More troubling though is another example, because in this case the solution does exist — indeed has long been obvious. How Fair is Britain? discovers that "achievement is higher for those pupils whose first language is English when compared to pupils who have English as an additional language".Now I hate to bang an old drum, but when the Bradford head-teacher Ray Honeyford pointed this out in the Salisbury Review almost 30 years ago he was hounded by exactly those people now picking over the educational pile-up he saw coming.
And here we get to the core of the problem. It is no longer the case that our country is filled with elites who do not recognise our problems. And it is no longer the case that they remain unwilling to mention them as it once was. The crippling disaster for 21st-century Britain is that it will not permit itself to mention or even consider the answers to problems that have at last been identified.
Most of the problems the EHRC has identified could be solved by stopping mass immigration, enforcing strict entry requirements to Britain and expelling illegals. It could also be solved by ensuring that anyone who does come into the country has to speak the language and that those here who wish to have access to public services are expected to learn it.
This isn't way-out-there stuff. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has started saying some of it. Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have begun to do some of it. The new Dutch government is likely to go further. But in consensus-politics Britain it is apparently impossible for anyone merely in quango-power even to speak about any of this.
The EHRC boasts that it has a "vision". It says that it is not only there to "challenge discrimination" but to spread that vision. This is a vision of "a society at ease with its diversity, where every individual has the opportunity to achieve their potential and where people treat each other with dignity and respect."
Even if all of this was agreed to be desirable, possible and the job of government it would not follow that the right solutions are the EHRC's. The answers staring everybody in the face are the answers that bodies such as this not only will not but apparently cannot give. How unfair to Britain is the Equality and Human Rights Commission?
