They expect all young people to aspire to be kings and queens of ‘the heap’, to sit on its peak and look down on those who failed — those 74% of white British young men on free school meals who did not gain five A-C GCSE grades, including English and Maths in 2012, compared with 60% of young black men and 37% of all other young people on free school meals. Christopher Hope (www.telegraph.co.uk September 3, 2013), quoted Christian Guy, the Director of the Centre for Social Justice, which produced these figures, who said they were “sobering”. They suggest that despite much money and effort white working-class boys are in danger of becoming an educational underclass”.
They must be ‘thick’, and must be made to work, opine those who resent their own place in the work heap. Yet, they are wrong, for many young people take a conscious decision that the work heap is a shit heap, which is not worth climbing. They do not fail to attain five A-C GCSE grades because they have a low IQ, on the contrary, many have the insight to despair of their future prospects if gaining the entry level to ‘the heap’. They understand that over one million young people (their brothers and sisters) have been unemployed in Britain. Being ‘educated’is not the same as being intelligent.
Many of those interviewed in the Reading the Riots study (www2.lse.ac.uk,2011/12/riots), were from the country’s deprived areas, and were pessimistic about their future — 29% disagreed with the statement “life is full of opportunities” — compared with 13% among the general population. Their anger is reflected in the lyrics of the Anti Flag song “No Future”:
“everything that i see
there is no future for me
everything that i read
there is no future for me, for me, for me”.
This anger is part of a European-wide revolt of young people pushed to the edge. They are all labelled as “looters” or “anarchists” in the brainwashing, corporate press, but they are not. They know that their Starbucks coffee is likely to be made by debt-drowning graduate from a third-rate ‘university’. There is a greater supply of university graduates than a demand for them, because most available jobs do not require a university degree, including the much vaunted science ones.