·  White working-class boys have become the new "underclass" , a report by Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, warns today.

Boys from low-income white families are bottom of the heap in school performance, trailing behind every other major ethnic group.

The report argues that family breakdown, parental breakdown and peer pressure that it is not "cool to study" are the key factors in the collapse in educational achievements. It also cites drug and alcohol abuse by parents.

The report also highlights international research which shows that simply throwing more money at the problem will not provide a solution.

The bleak findings are spelt out in a study published by the Social Justice Policy Group that Mr Duncan Smith was asked to lead by David Cameron, the Conservative leader. The report stresses that only 17 per cent of white working-class boys managed to gain five or more A to C grades at GCSE.

This contrasts with the 19 per cent recorded by black Caribbean boys from poor backgrounds, who are traditionally seen as the ethnic group with the worst educational achievement.

Other groups have significantly better results. Around seven out of 10 boys from working-class Chinese families get at least five A to C grades at GCSE, while the figure for Indian boys is around 40 per cent.

Mr Duncan Smith said there was a danger that the problem has been disguised because results for white boys were boosted by the performance of boys from middle-class backgrounds.

"If you strip out the results of white middle-class boys, the position really is extraordinarily bad," he said.

"The fact that poor children from Chinese and Indian backgrounds, where family structures are strong and learning is highly valued, outscore so dramatically children from homes where these values are often missing suggests that culture, not ethnicity or cash, is the key to educational achievement.

"The policy-making implications are clear. To prevent the growth of an uneducated and unemployable underclass of forgotten children, we have to get their parents to engage in their learning and schooling from an early age."

The report stresses that the under-performance of white working-class boys would have profound implications. "Almost every symptom of social breakdown -- crime, drugs, alcohol and unemployment -- is rooted in educational failure," it warns.

Three out of four young offenders have no educational attainments, while 37 per cent of adult prisoners have reading skills below those of the average 11-year-old. It also argues that the only way to tackle the problem is to address the collapse of the traditional family in the worst sink estates.

While ministers repeatedly emphasise the increase in spending on schools under Labour, the report warns that there is little evidence that more spending will deal with under-achieving white boys.

The education budget has increased by around 50 per cent over the past decade while academic standards among the poorest pupils have barely risen.

"There is no direct international correlation between high spending on education and better outcomes. . . the problem is deep-rooted and social in character," the report argues.

A lack of parental involvement during pre-school years creates an "attainment gap" which widens once the children reach school.

The report says that around 26,000 children a year, around five per cent of the year group, leave school without a GCSE pass. Around 75,000 15-year-olds enter their final year "barely able to read and write". Social mobility is also declining, with a child from a low income family now less likely to get a well-paid job than in the 1970s.

Another issue is the lack of permanent head teachers in inner-city schools. Around 500,000 children are in schools without a full-time head, the report estimates.

Mr Duncan Smith hopes to produce a final report containing recommendations next summer.

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 of so-called "chavs" or "white trash".

This kind of repellent snobbery and prejudice was captured in an extraordinary outburst from newspaper columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Condemning white working-class Britons as "either too lazy or too expensive to compete" in the new era of multi-racialism, she wrote that "tax-paying immigrants past and present keep indolent British scroungers on their couches drinking beer and watching TV".

Such comments are not only offensive, but also factually incorrect, since levels of unemployment and welfare dependency are actually much higher in certain immigrant communities. According to the Office of National Statistics, 35 per cent of Muslim households have no adult in employment, more than twice the national average, though no liberal columnist would dream of ever writing about "Muslim scroungers".

The growing ostracism of the white working class is highlighted in a report out today by the Tory party's Social Justice Policy Group, chaired by the former leader Iain Duncan Smith. In his report, Duncan Smith warns that white pupils from poor backgrounds are performing worse at schools than any other ethnic group. He fears that there is a danger of creating "an uneducated and unemployable underclass of forgotten children".

On top of the crisis in education, white workers are also confronted with economic difficulties, since they are disproportionately employed in the declining manufacturing industries, while in the services sector their wages are under pressure because of mass immigration. Yet, instead of having their plight recognised, they are condemned by the nanny-employing classes for their insular racism and reluctance to struggle on minimal pay.

If the experience of poor urban whites were happening to other groups, there would be an outcry, followed by official inquiries, commissions, reports, and positive action plans. But nothing of the sort will occur. The entire thrust of the state machine is to address the needs of ethnic minorities, not the hard-pressed indigenous population.

The public sector is now filled with initiatives geared towards blacks and Asians, whether they be special housing, positive action training schemes, or community grants. No less than 10 per cent of all Arts Council funding, for instance, is explicitly given to ethnic minority groups, while the BBC makes a fetish of minority recruitment, reflected in the famous comment of the former director general Greg Dyke that the corporation is "hideously white". That is the attitude that prevails in our civic institutions. The celebration of diversity is a one-way street, with every culture treated with reverence except the traditional British one.

In his book The Likes of Us: A History of the White Working Class, the author Michael Collins recalled coming across a municipal leaflet in a library in south London, listing every group that had settled in the borough, including the Germans, Dutch, Afro-Caribbeans, Somalians and Ethiopians. As he read this, Collins sensed an elderly white man looking over his shoulder. "They don't mention us English," said the old man, "You wouldn't think we existed, would you?"

When they are not being airbrushed from history, the white working classes are being openly loathed. The fashionable push for healthier school dinners has a nasty sub-text of bullying intolerance towards working-class eating habits; the same is true of the crackdown on smoking.

In this climate of condescension, double standards abound. So the human rights brigade works itself into a froth about the civil liberties of alleged Muslim terrorists, yet utters not a bat-squeak of condemnation of the Draconian measures used against suspected football hooligans, who, whatever their faults, have not been accused of plotting mass slaughter. But then hardline soccer fans, unlike Islamic radicals, tend to be white, so they are seen as fair game.

The same hypocrisy can be seen over crime. White working-class youths are treated as a disturbing threat to the fabric of our society, yet the propensity for young urban blacks to be involved in serious violent crime attracts nothing like the same concern.

The same is true of racially motivated murders, where ethnic minority victims generally receive much more coverage than whites. The idea of innocent blacks being preyed on by ill-educated white thugs fits the progressive anti-racist narrative, if not reality, with the Stephen Lawrence case the perfect example of this pattern.

In their sheer nastiness, the alleged killers of Lawrence could have stepped out of central casting for this morality tale about proletarian racists. The only problem was that no court would convict them, despite two trials.