July 24, 2004

by Jamie Whyte


IF YOU have the wrong beliefs in North Korea, the Government will send you to a re-education camp. There you will be presented with the right beliefs and encouraged to embrace them. If you have the wrong friends in Britain, the Government will send you to a re-friending camp. There you will be presented with the right friends and encouraged to embrace them.
That, at least, is the proposal of Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. Mr Phillips thinks Brits do not have enough friends of other races. To correct this, he wants children sent to mixed-race summer camps where they will learn to love all the peoples of the world.

Mr Phillips got his idea about the inadequate racial diversity of our friends from a YouGov poll. It reveals that more than half of whites have no non-white friends and that only 20 per cent of whites have a Muslim friend. These statistics alarm Mr Phillips, but they should not. The problem is not racism; it is just that there are not enough non-whites to go around.

Consider Pakistanis. They make up just 1 per cent of the UK population, 92 per cent of which is white. For every white to have a Pakistani friend, the average Pakistani would need at least 92 white friends. That is surely too much to ask even of the friendliest Pakistani. Suppose every Pakistani had five white friends. Any anti-racism campaigner should be content. Yet the shocking statistics would persist: 95 per cent of whites would still have no Pakistani friend.

TO AVOID being foolishly shocked by statistics, it helps to understand them. Better sums would also help Mr Phillips to see the futility of his summer camps.

The average camp of 100 children will have ninety-two whites, two Indians, two blacks, one Pakistani and three “others”. A child who made two genuine friends in a few weeks at camp would be doing well. Given the camp’s ethnic composition, however, these two friends would most probably be white.

Perhaps Mr Phillips intends his camps to include a disproportionate number of non-whites: 50 per cent, say. Alas, that could be achieved only by leaving out most whites, or by making non-whites attend 12 times as many camps as whites. If camps were two weeks long, that would be 24 weeks a year at re-friending camps for non-whites.

Leaping from a faulty interpretation of statistics to radical proposals for social engineering is characteristic of the Left. Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, recently declared that admissions to Oxford and Cambridge were unfairon the basis of a simple statistic. Athough only 10 per cent of students attend private secondary schools, they make up 50 per cent of admissions to Oxbridge. Obviously unfair, no?

No. An admission process is fair if it considers nothing but the applicant’s academic ability. Even Labour ministers never publicly deny this principle. Oxbridge aims to admit the most able 2 per cent of students. The fair percentage of admissions from private schools depends on what portion of the most able students are educated in them. If it is 50 per cent, then Oxbridge admissions are just right.

Mr Clarke is committed to the view that less than half the most able students attend private schools. But how does he know? He has never provided any evidence. In circumstances of such ignorance, however, he should not go around threatening universities which do not increase their intake of students from “non-traditional” (ie, non-wealthy) backgrounds with £500,000 fines.

Nor should Mr Phillips have us all sent to re-friending camps. For, even if the proposal were not based on wonky reasoning, it is really none of Mr Phillip’s business who our friends are.

Jamie Whyte is author of Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking