Today’s third race story–counting Imus and Duke as first and second–is Tony Blair exhibiting soon-to-be-retired politician’s Tourette Syndrome over in London. The high rates of violent crime in black areas, says Tony, arise not from poverty, but from black culture.

Mr Blair’s remarks are at odds with those of the Home Office minister Lady Scotland, who told the home affairs select committee last month that the disproportionate number of black youths in the criminal justice system was a function of their disproportionate poverty, and not to do with a distinctive black culture.

Logically there are three possibilities here: The poverty causes the crime, the crime causes the poverty, or both the crime and the poverty are functions of some third variable. Is it really so difficult to work out which of these is the case? It seems to me like a pretty elementary exercise in social science.