A boy of 14 stabbed on a bus — another victim invisible to elites
Something in Britain is broken but a ruling class dominated by the comfortable too often fails to notice
On Tuesday, Kelyan Bokassa was murdered. Stabbed on the upper deck of the 472 bus, in the middle of the afternoon, as it travelled down Woolwich Church Street in south London. The most striking thing about this awful crime wasn’t the tearful tributes from his mother and teachers. Or the grim details of the 14-year-old’s life that she and others provided: groomed by gangs from the age of six; living on the streets for a year; turning up on her doorstep sick, underweight and tattooed; the time in care; the looming court date for possession of a machete. It wasn’t even that his attackers didn’t bother to cover their faces. It was that they were, reportedly, both teenagers too.
The headlines last week were — thanks to Elon Musk — dominated by the rape gang scandal first exposed by Andrew Norfolk of The Times. An awful lot of people have been asking why the scandal was ignored for so long. And there is a simple answer. Yes, a lot of well-meaning, middle-class people were terrified of being thought to be racist. But even once the scandal was exposed, the victims were largely invisible. It had happened to them, not to us.
It’s the same when it comes to knife crime. In 2022-23, of the 244 people killed by “sharp instruments” 26 per cent were black, more than six times the share of the population. Of those, 40 per cent were under 25, versus 24 per cent for white victims of the same crime. Yet for most of us — at least most of us reading The Sunday Times — gang violence is something done by other people to other people.
Kelyan Bokassa’s story is heartbreaking, but unutterably distant from our day-to-day concerns.
And it’s not just crime. There are all kinds of statistics that show how divided we are as a nation. One in nine schoolchildren in Newham, a borough in east London, are classified as homeless. The richest parents are more than twice as likely to be married as the poorest. There are huge variations in employment rates, levels of family breakdown, even life expectancy.
This isn’t just about pockets of deprivation, but a wider malaise. Fraser Nelson pointed out in a recent Channel 4 documentary that sickness benefit approvals and renewals have now passed 3,000 a day, up threefold since the pandemic. About 3.2 million people are “on the sick” — in particular in places like Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester, where roughly a fifth of people are on some kind of out-of-work benefit. Welfare dependency, knife crime, antisocial behaviour, derelict high streets — all are concentrated where the middle classes don’t see them.
Sometimes such low-income communities are neglected by politicians: a striking report from the Stonehaven consultancy recently found that all the constituencies that swung to Reform had a “missing” road project, long promised but never built.
But in many cases they find themselves bearing the brunt of politicians’ decisions. Last year the think tank I run, the Centre for Policy Studies, produced a big report on immigration. One of our most striking findings was how disparate the effects have been. There were constituencies, such as East Ham in London, where only 27 per cent of school pupils had English as their first language; and constituencies, such as Workington in Cumbria, where the figure was 98 per cent. There were places where less than 5 per cent of the population had arrived since 2001, and places where the figure was more than a third.
Inevitably, therefore, experiences of migration had been very different. For the rich it meant cheap labour — in shops, on hospital wards, in their homes. For the poor it meant increased competition for jobs and housing, plus an unprecedented transformation in the communities around them.
Indeed, as the writer Ed West pointed out last week, it has always been the poor who have had more reason to be resentful of mass migration — and had their concerns fobbed off. He tells the story of two women from Barking & Dagenham, which went from 81 per cent white British in the 2001 census to 31 per cent 20 years later. They pleaded with their MP, Margaret Hodge, to “live here for two or three weeks and see what it’s like”. She told them she was there “pretty often”, but “times have changed and we have to move on with them”.
Even when we do make policy for the left-behind, it is often laced with the most patronising of assumptions.
In 2016 I visited New Orleans to study its school system. The city was for a long time home to some of America’s poorest people and worst schools — even before Hurricane Katrina wiped large parts of it off the map. Yet after Katrina something extraordinary had happened. New Orleans rebuilt its school system on the same lines as the academy revolution in England — handing power to head teachers and school chains, rather than imposing top-down control. The result was a flourishing of brilliant schools that were unapologetic about demanding the highest standards from the worst off.
At Samuel J Green Charter School — 95 per cent African-American, 95 per cent on free school meals — the walls were plastered with pictures of the first black president, the first black senator and so on. Even the year groups were named after the date the kids would graduate from university — historically a foreign concept. City-wide, standards soared and failure plummeted.
It may seem a long way from charter schools in Louisiana to a stabbing on the 472. But the education reformers in New Orleans, and their allies in England, shared a sense of moral mission: a belief that high standards, knowledge and discipline shouldn’t just be for the middle classes. That you helped the worst off not by pandering to them, but by giving them the same opportunities, structures and support as their better-off peers.
This is why I was so upset about the last government’s failure to make reversing the scandalous rates of post-Covid truancy a national crusade. And it’s why I’m even more upset about the new government’s education plans. So much of the coverage has been about the taxation of private schools. But far more corrosive, as Michael Gove has argued, is what is being done to free schools and academies, not least via the new schools bill. Reasserting Whitehall control over everything from salaries to school uniforms.
Cancelling funding for new free schools, or for academy chains that want to take over their struggling counterparts. Rewriting the curriculum to make it less challenging and more “diverse”. Taking responsibility for failing schools away from visionary educators and handing it to civil servants. Giving unions everything, and parents nothing.
The murder of Kelyan Bokassa — and the rape gang scandal — show that something in Britain is broken. That a ruling class dominated by the comfortable too often fails to notice the travails of those who are not. How depressing that Labour is sabotaging one of the few programmes that is doing anything to help.
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