David Lammy and Toby Young battle on Twitter over accusations of Oxford University ‘racism’
Labour MP David Lammy and Toby Young, the Spectator writer and free schools advocate, have rekindled their war of words on social media concerning the explanation to Oxford University’s lack of black British students.
The online spat between the pair ignited in 2017 after Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, accused Oxford University of “social apartheid” over its admissions policies when they disclosed data showing that one in three Oxford colleges failed to admit a single black British A-level student in 2015.
The Oxford University-educated Young responded to Lammy’s accusation with an article in right-wing publication The Spectator by insisting it was unfair to blame Oxford for the low numbers of black undergraduates.
I blogged about David Lammy’s previous attack on Oxford for admitting too few black British students. @FraserNelson is right — issue isn’t Oxford’s bias, it’s that too few black British students are getting 3 As at A level. Solution is to improve schools https://t.co/2oBu8442bs
— Toby Young (@toadmeister) May 23, 2018
Lammy (and countless others) point out that the acceptance rate for black applicants to Oxford is lower than it is for white applicants. But if you control for the acceptance rate in the subjects applied for (most popular in case of black applicants) discrepancy largely vanishes.
— Toby Young (@toadmeister) May 23, 2018
Toby tell us again about that time you got into Oxford because your Dad (a Baron) rang up the College to ask them to let you in because you didn't get the grades? And then come back to talk to me about institutional bias and why white students twice as likely to get in as black. https://t.co/1iVhwjBad3
— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) May 23, 2018
Oxbridge gets £700 million a year from the taxpayer and the Oxbridge admissions system decides who gets to be the next Cabinet Ministers, newspaper editors, senior civil servants, FTSE CEOs etc. So it does matter to my constituents and to every person in this country, actually. https://t.co/C0tJJN7vTQ
— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) May 23, 2018
630 Black British students get 3 A's and yet 1 in 4 Oxford colleges did not have a single Black British student in the entire cohort in at least one of the last three years. Not one Black British student offered a place for Computer Science or Psychology. Go and find the talent. https://t.co/dbJBnyXnY1
— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) May 23, 2018
He wrote the reason behind such statistics was because there were not enough black students achieving the required grades, claiming that the only way to change this was to “improve post-16 education, particularly in urban areas.”
The man who by his own admission only required two B’s and a C, plus a phone call from his father to get into Oxford, has had another dig at Lammy, with a series of tweets on social media to reignite their feud. Lammy has hit back with a jab at Young’s own personal experience of getting into the elite university with help from daddy.
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