I am not sure if Charles Murray’s thesis has ever been refuted particularly well. It is perfectly consistent to say that blacks have been unfairly discriminated against AND that, purely from a population perspective, they have lower average IQ. And would it really surpise that many people to hazard that jews have a higher than average IQ (the same of which can be said of ethnic chinese too)? It doesn’t really mean much. You still need to treat everyone as individuals and respect them as having the same rights.

So it seems like your kicking up some mud in this post without really digging into the actual issues.

“Have the Tories collectively lost their minds over the summer?”

Not if the latest MORI poll is anything to go by. What winds up the Left doesn’t necessarily wind up the masses. I suspect over 90% of people haven’t even heard of Charles Murray.

So it seems like your kicking up some mud in this post without really digging into the actual issues.

You want me to spend time refuting the Bell Curve even though it’s been done already?

I suspect over 90% of people haven’t even heard of Charles Murray.

Not a particularly good excuse is it?

I’m sorry, but this is a hilariously poor attempt at a hit job. (It’s interesting that the quotes you put up here are precisely the ones on Murray’s wikipedia page – how long did it take you to cook this up, all of 30 seconds?) Murray is a serious and well-renowned scholar – whether or not you agree with him – particularly on issues of welfare (his Losing Ground was enormously influential, and is even said to have inspired the Clinton welfare reforms.)

The Bell Curve is more controversial (and it’s possible Portillo didn’t mention it because, you know, it was irrelevant to a point about welfare), but from conversations with people who work in this area I gather that despite the very many attacks it has generated, the main theses have hardly been touched. This whole topic is the left’s version of creationism, a politically motivated denial of science for no other reason that the truth may be found to be unpalatable.

‘You want me to spend time refuting the Bell Curve even though it’s been done already?’

Actually, I’d like to see you do that.

I could, easily, and Unity and a couple of others here could do so without breaking stride, but you’ve never given any indication that you understand statistics.

From Murray and Herrnstein’s conclusion to The Bell Curve : “If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or the environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a particularly good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with this issue. What might the mix be ? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not justify an estimate.”

Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, from which the above Murray quote is taken, has this to say about stuff like Sunny’s “He said Jehovah !” conniptions. He quotes Geoffrey Miller’s review of another controversial science work :

“it has already suffered the worst possible fate for a popular science book. Like The Descent of Man and The Bell Curve, it has become an ideological touchstone … Viewed sociologically, turning books into ideological touchstones can be useful. People can efficiently sort themselves out into like-minded cliques without bothering to read or think. However, there can be more to human discourse than ideological self advertisement”

That’s Sunny, that is !

“despite the very many attacks it has generated, the main theses have hardly been touched”

There’s a review of the critics by this Harvard researcher which generally supports that view.

“Since The Bell Curve, intelligence is stronger than ever as a scientific concept, but as unwelcome as ever as an issue in polite society.”

“In the case of The Bell Curve, a special committee set up by the American Psychological Association to report on the basic science eventually backed all of the book’s main claims, as did an open letter signed by several dozen of the nation’s most qualified intelligence researchers.”

I suppose I also need to lay out the stats for climate change otherwise I should never publish anything on that either.

This article isn’t a hit-job – it is pointing out something that will may be interesting. Now I don’t expect everyone to agree with me but there it is.

You take it or you leave it.

I see Summy’s done some deep research – on Wikipedia !

Murray’s stuff on social policy and the underclass is excellent. But painful for those with delicate sensibilities. However, President Clinton seems to have taken note – hence 1996s welfare reforms.

When The Sunday Times first asked me to look at the British underclass in 1989, the American underclass was about 15 to 20 years ahead of Britain’s. You were tracking the American experience with remarkable fidelity then and you are still tracking it.

From the beginning I have used the simple-minded assumption that Britain 16 years on would look like America did when I was writing, and that’s more or less the way things have worked out. Nothing about the underclass is rocket science. It’s all basic, the kind of thing our grandparents took for granted. It just has to be rephrased to accommodate today’s delicate sensibilities.

Our grandparents thought bastardy was a problem to be avoided at any cost. Today’s translation: children who grow up without being nurtured by two biological parents are at risk. Poverty isn’t the problem. Inadequate educational opportunities aren’t the problem. Social exclusion isn’t the problem.

