classified as involved fathers, which means they spend an average of two hours a day on childcare.

It is also assumed that most women want to hurry back to full-time work as soon as possible and are therefore mourning the closure of all those childcare providers. But more state support that made it easier for young mothers to stay at home when their children are young would be just as popular. According to the Government’s Childcare And Early Years Survey, 37 per cent of women with children under four would give up work completely to look after their children, and 65 per cent would like to work fewer hours if they could afford it.

What about the generations? The idea that baby boomers and those just a little older had it easy with free university, good pensions and cheap houses to buy forgets that they also experienced deindustrialisation and the first mass unemployment since the war. Moreover, until the Eighties, fewer than 10 per cent of school leavers went to university, and most of those generous pensions were in the public sector.

There was no internet or cheap air travel when the boomers were young, but there was lead in petrol and you were more likely to die in a road accident. It was much harder to rent privately, so buying houses was the only option, and those growing up more recently have enjoyed lower income tax and a big increase in transfer payments to people of working age with children. Boomer women faced more bias in jobs and much more harassment when they were young, and older boomers have had to suffer the failings of our under-financed elderly care system.

Finally, one example where things are worse than assumed concerns social class. Everyone knows – because we are constantly being told – that the tripling of university tuition fees in 2012 had no impact on people going on to further education from lowerincome backgrounds, whose numbers kept rising. Yet that has been true only of young people going straight from school; the participation of mature students from low-income backgrounds fell off a cliff. If you include part-timers, there has been an overall 16 per cent fall in the number of students from disadvantaged areas since 2012.

So watch out for those invisible gravitational forces of opinion formation – all those things you “know” ain’t necessarily so.

David Goodhart works at Policy Exchange and is author of ‘Head, Hand, Heart’ (Penguin, September)