According to a 2007 study by the Rockwool Foundation, after ten years in the Danish school system, two-thirds of students with an Arabic background remain functionally illiterate. In Bradford, Yorkshire, 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, many of whom are themselves the children of first cousins. In the new west, why even bother worrying about IQ? Professor Bates says he wants to get to the bottom of the “why” and the “what”. But as I wrote eleven years ago in America Alone:
Stick a pin almost anywhere in the map, near or far: The “who” is the best indicator of the what-where-when-why.
Which is why a gay bathhouse got nixed in Luton: The mosque has more muscle.
And the more demographic transformation transforms, the more ill-advised it becomes to mention it. Before 9/11, even the BBC was happy to discuss whether the resurgence of rickets in the United Kingdom is due to Muslim dress. Sixteen years later, when UKIP bring it up, it’s cited as proof they’re a laughingstock. A question for Professor Bates and his colleagues is whether a society in which more and more subjects are ruled out of public discourse should expect its measures of intelligence to do anything other than head south – for native and non-native alike. Thus:
The quality of what we called the student “clientele” had deteriorated so dramatically over the years that the classroom struck me as a barn full of ruminants and the curriculum as a stack of winter ensilage… The level of interest in and attention to the subjects was about as flat as a fallen arch. The ability to write a coherent English sentence was practically nonexistent; ordinary grammar was a traumatic ordeal. In fact, many native English-speakers could not produce a lucid verbal analysis of a text, let alone carry on an intelligible conversation, and some were even unable to properly pronounce common English words.