Throughout history, societies around the world have been poor, with inadequate educational opportunities and with socially excluded people. Those same societies have been remarkably successful at ensuring that almost all children came into the world with two biological parents committed to their care. That’s the difference between societies with small underclasses (for every society has had an underclass) and with large ones….

Our grandparents thought you couldn’t “do” with a youngster who wasn’t brought up right. Today’s translation: social programmes for intervening with children at risk have consistently meagre results. This finding has even longer shelves of analysis than the literature on the children of single parents.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Americans tried everything: pre-school socialisation programmes, enrichment programmes in elementary schools, programmes that provided guaranteed jobs for young people without skills, ones that provided on-the-job training, programmes that sent young people without skills to residential centres for extended skills training and psychological preparation for the world of work, programmes to prevent school dropout, and so on. These are just the efforts aimed at individuals. I won’t even try to list the varieties of programmes that went under the heading of “community development”. They were also the most notorious failures.

We know the programmes didn’t work because all of them were accompanied by evaluations. I was a programme evaluator from 1968 to 1981. The most eminent of America’s experts on programme evaluation — a liberal sociologist named Peter Rossi — distilled this vast experience into what he called the Iron Law of Evaluation: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large-scale social programme is zero.” The Iron Law has not been overturned by subsequent experience….

The bottom line for this accumulation of experience in America is that it is impossible to make up for parenting deficits through outside interventions. I realise this is still an intellectually unacceptable thing to say in Britain. It used to be intellectually unacceptable in the United States as well. No longer. We’ve been there, done that.

Well this is slightly different from the climate change debate, as the current state of scientific evidence seems to be somewhat more out of step with the political consensus. By quoting a scholar’s views as if they were self-damning, you are doing very little but reinforce a bunch of fairly arbitrary ideological battle lines.

To be fair to you, Sunny, I don’t think you’re as daft as you often appear. You have a perfectly clear aim in mind – to smear the Tories as racist, for presumably party political reasons. Trouble is you’re not too fussy about how you do it.

Laban Tall – you’ll be glad then that VDare agree with you.

Here’s something that you may want to read. Generally, I think IQ tests are a silly measure of intelligence.
http://goinside.com/98/3/postmod.html

to smear the Tories as racist, for presumably party political reasons

I have no problem with people using perfectly intelligent arguments about why unemployment is bad.
I’m used to very rich Tories who have no idea of living in the dole saying that the unemployed are lazy fuckers who sit around on their butts because they don’t want work. That is standard Tory rhetoric.

I object to use the author of the Bell Curve being used to justify that kind of stupidity as if it has scientific logic behind it.

Hate to rain on anyone’s parade, but the hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews tend to have IQs above the mean is not new, and not by any means restricted to Murray. In fact, it’s a well-attested observation, though not by any means universally accepted, of course, and actively challenged by some.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_intelligence

I’ve no interest in defending Charles Murray, whose “Bell Curve” I have not read, but his thesis about the elevated IQ scores of that particular ethnic group is not the smartest choice of target.

This is weak – though not as weak as trying to smear Portillo as a racist on the basis of something someone else wrote.

Here’s what I found on that paper Mr E:

Ascribing an ethnic or racial explanation to any trait more ambiguous than skin color is by definition a dangerous idea, the kind of notion that can seep into the political arena with disastrous consequences. Institutionalized racism has always found sanction in the scientific community, from eminent biologist Louis Agassiz’s racial typologies justifying slavery in the 1850s, to the Nazi scientists’ depraved use of calipers to establish Jewish inferiority, to psychologist Arthur Jensen’s call in the sixties to stop funding Head Start because most of its poor, black recipients were intrinsically uncoachable.

We may consider ourselves the products of a new, more enlightened age, and scientists may carry on with more sensitivity than they did in the past. Yet to invoke the genome as an explanation for anything more complicated than illness or the most superficial traits (like skin color) is still considered taboo, as Harvard president Larry Summers discovered when he suggested the reason for so few female math and science professors might lurk in scribbles of feminine DNA (rather than, say, the hostile climes of the classroom, the diminished expectations of women’s parents, or a curious cultural receptivity to Pamela Anderson’s charms).

