In its editorial today about the report on adoption it commissioned from Martin Narey, now the government's new adoption Czar (God how I hate that word) The Times mentions that only 10% of black children in care are adopted whereas over 33% of white children are, the reason being that local authorities insist on ethnic matching when assessing the suitability of applicants.
The Times and Martin Narey rightly condemn this policy and call for children in care to be placed without regard to ethnicity, but have you noticed that neither of them asks the question that screams to be asked? If the numbers of white and black children ending up in care, and the numbers of white and black parents wishing to adopt, were both roughly proportionate to the respective sizes of our white and black populations, there would be no such discrepancy between the numbers of white and black children being adopted. The fact that there is such a massive discrepancy can only mean either that the scale of black parental failure is massively greater than that of white parental failure, or that the need and/or desire of black people to adopt children is massively smaller than that of white people, or a combination of the two.
Given that this is so, this fact must be a huge part of the adoption problem. That being so, investigating why it is so and what can be done to change it must be a major part of any solution. So why do you think neither The Times nor Martin Narey address that question?
Of course, it's because they are both terrified of being accused of racism; the very same terror that led the powers that be to sweep under the carpet for years the fact that the incidence of the grooming for sex of young girls by organised groups of men had a massive predominance of whites among the victims and of Asians among the predators. It took a handful of brave politicians and social workers to get that problem tackled. How long will we have to wait for the same courage on the adoption front?
We pay such a heavy price in so many fields for the tyranny of political correctness.
Hi Theo,
ReplyDeleteI agree utterly both with the main point of the post, and hatred of the term "Czar" for anyone appointed to address a given societal problem. For goodness sake, there are so many other leadership titles that are being overlooked. Perhaps I can suggest a few on the grounds that only using "Czar" is intrinsically offensive to those of us who want variety in life and language.
So here goes:
Adoption Bishop
Drugs Ayatollah
Racism Fuhrer
Gay Rights Queen
Residents President
Illiteracy Laureate
Violence Mahatma
There is so much opportunity for irony in these titles and the government is really missing a trick, I think. The only thing that Czar might be appropriate for is the head of a think tank looking into changing us to a republic - now that would be irony.