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Foreclosures, plant closings, offshored jobs, underwater mortgages, miserable rates of unemployment, stagnating incomes: Is there any end to the woes of the struggling American middle? Apparently not, because now comes news of a trend guaranteeing trouble ahead for the more than half of the nation that make up the moderately educated and moderately earning middle — even if the economy improves. That seismic shift, outlined in a new report from the National Marriage Project and the Institute for American Values, is towards more divorce, more out of wedlock births and, ipso facto, fewer kids with a hopeful future. Family breakdown,...

David Cameron today defended the Government's plans to limit housing benefit, saying it was not fair for working people to see their taxes used to fund homes 'they couldn't even dream of'. The Prime Minister dismissed reports there could be a climbdown over the proposals, telling Labour leader Ed Miliband: 'We are going forward with all the proposals we put in the spending review and in the Budget'.

John Denham is one of the more impressive members of a largely undistinguished Cabinet, and his speech yesterday on race and discrimination was characteristically thoughtful, if disingenuous. Mr Denham is the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, head of a department whose very title signifies the multiculturalist patchwork the country has become. The word "communities" is often used as a euphemistic shorthand for ethnic minorities, on whose advancement the Government has concentrated in recent years. So successfully has it done so, said Mr Denham, that "being black or Asian no longer means being automatically disadvantaged". He effectively declared...

Charlie Webster promises to take the Maine Republican Party in a new direction. The newly-elected party chairman sat down Thursday with Statehouse Reporter Susan Cover to talk about his goals over a piece of Dutch apple pie at the Top of the Hill Grill. He officially takes over Feb. 1 and says he will work closely with Vice Chairman Charlie Summers of Scarborough. Webster, owner of Webster Heating Co., took a break from working on oil burners and giving estimates to explain his vision for the party for the next two years. Democrats are set to meet Jan. 25 to...

Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream By Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam Doubleday, 256 pp., $23.95 A few months back, Barack Obama explained why he had not won more support from voters in Appalachia. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate,...

White working-class boys becoming an underclass By Graeme Paton, Education Editor Last Updated: 4:11PM BST 18/06/2008 White teenagers are less likely to go to university than school-leavers from other ethnic groups - even with the same A-level results, according to official figures. The gap is widest among male teenagers from poor backgrounds, raising fresh fears that working class boys are becoming the education "underclass" in England. According to a Government report, just over one-in-20 white boys from poor homes goes on to university. This compares to 66 per cent of Indian girls and 65 per cent of young women from...

"The working classes have lower IQs than those from wealthier backgrounds and should not be expected to win places at top universities, an academic has claimed. Bruce Charlton, reader in evolutionary psychiatry at Newcastle University, suggested that the low numbers of working-class students at elite universities was the "natural outcome" of IQ differences between classes. In a paper shown to the Times Higher Education magazine, Dr Charlton questioned the Government's drive to get more students from poor backgrounds into top universities like Oxford and Cambridge. He said: "The UK Government has spent a great deal of time and effort in...

There's no whiter place in England and Wales than Easington in County Durham. As a survey finds white working class people feel forgotten and dejected, what do the people in this former colliery town think? Where Easington colliery stood, there is now virtually nothing. Just the jet black monument to a disappeared past, made from the cages that once took thousands of men underground. Face east and there is the cold North Sea. Look west and there are the streets and streets of cramped Victorian colliery homes, the inspiration for many a Geordie folk song. But the streets are not...

Over the past two decades, Britain has been through a revolution. The extent of the change, in both scale and speed, has probably been unique in the peacetime history of our country....Globalisation, mass immigration and economic upheaval have helped to transform the fabric of our nation....Today, we are one of the most culturally and racially diverse places in Europe. These changes have been the subject of noisy debate...yet it is a curious irony that...one voice has been largely absent: that of the white working class.... the voices of the British working-class public have been all but ignored. Given that they...

Like most good Southern yarns, the Fred Thompson story is steeped in legend. His small-town upbringing in Lawrenceburg, Tenn., is humble and distinct on a campaign trail worn by front-runners in suits that match their polished images. In his methodical drawl, the Republican mentions his early years at every opportunity -- from his announcement speech Sept. 7 in Des Moines, Iowa, to his Oct. 15 appearance on Fox News. The details sometimes differ, but the effect is the same. "My story is an American story," Thompson, 65, said in Des Moines, "one that's happened many times across this great nation...

I sometimes think the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who live in three dimensions and those who live in one. Those who live in three dimensions live simultaneously in the past, in the present and in the future. And when you live in three dimensions at the same time, you realize, as Edmund Burke once said, that those of us who live in the present, at any given time, are the trustees of the past, during our lifetime, to hand it over to the next generation, so that the dead and the unborn are as much...

In defence of the white working class By Leo McKinstry Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 15/11/2006 Anti-racism has become the central theme of today's political culture, yet the obsessive concern for racial sensitivities rarely seems to be applied to the white working class. This is the one ethnic group that it is perfectly acceptable to insult and ignore. Once regarded as the backbone of Britain, the people who saved our country in two world wars, the indigenous, less affluent, sector of the population is now treated with contempt by liberal elitists, who sneer at the supposed idleness, vulgarity, xenophobia and ignorance...

Recent research by behavioral psychologists might shed some light on why President Bush had difficulty in selling his concept of private retirement accounts as a central feature of reforming Social Security. As you might recall, the president promoted the plan through the idea of moving to an "ownership society" and providing the opportunity of choice regarding our retirement funds. However, according to a team of psychologists from Swarthmore and Stanford, who discussed the results of their work recently in the New York Times, Americans do not uniformly welcome more choices into their lives. Specifically, whereas higher income, better educated individuals...

In 1988, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, president of the Modern Language Association, authoritatively stated (as something too obvious to require any evidence) that classic literature was always irrelevant to underprivileged people who were not classically educated. It was, she asserted, an undeniable "fact that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare do not figure significantly in the personal economies of these people, do not perform individual or social functions that gratify their interests, do not have value for them." One should not be too hard on Professor Smith. She was merely echoing what was, at the time, standard academic opinion: that the Western classics...

The Democratic Party knowingly and disloyally contains a far-left wing that helps the cause of communism-socialism, not democracy. As long as the Democratic Party contains any communist-helping left-wing members, it is the party of treason. Many in the left wing are loyal to communism, not to the United States, but they deny it the way Alger Hiss denied his treasonous actions helping the Soviet Union. Gus Hall, the former head of the Communist Party USA, said the Communist Party members who are also members of the Democratic Party are "riding two horses, one a Communist horse and the other a...

When I asked Gary Newmark if I could talk to him about his job, his response was, "You want to know about regular working stiffs? You want to know what I do? I unloaded from a truck probably every book you ever read at Harvard. That's what I do." It was my first honest conversation with a campus service worker. There is a deliberate aura of wealth and power at Harvard, and it is tended to by more than a thousand workers. They dust the portraits, polish the oak panels, and prune the trees. They cook the food and guard...