For this reason, and the fact that it did not meet the standards of traditional scientific scholarship, Harpending and Cochran’s paper attracted a barrage of criticism from mainstream geneticists, historians, and social scientists.

From: http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/1478/

A Sunny Hundal post (almost ANY Sunny Hundal post) in 7 stages:

1. Sunny hears about an argument that challenges his conventional left-liberal view of the world.
2. Rather than read into the matter at all, Sunny Googles the name of the author or speaker in question and finds any smear-job, no matter how ignorant, stupid and nasty. Said smear-job almost certainly fails to challenge the author/speaker on the facts.
3. Sunny recycles the smear-job into a blog post, spluttering with outrage: “Amazingly, [incredibly stupid smear-job] wasn’t even mentioned!”
4. Patient commentators try to point Sunny towards other writers who present evidence that his own views on this issue, and on the person he is trying to smear, are less than fully informed.
5. Sunny immediately Googles the name of these writers and finds any smear-job, no matter how ignorant, stupid and nasty. Said smear-job almost certainly fails to challenge the author/speaker on the facts.
6. Patient commentators either give up in disgust or persist in trying to present their evidence.
7. Sunny removes every vowels from all the posts by these ptnt cmmnttrs, s tht hs ncrdbly gnrnt vws cn g n nchllngd …

A Sunny Hundal post (almost ANY Sunny Hundal post) in 7 stages:

I see the Tory trolls have nothing better to do today.

Sunny – I know we’re both busy people, but I actually took out time to read the Harvard researcher’s report before I quoted from it (but got the link wrong).

I then read the ‘debunking’ link you posted – by William Mathews. When I got as far as his four ‘very questionable premises which they simply do not discuss much less defend’ I realised that premise 3 did not actually describe Murray’s views (see the quote I first posted), and 1, 2, and 4 were dealt with in the Harvard link.

But thanks for the Steve Sailer link – interesting stuff and he has a sense of humour. I liked the quote from Murray about Richard Herrstein :

We had been musing about the warning shots the prospective book had already drawn and the heavy fire that was sure to come. The conversation began to depress me, and I said, ‘Why the hell are we doing this, anyway?’

“Dick recalled the day when, as a young man, he had been awarded tenure. It was his dream fulfilled—a place in the university he so loved, the chance to follow his research wherever it took him, economic security. For Dick, being a tenured professor at Harvard was not just the perfect job, but the perfect way to live his life.

“It was too good to be true; there had to be a catch. What’s my part of the bargain? he had asked himself.

“’And I figured it out,’ he said, looking at me with that benign, gentle half-smile of his. ’You have to tell the truth.’

and btw, Vdare agree with me so much they link to my blog, or so I believe … I’m not an IQ fanatic one way or the other – in 3,000-odd blog posts I don’t remember ever posting about it.

But what’s this about ‘a huge favourite with race supremacists’ ?

According to that vdare link you posted the people with the highest IQs are Jewish or East Asian. Are you saying all Murray’s supporters are Greater Israel or Greater Japan merchants ?

Is this post further evidence that Sunny is in fact a double agent working for the Tories?

“This is weak – though not as weak as trying to smear Portillo as a racist on the basis of something someone else wrote.”

They say you can judge a man by the company he keeps.

20
Hitler often made reference to ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, indeed it was a staple reference for most 19th century anti-semites
Quoting another’s work can enable you to say the same thing without actually having to take responsibility for the content.

16
“you have to tell the truth”
I wonder whose truth that might be’ and yes, I have a benign half-smile on my face as I write this post.

The problem for Sunny, unfortunately, is that it is far harder for those in thrall to identity politics and multiculturalism refute Murray’s and Hernnstein’s claims. The Bell curve was a huge unwieldy set of facts and figures which managed to disguise the bullshit it was pedalling largely because it could “legitimately” use a conservative brand of multiculturalism thanks to the groundwork already put in by liberal cultural pluralists. They looked at the liberal worldview of identity, diversity and celebration of difference, axiomatic to the antiracists, and used its tenets to investigate distinct self-affirming ‘populations’ on the basis of ‘bio-diversity’.

