David Cameron, Oxford & Race

Oxford University has hit back at the prime minister after he said only one black UK student began a course there in 2009 and called it "disgraceful".

The university said David Cameron had been "incorrect and highly misleading", and that at least 26 black British undergraduates started that year.

Mr Cameron was answering questions about the effect of raised tuition fees on poorer students.

Downing Street said the figure of one black Caribbean student was accurate.

You have to feel for Oxford University, this is like trying to argue with a 5 year old. Why not simply admit he was mistaken instead of transparently shifting the goalposts to defend a different assertion to the one which was actually made?

It shows that David Cameron is on most things except public spending, not particularly conservative and his basic assumptions are similar to those of David Lammy- whose figures he was using:

- Cherry pick a number that shows a racial disparity.
- Make no effort to investigate why it exists.
- Blame an institution with, no real evidence.

The sad thing is he is accusing real people of doing something vile, in order to win votes even though even a cursory look at the figures shows that Oxbridge has no real case to answer. Of the 30000+ candidates who receive 3 As at A-Level (which is generally the minimum for the two universities in question), around 300 are black. In other words around 1% of eligible British candidates are black which is pretty much reflected in the actual ethnic make up of Oxford and Cambridge.

Masterminding Equality

David Lammy writes about the low number of black students at Oxbridge. I think he underestimates the role of the media in perpetuating stereotypes about black academic performance, for example I remember seeing a comedy sketch featuring a black guy on Mastermind who kept giving comically wrong answers to really easy questions.

Seriously though most of his arguments are demolished in the comments so I won't go over every wrong fact and unsafe assumption- although the fact he uses different definitions of "black" for the number of people who apply and the number accepted is telling. The fact that other minority groups are statistically over represented is also interesting.

However one thing that is always worth remembering is that the differences in academic performance are evident from before children even start school, so it isn't obvious how higher education institutions can have proportional numbers of different groups.

Chutzpah

Noted Labour intellectual, David Lammy, writes:

If we get these things right, Boris will be vulnerable. In 2008 Labour recorded its worst local election results for 40 years. This time, Tory ministers will be overseeing some of the most savage cuts to public services since Margaret Thatcher's time in office. Boris, meanwhile, will have his own record to defend.

Two years ago Boris was an irreverent figure, cycling to City Hall to announce his candidacy. But every day it becomes clearer he is just another politician. He has developed a reputation for reneging on pledges, indulging in cronyism, and dodging responsibility for issues like policing. He has done nothing to ease London's chronic housing shortage, the Olympics risks running way over budget, and he has wasted money on vanity projects. He seems more interested in replacing Cameron than in his own job.

That's right, Labour have been out of office less than a month and he is already using Labour's failures- the Olympic Budget, lack of housing, and the necessity of cuts- to bash his opponents. For a support of Ken Livingstone to denounce mayoral vanity projects is pretty impressive too given that Livingstone decided that London needed its own foreign policy during his tenure.

Lammyentable.

New Labour minister David Lammy recently appeared on Celebrity Mastermind, which is odd since he isn't a celebrity and demonstrated quite conclusively that he isn't a mastermind either.

But Lammy’s tour de force was his assertion that the monarch who succeeded Henry VIII was “Henry VII”. Lammy is Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property.

Yet he thinks that he is qualified to run our lives for us.