The Tories’ education report is an exercise in blame-shifting. The culprit is austerity

It’s easy to forget how very short childhood is. Actually, it’s not easy: if you spend any time around children, that’s all you think about. But let’s recap for the Conservative-led Commons education committee, which this morning published its report The Forgotten: how White working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it.

An underperforming child in year 7 today, whatever their race, has not been let down by “decades” of underfunding. They’ve been let down by 11 years of underfunding, the length of their life. A year 12 kid whose journey through school has been marked by food insecurity – food banks at home, breakfast clubs co-delivered by charities, free school meals but only in term time – wouldn’t be able to trace the roots of that back to any Labour administration.

In 2010-11, as Gordon Brown ceded government to Cameron and his “austerians” (as we used to call them – too cute!) 61,000 emergency parcels were delivered by a single food bank, the Trussell Trust. Those numbers were considered a scandal – but being scandalised, unaccountably, didn’t stop them climbing. In 2019-20, it was 1.9m, from that one trust. There is simply no observable mechanism by which a primary school pupil could be bearing the brunt of a government policy devised before 2010, unless succeeding governments had left those policies unchanged. This much is obvious, yet faced with an avalanche of misinformation, you have to grab on to the truth like a tree root.

It was quite chilling to hear the Conservative MP Robert Halfon defend the education committee report on the Today programme on Tuesday. What he described – stagnant spending under Labour, only partially restored by generosity under the coalition and the Conservatives – was the direct opposite of the truth. To recap: child poverty fell significantly between 1997 and 2010. It was the focal point of government efforts and rhetoric. Since 2010, the cuts affecting children have been so swingeing and so wide-ranging, so short-sighted and so interconnected, as to often look like deliberate acts of cruelty.

Children were hit universally, by cuts to schools, healthcare, local authorities, and particularly, by cuts to targeted services. Small kids were affected by the closure of 1,000 children’s centres, teens were affected by the cuts to youth services, mental health provision and the education maintenance allowance. Those in already financially precarious households were hit the hardest, by cuts to disability benefit, the notorious two-child welfare cap, cuts to tax credits for parents on low incomes and benefit sanctions.

By 2017, 4 million children were living in poverty, two-thirds of them in working households. The same year, 350,000 kids were classified as destitute. Again, this much we know. Again, I’m reaching feverishly for some stable reality. The Conservatives have always operated in bad faith, preaching great care and commitment while knowingly meting out real hardship. But this report jumps into the realm of fantasy.

Our underperforming youth, we learn, are the victims of a narrative of “white privilege”; the white working class have been “neglected”, “swept under the carpet”; working-class kids of every other ethnicity have been supported by “an industry” (an industry of liberal do-gooders, one supposes); absent that additional – if indefinable – support, white disadvantaged children are both left behind and choked with indignation, at being told about their own privilege when their lived reality is the opposite.

Never mind that the Conservatives have been in power for twice as long as the phrase “white privilege” has even been in common usage. Never mind that nobody in education would recognise this picture, that their support has been reserved for BAME students. The argument, in its fundamentals, is a confection. There is no such thing as a “white working class”; it’s taxonomically meaningless. If “class” connotes anything, it is a set of shared structural conditions; there isn’t, within the working class, a subset of white people whose conditions are different to those of people who are not white. It has no more descriptive clarity than saying “the white middle class”, although the juxtaposition does remind us of a racist cross-current: in “middle class”, the “white” is implied.

Politically, though, the phrase is heavy with meaning, deployed to the greatest effect over Brexit and since, but in use for some years before that. As the author Richard Seymour describes Brexit and the “white working class”, the word “white” does a lot of heavy lifting, stripping the phrase “working class” of its militant, leftist, organised connotations, and refashioning that social group “not as class combatants, but as conformist, sentimental, traditionalist, resentful and socially sadistic”. As a voting bloc, they could be reliably whipped into a fury by immigration – and here it turned out the phrase “working class” remained residually useful even denuded of its definition, since to disagree with “white working-class” opinion became de facto snobbish and elitist. In short, it was strategically misapplied to dress up aggressive ethno-nationalism as the restoration of voice and power to the dispossessed.

It ought to be laughable, to try and tug this cheap polyester disguise over education, and explain shortfalls in attainment as yet another conspiracy of the liberal elite, hellbent on stripping the white working class of its dignity. Yet the Conservatives say it with a straight face. Irresistibly, their back-to-front argument draws our attention to the staggering loss caused by austerity: years upon years of childhood, voided of delight by the spectre of destitution. It’s safe to say, none of us are laughing.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist