White working-class heroes are hard to find

Perhaps you, like me, found an irony in the story about under-achieving white working-class boys being published while the nation was still mourning the late Bernard Manning.

The Sage of Ancoats, who was a white working-class boy, managed by a certain sort of genius to find fame, fortune and a gold Rolls-Royce. Such a route out of poverty is open to few with his disadvantages in life, as the new Joseph Rowntree report reminds us.

Manning was vilified in his life, and even in some of his obituaries, for the universal curse of “racism”. I never met him, but I sense he was neither a stupid nor a wicked man. Indeed, he seems to have been smart enough to realise the hypocrisy of the fact that, to many in society, racism was quite an acceptable practice, provided its victims were white.

That to me seemed to be one of the roots of his humour, rather than his having an instinctive dislike of foreigners simply on account of the fact that they were not like him.

And it is such racism - often white-on-white, as part of our national fetish for self-hatred - that causes boys of 16 to leave school barely literate or numerate, and equipped only for a life of drudgery, unemployment or crime.

Complete text linked below:

Source:
White working-class heroes are hard to find
Telegraph