Why no one cares about white working-class boys

Stephen Daisley's column argues that progressive politics has ignored white working-class pupils. In its passage on Rotherham and Rochdale it calls a whole demographic predators on the strength of crimes by particular men in particular towns. A few lines later the column condemns this same kind of aggregation.

Opinion piece: read for false claims of fact and for fairness to the people it names, not for its opinions.

1. Judges a whole people on a few

   Serious

   “The girls were the prey of a demographic which local and national authorities would not allow to be seen as predators”

   Why this matters

   The words "prey of a demographic" and "to be seen as predators" make the predators a whole demographic, Pakistani-heritage people, rather than the men who committed the crimes.

   The impression it gives

   A reader comes away believing that people of Pakistani heritage, as a group, are predators whom the authorities protected from scrutiny.

   The context

   The previous sentence ties the abuse to specific towns and to men who were "mostly" of Pakistani heritage. The crimes were committed by particular men, not by a demographic. The column itself argues that individual conduct should not be treated as a defining quality of strangers who share a skin colour, then does exactly that here.

   How we know

   • Elsewhere in the article“white working-class girls were exploited by mostly Pakistani-heritage men”
   • Elsewhere in the article“would not be hyped up in the aggregate as definitional qualities of strangers who happen to share their skin colour”