AT A TIME when much of the world is finally facing up to the reality of structural discrimination, the government has cynically been preoccupied with creating a new narrative in which working-class communities are pitted against each other and blamed for the systemic disadvantages they face.

By denying the existence of institutional racism, the government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities was already a slap in the face for African, Asian and minority ethnic communities and all those affected by racism. Its claim that Britain is a world-leading bastion of racial progress was nothing short of state-sanctioned gaslighting.

Yet now this damaging study has an ugly sibling, with the publication of a report published by the Conservative-dominated Commons education committee entitled The Forgotten: How White Working-Class Pupils Have Been Let Down and How to Change It.

The report uses cherry-picked data to claim that “an industry” has emerged to support non-white pupils and that the same is not available to white pupils on free school meals. The report also, farcically, claims that terms such as “white privilege” have contributed towards systemic neglect and underachievement of poor white pupils.