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Underclass + 10 Underclass + 10 Underclass + 10 Charles Murray and the British Underclass 1990 - 2000 Charles Murray Commentary by Melanie Phillips CIVITAS: Institute for the Study of Civil Society in association with The Sunday Times London First published February 2001 Material by Charles Murray © Charles Murray Other material © The Institute for the Study of Civil Society 2001 email: [email protected] All rights reserved ISBN 1-903 386-10-1 Typeset by CIVITAS in New Century Schoolbook Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Trowbridge, Wiltshire Contents Page The Authors vi Foreword David G. Green vii Underclass + 10 Charles Murray 1 What About the Overclass? Melanie Phillips 19 Notes 29 Bibliography 30 v The Authors Charles Murray is the author of Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, 1984; In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, 1988; The Emerging British Underclass, 1990; with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, 1994; and What It Means To Be A Libertarian, 1997. He is the Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy research institute in Washington, DC. Melanie Phillips is a columnist for the Sunday Times who writes about social issues and political culture. She is the author of Divided House, a study of women at Westminster, and co-author with Dr John Dawson of Doctors’ Dilemmas, a primer on medical ethics. Her controversial book All Must Have Prizes (Little, Brown) charted the disastrous effects of our culture of individualism upon the education system and the moral order. Her latest book, The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male (Social Market Foundation) argues that feminism has distorted its own agenda of equal- ity by replacing it with sameness. vi Foreword In 1989 the Sunday Times brought Charles Murray to Britain to investigate whether Britain had an ‘underclass’. In his article, subsequently published in book form as The Emerging British Underclass, Murray described himself as a visitor from a plague area who had come to see whether the disease was spreading. In 1993 he returned to check on its prog- ress, and the resulting article, also for the Sunday Times, was published as Underclass: The Crisis Deepens. Both titles were published with commentar- ies by critics of Murray’s thesis. In the early part of 2000 the Sunday Times pub- lished a further update, allowing Murray to look back over ten years of the underclass debate in Britain. It is re-printed here with a commentary by Sunday Times columnist Melanie Phillips, whose books All Must Have Prizes and The Sex-Change Society have established her as a leading commentator on social and cultural trends. We are very grateful to John Witherow, the Editor of the Sunday Times, for generously allowing us to reproduce Charles Murray’s essay. David G. Green Acknowledgement Cover graphic supplied by the Sunday Times. vii Underclass + 10 Charles Murray s the 1980s came to an end, the Sunday Times Aasked me to come to Britain and look at your social problems through the eyes of an American who had been writing about the American underclass. The questions: Does Britain have an underclass? If so, big or small? Stable, shrinking, or growing? When I wrote in the Magazine that Britain did indeed have an underclass, small but growing, the news had no natural constituency. Conservative politicians were embarrassed that crime, unemploy- ment, and illegitimacy had soared conspicuously on their watch, and would just ‘...the notion of a British as soon have ignored the underclass was whole thing. The Left, ordi- generally dismissed as narily delighted to blame an attempt to impose an anything on Margaret American paradigm on Thatcher, couldn’t admit British problems that that crime really was rising weren’t really so terrible anyway’ and large numbers of people were exploiting the dole without sounding like lower-case conservatives. As for unmarried women having babies, it was a good sign, not a bad one, that 1 2 UNDERCLASS + 10 women were no longer forced into marriage just because they got pregnant. From Left and Right alike, the notion of a British underclass was gener- ally dismissed as an attempt to impose an American paradigm on British problems that weren’t really so terrible anyway. Ten years on, the Britain I had written about in 1989 was a much different place. In 1989, Britain was in the beginnings of recovery after wrenching economic dislocations earlier in the decade; in 1999, Britain was six years into an economic expansion. In 1989, a dominant Tory was at 10 Downing Street and the Labour party was in a shambles; in 1999, that had changed to a dominant Labourite and a Conser- vative party in a shambles. And what had been a nascent underclass in 1989 had by 1999 become one that increasingly resembled, in behaviour and proportional size, the underclass that we have learned to live with in America. Before I make that case, let us be clear on terminol- ogy. By underclass, I do not mean people who are merely poor, but people at the margins of society, unsocialised and often violent. The chronic criminal is part of the underclass, especially the violent chronic criminal. But so are parents who mean well but who cannot provide for themselves, who give nothing back to the neighbourhood, and whose children are the despair of the teachers who have to deal with them. In real life, people seldom fall into neat categories. The dole came into being because many hardworking people were down on their luck and needed a few months of tiding-over. It still serves that purpose for CHARLES MURRAY 3 some people, and they bear no resemblance to the underclass. For that matter, the criminal can be a loyal friend to those he chooses not to assault and rob. The single mother whose children are out of control may be the backbone of her neighbourhood in other ways. But the complexities of individuals do not trump statistical tendencies. My fundamental thesis is that large increases in the three ‘By underclass, I do not indicators I used in 1989— mean people who are merely poor, but people drop-out from the labour force at the margins of soc- among young males, violent iety, unsocialised and crime, and births to unmar- often violent’ ried women—will be associ- ated with the growth of a class of violent, unsocialised people who, if they become sufficiently numerous, will fundamentally degrade the life of society. Where did Britain stand by 1999? Drop-out from the labour force among young adult males is an important indicator that an underclass has formed because it reflects such a clear departure from the age-old norm that young adult males work regularly and work hard—supporting wives and children, siblings or parents, or, at the very least, supporting themselves. But the simple statistic for tracking changes in that norm, the percentage of young men who are not employed, is laden with ambiguities. Young men who are listed as not in employment can be in school, trying unsuccessfully to find a job, idle on the dole, officially on the dole but actually holding a job, or active in the criminal 4 UNDERCLASS + 10 economy. To complicate matters further, changes in the overall health of the economy can mask under- lying changes in the propensity to work. The short story is that the percentage of young working-aged males not in employment was dramati- cally higher in 1999 than it had been in 1989. Among males aged 18-24, the percentage not in employment shot up from 20.5 per cent in 1989 to 31.2 per cent in 1999, an increase of more than half. Judging from the more detailed age breakdowns available through 1997, drop-out from the labour force was largest in the age group that has the fewest excuses for not working, those aged 20-24. There is no obvious benign explanation for these large increases in young males out of employment. A worsening economy is not to blame—the overall national unemployment rate was lower in 1999 than in 1989. The percentage of men aged 18-24 in school did not change appreciably—the increases in people in higher education since 1989 have been concen- trated among young women and among people of both sexes aged 30 and older. Since 1994, the number of men in their twenties who are in higher education has actually been falling. What has been happening? The trend conforms exactly to what one would expect from a growing underclass, but it requires a full- blown analysis by geographic region and condition of prior employment before the numbers can be fully understood. At the very least, the magnitude of the raw increase demands attention. The storyline for violent crime is more transparent. Figure 1 shows the trend lines for violent crime and property crime since 1950. The shaded area high- lights the change in the ten years since my 1989 CHARLES MURRAY 5 assessment of the situation. (Note that in 1999 the Home Office introduced a new method of counting offences that substantially increases the apparent crime rate. Everything that follows is based on the old counting rules.) Figure 1 Does Britain have an underclass? 16 14 12 10 Crime index 1950 =1 8 Violent crime 6 4 Property crime 2 0 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 Source:: Home Office statistics for England and Wales. Trend lines are based on notifiable offences per 100,000 people. In 1989, I observed that a sure way for an American visitor to provoke scornful disbelief was to say that Britain had a higher rate of property crime than the United States.
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