They could ignore the scientific reality which clearly demonstrated the fact that there is no remotely sound genetic basis for the designation of a group called “African American” because liberal cultural pluralists had spent years hammering home the fact that there was. What’s more, Murray wasn’t even trying to arrive at the conclusion which was headlined on publication of the Bell Curve…he was trying to prove an equally contentious and misguided view: that American society was “meritocratic”; that affluent Americans were inherently more intelligent than poor Americans. Conservatives loved it not for its ‘racial’ findings but for the illusion of ‘natural justice’ and ‘legitimacy’ with which economic inequality in US society was endowed.

The reason it could do this, in stark refutation of the genetic evidence to the contrary, was that cultural pluralists insisted on the promotion and preservation of distinct racial groupings. Surprise, surprise…poor Americans, white and black fared markedly worse that affluent Americans on IQ tests. Since many more black Americans are poor and insist, or have it insisted on their behalf, that they are a distinct racial group, Murray and Hernnstein could confidently assert, regardless of any objective evidence, that black Americans were less intelligent than whites.

Now we have the same going on in the UK. There is clear, unequivocal evidence that the least affluent sectors of society (black and white and particularly boys) under-perform at school. Since such sectors contain a disproportionate number of blacks(and Bangladeshis), what lessons have we drawn? The natural, sensible, and all too understandable conclusion that on average academic attainment bears a clear correlation to parental income? Oh No! Too easy. That white Britons are more intelligent than black? No..our academics aren’t as biased as Murray? We decided that teachers discriminate against black boys.

We only do this because we share the same obsession with identity and diversity. We have to find explanations which speak in terms in different cultural and racial groupings because they have become a solid fixture in the political landscape. Rather than tackle economic inequality as a whole and its inevitable symptoms, we explain those symptoms in terms of diversity. It’s fuckin madness.

Not only does this emphasis on diversity hinder social justice by allowing governments to appease and placate different groups on an occasional piecemeal basis rather than tackle the real substantial issues, it fosters division, suspicion and the rise of the far right. We need a return to a universalist stance. In short…we need the proper Labour party back. NuLabour is destroying the working class while maintaining a patina of progressiveness by simply chucking the odd “cultural” or racial grouping the odd bone while selling us all down the river to the corporate elite. Cultural pluralism and diversity is killing us all.

The influence of ethnicity on IQ and educational achievement is evidently complicated:

“Government figures show only 15% of white working class boys in England got five good GCSEs including maths and English last year. . . Poorer pupils from Indian and Chinese backgrounds fared much better – with 36% and 52% making that grade respectively.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7220683.stm

Oddly, Bushist economist Greg Mankiw has been saying the same thing over in the US.

Paul Krugman responded with:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/heredity-environment-justice/

With more coverage here: http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/08/greg_mankiw_hearts_genetic_det.html

and here:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/08/if-you-are-so-rich-why-arent-you-smart.html

A more specific piece on the Bell Curve by statistician Cosma Shalizi:

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html

I think that Portillo is the acceptable face of Toryism these days.
I’m not sure what the point of this post was. That because he quotes Charles Murray, that he’s somewhow giving a nod and a wink to Murray’s Bell Curve book?

That like Enoch Powell, Murray should be considered a non-person and should not be quoted on anything else he might have said.

”State handouts devalued education, discouraged work and marriage, encouraged teenage pregnancy and undermined parental authority”

That idea from Portillo is certainly a conservative one, but I think it at least is worthy of discussion.
This guy (John McWhorter) also thinks excessive welfarism was a major factor in bringing about the implosion in African Americin communities after the late 1960’s.

But he’s considered a conservative too, so maybe his views don’t count either.
http://www.onpointradio.org/2006/01/john-mcwhorter

That NPR programme is well worth giving a listen though.

Monkeyfish: “We need a return to a universalist stance. In short…we need the proper Labour party back.”

We need liberalism (which is as much as to say a univeralist stance). Proper, colour-blind, gender-blind, money-blind liberalism as opposed to Liberal Conspiracy liberalism. I am not sure the Labour party have ever made any pretence to wishing to provide this at any point in their history.

