There has been another report – this time from the Sutton Trust – showing that white working-class children are underperforming in schools. This is a long-established tendency. Nearly all ethnic minority groups do better. This includes black African, Chinese and Bangladeshi children.

We are in a tricky area here – where race meets culture. Biology makes it plain that there are no differences in traits between races. However, races can be associated with cultures – and there are rough personality variations between cultures, whether ethnically related or not. Parisians and Boers, white Americans and Native Americans, Saudi Arabians and Israelis – all are liable to have their own separate collective views of and assumptions about the world. These are not binding, but they constitute what you might call mass tendencies. And as if this were not complicated enough, we have to throw class into the mix.

Cultures are inherited, enshrined habits of thought and behaviour, both good and bad. They are, as David Mamet puts it, “the way we do things here”. They are malleable, they are mutable – and extremely powerful. Their relationship to the chimera of “race” is complex and hard to chart, but appears to be real enough.

What is wrong with British white working-class culture, then? Is it a predisposition to be feckless and lazy? One reason is hinted at in Lynsey Hanley’s excellent book Respectable, about the working-class estate in Birmingham where she grew up. Hanley tells of her contemporaries’ reactions to study at the comprehensive she attended. For most of them, particularly boys, everything became a laugh, a joke, a bit of a lark. Clever children were mocked and bullied.

Lack of hope and respect leads to a lack of trying (Hanley and I were rare exceptions to the rule). But why should this particularly affect white working-class children rather than any other ethnic group? It may be because their morale and self-esteem is lower than other, more superficially “oppressed” groups. At least black and Asian children, who, although vulnerable to racial prejudice, can also see themselves as part of an unfairly victimised minority forming part of a coherent group championed by the parts of society that pride themselves on being liberal. On the other hand, the white working class are often seen across the board as the scum of the earth rather than the salt of the earth.

Underperformance may also be linked to family stability and family values. Asian, Chinese, and black African culture seem to be more committed to the institution of family. Not only is the divorce rate generally lower, sending money back to family in the country of origin is common. For all the vulnerabilities to racism, there is integrity and a purpose to this setup.

A junk heap is a junk heap, however much air freshener and fresh paint you apply

But for poor white kids, chaotic families are commonplace. Throw into this mix the fact of poverty itself and you have a recipe if not for despair, then for making a mockery of the whole damn farce. It is behaviour that says, “We’re not going to spend the only youth we have joining in a vast, grinding societal pantomime in which we pretend that we can transcend our place in the world when the odds are fatally stacked against us.”

So you learn not to care. You slouch and loaf and sneer. But you don’t try because that is to buy into a game that is rigged and which you are almost certainly going to lose. Plus you are likely to have underfunded schools and teachers struggling to cope.

A junk heap is a junk heap, however much air freshener and fresh paint you apply. And the only thing to do once you are buried under it, is to kick and scream and giggle, as you slowly sink and lose hope. It is only if we as a society start taking notice of this cry of anger and disillusionment that those buried can start, with our help and our compassion, to dig themselves out.

@timlottwriter