The nonsense of the Macpherson report.

Lord Macpherson’s report in 1999 was about the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. This slaying took place in 1993.

Lord Macpherson may well have had the best of intentions. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Many black people in the 1990s had a negative perception of the police. I do not know if it was most I do not have any statistics. Let us say most of them felt alienated from the police. Even if this were so that does not necessarily mean that the police on the whole mistrated them.

I suspect that the use of cannabis in the Afro Caribbean community was more widespread than among whites. This may have been a cause of friction. Black Britons often come from the lower socio economic groups. I suspect a negative image of the police among whites in low socio economic groups is not much lower than among Afro Caribbean and other black people.

The job of the police is not to be popular it is to prevent crime and to detect it when it happens. If the police can be popular while doing this then so much the better. One must not but the horse before the cart. That is why I am opposed to elected police chiefs. It politicises policing and distorts priorities.\\

I have read substantial sections of the Macpherson Report. As Peter Hitchens has pointed out there is not a single instance of racialsim shown in the report. There were plenty of allegations but nothing substantive to them.

Some of the black people involved in the case (eyewitness Duwayne Brooks and Stephen Lawrence’s parents) acused the police willy nilly. If they were not entirely satisfied with the police they said this was owing to racialsim.

I have read ”Racist Murder and Pressure Politics” which is a critique of the Macpherson Report. This was compsed by three left wing intellectuals. Two of them are not native Britons – one Kurdosh and one Hungarian.

The Macpherson Report is nonsense. People have been guilt tripped into accepting it. Yes, I feel sorry for the Lawrences. That does not mean they are right about everything.

Duwayne Brooks was very distressed at seeing his friend killed. He called an ambulance. The police showed up and Brooks admitted that he was anti police. He was furious and swore at the police repeatedly and refused to answer some questions. He then felt the police treated him rudely which is not very surprising in view of his hostile demeanour.

The prejudice was in the eyes of Brooks and the Lawrences. Whenever they did not get an ideal outcome they put it down to racism.

The only thing they put their finger on was the use of the word coloured and negro. These may be old fashioned but they are not racist. There is no reason to think that whites would have been treated differently.

Left wing rabble rousers seized on the Lawrence murder and exploited it for their own ends. Advocates of racial conflict used it to cause trouble. There was a media feeding frenzy around it. Mrs Lawrence asked why the Prime Minister had not been informed. There are about 1 000 murders a year in the United Kingdom and this one was not much more significant than most. It is just that troublemakers jumped on the bandwagon. Demagogues denounced the police as racist and said blacks could never trust them. It became a self fulfilling propchecy as many black people were influenced by this.

Mrs Lawrence said the UK was racist country. This was a foul slur. If it was racist her parents would not have moved with her here and she would not have stayed. People of different ethnicities would not risk life and limb to illegally enter the United Kingdom.

Macpherson’s caveats have been disregarded. He said the police had no racialist policies and it is wrong to regrd all police as racialist. Any ethnic minority person can stop the police in their tracks by accusations of racism.

\The police are now emasculated by the fact that they have been labelled instititionlly racist. ”You would never do this if I was white.” This is unprovable. On the other hand one could say ”I would never do this if you were no a criminal.”

I must say this for Lord Macpherson. I get the impression that relations between the police and the black community are better now than in 1993.

As has been said black is a nebulous term like white. Imran Khan – the solicitor for the Lawrences – was described as black. He is of Pakistani origin. It is a myth to suggest that people of a race are all the same. Black culture is as ill-defined as white culture.

I am white but that hardly means I share a culture with a white Argentine, a white Moldovan or white Saudi Arabian. Saudi Arabians are arguably white.

The authorities needed more courage. They ought to have said that it was tragic that unoffending Stephen Lawrence was foully murdered. However, they ought not to have given into pressure from grievance mongers.