Economic depression and dialogue about race has become a depressing pattern within liberal democracies. Portillo’s comment may have sounded ‘off the cuff” but believe me it wasn’t. Liberalism is quite happy to allow conservative ideas to flourish whenever its’ sacred cow (capitalism) flounders.The BNP becomes the state’s friend as it distracts attention towards ethnic minorities’
Any discussion about social and economic problems which doesn’t have the word ‘class’ in it,is sterile.

#We need liberalism (which is as much as to say a univeralist stance). Proper, colour-blind, gender-blind, money-blind liberalism as opposed to Liberal Conspiracy liberalism. I am not sure the Labour party have ever made any pretence to wishing to provide this at any point in their history.#

Well, we’d have to differ on what the Labour party might once have stood for, but can you think of another mainstream party that came closer to aspiring to deliver your formulation of liberalism?

Interesting how -in typical rightwing fashion- a succession of trolls here have been mudding waters with generous helpings of red herring to the point that we’re not talking about Charles Murray’s abhorrent views and Portillo’s endorsement of the same, but on a series of lazy and useless ad hominem attacks on Sunny.

Sunny has done well to highlight Portillo’s clanger. Charles Murray represents the most vulgar right-wing ideologue of the last 30 years. If you agree with what Murray stands for then you can take Cameron’s la la brand of Modern Conservatism and shove it up Osborne’s bum.

Some people here have been going on about “googling” and “wikipediaing”, but if only they had the attention span of doing that themsleves, they would discover a few very simple truth’s about Murray’s view of the world.

Some clues: the culture of dependency (get rid of ALL benefits and poor families should give their babies up for adoption, something not even John Redwood has been saying as openly); “dysgenesis” (there is a downward pressure on average intelligence in the U.S. because black families have more children than white families, and black children are – according to Murray – less intelligent than white children).

No racist would ever come up and say “I’m racist”, not even a BNP member. But Murray’s work is blighted by racist overtones. If some 21st century Modernised Tories want to start quoting Charles Murray as a beacon of wisdom then go ahead, but it will soon turn out another spectacular own-goal like Daniel Hannan’s on the NHS.

I’m not quite sure what your point is here :

Is it the old “Hitler liked Wagner and Hitler was a Nazi, therefore anyone who listens to Wagner is a Nazi” argument (a logic which could be applied to anything and is therefore meaningless) to anyone who’s read a “controversial” piece of reasearch on intelligence ?

Are you offering a scientific refutation (as opposed to an emotive one) to a genetic basis for intelligence, even though, despite what Sunny appears to beleive, it has never been convincingly (i.e scientifically) refuted and then even pre bell curve, most scientistist agreed that up to 80% of intelligence is hereditary ?

Or are you just ranting becuse someone is questioning the “All welfare is by definition good” mantra ?

[31] actually Claude I think Laban Tall makes some very interesting points – I think we dismiss reasoned discussion at out peril.

Personally, I would like to see an end to the prefix ‘black’ or ‘gay and lesbian’ (for various groups) although how people choose to label themselves is a matter entirely for them.

Mind you, don’t be surprised if this his sort of thing simmers just below the surface if we continue to obsess about a single characteristic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbHWBEcJZsk&feature=related

Charles Murray’s work is read and studied at most criminology and sociology departments in the land. (The Emerging British Underclass, Underclass: the crisis deepens, Losing Ground).

Mr Portillo is no more a racist for having read them and commented on them than was my criminology professor. You can criticise his works – I can assure you that academia does – but you can’t ignore them.

Good comments, Laban.

“We’re now being asked to listen to Charles Murray on welfare policy.”

Yes, of course. The man has come out with an extraordinarily good proposal.

Here’s Crooked Timber discussing it (a lefty blog by academics: you know, lefties who are actually capable of thinking).

http://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/01/charles-murrays-in-our-hands-left-or-right/

“So, are you ready for a rave review of Charles Murray’s latest book, In Our Hands, on Crooked Timber (yes, that Charles Murray)? Its a book that just about anyone interested in policy ideas ought to be read; I recommend it highly and without reservation. There, that’s that out of the way.
…..

