The ethnic minorities are more successful than the English working class because, like the middle class, they have built their own subcultures that challenge the dominant degenerative one. Indeed, they have been encouraged to do so by multiculturalism. Reflecting the huge differences between their societies of origin, these cultures vary widely, but they have one feature in common: immigrants have aspirations. Hence, virtually all these ethnic subcultures are more conducive to social mobility than modern national English culture, the diet only of the English working class. The problem is most acute in northern cities because this is where middle-class culture has least penetration. It is indeed hard to envisage any group characteristic other than culture that would explain the systematic underperformance of the English working-class poor relative to poor and disadvantaged immigrants from Africa and Asia. 

On this diagnosis the demoralised English underclass lacks the cultural resources to save itself. It needs to recover its morale, and it needs to restore functional values such as thrift, hard work, family loyalty and self-help. Unfortunately, these objectives conflict. The simplest way to restore morale is to intensify the respect agenda: affirm the equal value of all behaviours. Yet the only way to enhance the cultural resources of the working class is for the middle class to reclaim national culture. The respect agenda is the more comfortable route, but feeling good about failure will evidently further weaken the incentives for achievement. The full logic of the respect agenda would be to accept the lack of social mobility. But if we are to will the middle-class ends of social achievement, as most surely we should, then we must accept the middle-class means.

A functional national culture is the ultimate public good. Everyone can benefit from it but, as with all public goods, it benefits most those who have the least. A functional national culture disproportionately benefits those whose own subculture cannot equip them with the aspirations necessary for achievement. A key duty of the middle class is to strengthen and promote such a culture which, though built by the middle class, can be shared by all. This happens in all successful societies. But the English middle class now lacks the will to do its job. Having of necessity become largely culturally self-sufficient, it no longer needs a national culture conducive to wellbeing. Of course, it will never accept a dysfunctional working-class culture as its own, and middle-class children will continue to be fed a more useful intellectual diet. Allowing the working class to win the culture war has meant only that the working class can no longer access middle-class culture through the conventional national channels. This is why working-class victory in the class war, while apparently a manifestation of greater social equity, has paradoxically increased inequality.

A national culture is a form of social capital accessible to everyone. It is a menu of imitable stereotypes which supplements the subcultures that endow groups highly unequally. If the national culture becomes worthless, the groups that lose are those whose subcultures are the least conducive to achievement. The middle class can cast its inaction as virtuous: a belated conversion from condescension and racism; an acceptance of diversity; a refusal to be judgmental. But in reality it is indolent, timid and selfish. The middle class has let the working class go hang itself; it is now reaping those ill rewards.