The book is a beautifully written defense of this simple proposal, arguing that it will have benign effects on poverty alleviation, marriage, family life, and work-life balance and, unusually, putting some figures on the proposal. If his figures are right then not only would the static-state consequences reduce poverty, but they would also reduce inequality.”
…

He’s advocating a citizen’s basic income. As others from Hayek and Friedman through inummerable lefties and good old Tom Paine himself has suggested.

That the man has some ideas about IQ which you think are racist has no influence at all on whether his ideas on welfare reform are a good idea or not.

Claude,

It’s simply false to say that Murray wants to “get rid of ALL benefits,” and for all your complaints about complaints about Google and Wikipedia, you could have found out in 10 seconds of searching that he actually supports a substantial universal basic income. I get why he is so demonized on the left, but it is a real shame that we can’t even talk about him without people making up shit.

“That idea from Portillo is certainly a conservative one, but I think it at least is worthy of discussion.”

As far as I can tell, you’ve just challenged the whole raison d’etre of this site. Sunny Hundal has even less time for liberals who believe in this than for conservatives.

@36 Dan:

Alas I had to study the fucker and his Manichean views of life at University.
Murray thinks a solution to the development of the underclass is to take all (that means ALL) benefits away from single parent families.

Like I mentioned above, Muuray argues that those who cannot afford their families should give their babies up for adoption. How do you call that? How would you call it if you found out that happened in Nazi Germany or Ceaucescu’s Romania or Stalin’s USSR? Surely you’d wince in horror, wouldn’t you?

May I add another thing. Murray could do with a solid year, 365 days, working at Maccie D’s, flat out, then I’d love to ask him about “the meaning of work in our lives” and “being unwilling to take jobs that are available to him”.

“Murray thinks a solution to the development of the underclass is to take all (that means ALL) benefits away from single parent families.”

He does? Then how come he wrote a great big book about having a citizen’s basic income then?

Perhaps “he did”….but not “he does”.

Worstall, you’ll have to ask the moron directly. Perhaps either :
a) he speaks out of his arse and contradicts himself
or:
b) chunks of society i.e. the idle, the ugly, the bad and the single parent would be excluded from state handouts.

Also:
@35 Worstall:
That the man has some ideas about IQ which you think are racist has no influence at all on whether his ideas on welfare reform are a good idea or not.

Well…how about…I’m a veggie but I’d rather not use notorious vegetarian Adolf Hitler as an example if I wanted to explain why going veggie may be a good idea. You know what I mean, dont you?

How’s UKIP doing btw?

“Muuray argues that those who cannot afford their families should give their babies up for adoption. How do you call that? How would you call it if you found out that happened in Nazi Germany or Ceaucescu’s Romania or Stalin’s USSR? Surely you’d wince in horror, wouldn’t you?”

But that’s effectively what happens anyway, it’s just called “being taken into care”.

“But that’s effectively what happens anyway, it’s just called “being taken into care”.”

No, or not in the UK anyway. Any social services dept who took a child into care purely because of financial problems alone would be in big trouble with the courts.

And when Murray talks about being able to ‘afford’ families I think he means without social security payments.

Munro, call your bluff, I reckon you’re a proper leftie with an A2 of Tony Benn hanging on your bedroom wall.

(incidentally…interesting how as soon as you mention Murray’s most hideous ideas his defenders either go quiet or claim that he no longer believes in that shit. Except that Michael Portillo repeatedly quoted Murray’s 1980s’ view of the world).

(incidentally…interesting how as soon as you mention Murray’s most hideous ideas his defenders either go quiet or claim that he no longer believes in that shit. Except that Michael Portillo repeatedly quoted Murray’s 1980s’ view of the world).

What hideous ideas did you have in mind? Saying that those who cannot afford children should voluntarily give them up for adoption doesn’t seem exactly on the scale of Nazi Germany or Ceaucescu’s Romania or Stalin’s USSR to me. You also say that Murray would take away all benefits away from single parent families, but given that you have quoted no evidence showing this and given that he has a book which is explicitly premised on a universal unconditional basic income, I’ll take the accusation with a pinch of salt.

Over the past few weeks we have seen a tory attack the NHS, without which, many of the poor would surely die. Portillo covertly and indirectly recommends the view of a writer who supports the notion of ‘inferior racial groups’.
The same author suggests that families who cannot afford children should give them up. When you hear the word ‘sterilization’. get very very frightened.

“Over the past few weeks we have seen a tory attack the NHS, without which, many of the poor would surely die.”

Really? The NHS is the only manner possible of delivering health care to the poor? Perhaps the Danish or Swedish systems, which rely upon the counties raising and spending the money would be better? Or the German, where there is a mix of for profit, not for profit and state owned supply but all paid for through the state? Or the French with their mix of public and private insurance?

Or Singapore, or the US, or Norway, or, in fact, the medical system of absolutely any OECD country?

It is *possible* that the NHS is the best compromise available amongst all of the competing goals (advances in medical treatment, no waiting times, universal coverage, a cap on total system cost etc, etc, etc) but that is a case that has to be made.

The assumption that without the NHS the poor would get no health care is simply ludicrous. No other country has anything like the NHS and yet their poor get health care. QED.

Quick quiz, which commentator criticised Murray for advocating policies which would “effectively starve poor women and children back into marriage” ?

Melanie Phillips.

http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:vBg4kpH7qYsJ:www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/cw33.pdf+charles+murray+lone+parent+families&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk

“I favour eliminating benefits forunmarried women altogether (for potential new entrants, while keeping the Faustian bargain we have made with women already on the system).

The welfare of society requires that women actively avoid getting pregnant if they have no husband, and that women once again demand marriage from a man who would have them bear a child. The only way the active avoidance and the demands are going to occur is if child bearing entails economic penalties for a single woman.”

Charles Murray, Underclass: the crisis deepens, 1994

46
you didn’t read my post properly, I said without the NHS, the poor would surely die, as the UK has only the NHS to serve them this is surely true. What other countries will do to address their economic and demographic problems I do not know, but the discrimination in healthcare against the elderly, extended now to smokers and those who may be overweight is blatant.
This, of course, is a class issue and so too (mostly) is the issue of single-parents
Where else do you think the state is going to address the pension problems, rising welfare benefits and healthcare demand – attacking the middle-classes or the aristocracy or middle-class professionals from ethnic backgrounds – I don’t think so.,

No other country has anything like the NHS

This is obviously untrue (a user of the Spanish healthcare system writes). Tim can’t tell “anything” from “exactly”, or more likely, doesn’t care to.

As I re-read Portillo’s Sunday Times piece, something crossed my mind:

Referring to Britain’s welfare system, Portillo writes: “State handouts devalued education, discouraged work and marriage, encouraged teenage pregnancy and undermined parental authority.”

But if generous welfare systems are to be blamed for such dysfunctionalities, why is it that continental Europe (with, generally, a more comprehensive and generous social security system than Britain) hasn’t produced the same dysfunctionalities as the UK i.e. teenage pregnancy, single parenthood, mental levels of alcohol consumption, etc?

“But if generous welfare systems are to be blamed for such dysfunctionalities, why is it that continental Europe (with, generally, a more comprehensive and generous social security system than Britain) hasn’t produced the same dysfunctionalities as the UK i.e. teenage pregnancy,”

Well, one answer, in one country, would be that in the Dutch system you don’t in fact get a flat and benefits as a teenage mum. You get to stay home with your own mum and get a little bit of extra help on top of that.

Incentives do matter, after all.

Another explanation might be that the Dutch (on average) start having sex a year later than the English. Abstinence does work you see.

Or it could be the absence of a national curriculum on sex education.

While reminding our UKIP friend that the Dutch are extremely liberal on sex education (a fact admitted by Portillo in person while on TV programme This Week a while back), it is also worth mentioning that certain governments PAY up to half the rent to anybody under the age of 30 in Europe (provided that their income does not exceed around 20,000 Euros a year) and that’s regardless of whether they work or not.

Single parents get extra points as they queue for council flats in most Western European countries too. French, Spanish, Italian and German teenagers dont get routinely rat-arsed to the level of British ones, so any overly simplistic finger-pointing at the UK welfare state is in need of a rethink.

I was lucky enough to have the time to write a full rebuttal to Portillo’s article as well as some of the comments to Sunny’s OP.