Are young Black men victimised by society or is society victimised by young Black men? Specifically, do the police have it in for young Black men or do young Black men have it in for the police? For more than twenty years it has been the settled opinion of the British police that it is society and especially they, the police, who are at fault. This was illustrated by a press release produced by the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset in June 2023.[1]

Before we come to the press release, consider the following points from Britain’s racial history. The first crime to be reported as a mugging occurred in 1972 when an elderly widower was stabbed to death near Waterloo Station by three young Black men as he walked home from the theatre.[2] They had tried to rob him; he had resisted.

It has been consistently stated over the decades that eighty per cent of London’s muggings are carried out by Black people, which makes a Black person about fifty times as likely to carry out a mugging as anybody else.[3] In 1973, 1,500 such crimes were reported in London;[4] by 1995 the number was 33,000. But reported muggings are a fraction of the total. It seems that in 1981 a certain Black twelve-year-old might have carried out a mugging every day.[5] If so and if London contained 500 boys like him, this would mean more than 175,000 muggings for the city in the year.

Not just that first one but many other muggings have been fatal. For example, in 1993 Constance Brown, 72, was knocked to the ground in South London by a young Black man who smashed her head against the pavement before running off with her handbag. Elizabeth Pinhom, 96, died in hospital in 1997 after being pulled down the front steps of her house when she opened the door to a young Black man, who went off with her bag.[6]

It was in 1970 that young Black men started attacking the police, according to an activist from Trinidad, who wrote that skirmishes and violent confrontations continued throughout the decade.[7] Young Black men first used knives against the police at the Notting Hill carnival in 1976.[8]

The activist, Darcus Howe, was a great admirer of the Brixton riots, where in 1981 young Black men threw petrol bombs at the police and set fire to buildings and vehicles. Howe described the riots as different “in range and depth from previous revolts waged by blacks against the police. This general uprising”, he continued, “stands head and shoulders above all that had gone before”.[9] In another riot, in Tottenham, North London in 1985, a policeman was hacked to death by young Black men with machetes.[10]

Black people had no legitimate grievance against the police on either occasion. The Brixton riots followed a crackdown on street crime. The Tottenham riot started after a woman died of a heart attack when the police came to see her about her son, who had given a false name when found in a car with a fake road licence.

During the 1990s the war on the police was conducted mainly through the media, who aired activists’ portrayal of them as, of course, “racist”. The activist-media alliance met with nothing but success, winning a decisive triumph in 1999 when a retired High-Court judge, Sir William Macpherson, described the police as institutionally racist, a conclusion he reached via a definition that allowed any institution to be described as institutionally racist. Although the police presumably saw the trick, they were prevailed upon to submit, after which they came effectively under the control of anti-racists and rapidly became anti-racist themselves. For example, in 2000 a Deputy Assistant Commissioner boasted that he had reduced the number of young Black men stopped and searched by almost forty per cent in the previous year,[11] during which muggings went up by two thirds.[12]

But it would be more accurate to say that the police became more anti-racist after 1999, for they had started on the road of anti-racism long before. In 1981, a report on the Brixton riots by Lord Scarman, a Law Lord, insistently called on the police to go easy on Black crime.[13] As a result, within ten years they were allowing open drug dealing on the street.[14] Scarman also called on the police to recruit more non-White officers, which led them to lower their admission standards for non-Whites, who enjoyed special treatment once they were in.[15] In 1996 they offered sub-standard young Black men a free ten-week course to help them pass the recruitment tests.[16] In 1998 they launched a scheme to “attract, develop and retain minority ethnic recruits, particularly at a senior level”.[17] As early as 1970, when a workman told the police that children were stealing from his lorry and throwing bricks through people’s windows, he was told that there was nothing they could do because the children were Black.[18]

Confirmed anti-racists by 1999, the police have been upending their traditional values ever since, a process of inversion seen also in every other British institution. This has been accomplished by means of political correctness, of which, if one sees it as a collection of ideologies, anti-racism is the leading one.

So there is nothing new or unusual about the self-hating press release we are about to look at. It is just the sort of thing one expects from the British police, who, after spending twenty years being attacked and accused by Black criminals and anti-racists, have spent twenty more trying to be their friends.

Entitled “Chief Constable Sarah Crew on Institutional Racism”, the document is typical of political correctness in being vague, evasive and inclined to presume what is far from obvious. It fails to define its terms and uses jargon not just to create an impression of expertise but also to defy comprehension. It treats Black people as members of a semi-royal class, not calling them Black people, an expression with only three syllables, but showing its extreme respect by calling them “those who are from Black heritage communities”.

According to Sarah Crew, she intends to make her force anti-racist. What does this mean? Pro-Black.

She mentions a report about disproportionality in her county’s criminal justice system. What is disproportionality? This refers to the fact that the criminal justice system deals with Black people out of all proportion to their numbers in the population, which, according to anti-racism, means that there is something wrong with it. According to anti-racism, the races are the same, therefore no system should deal with one at a higher rate than with another.

Sarah Crew describes a review of the Metropolitan Police as a “stark reminder for policing … that the need for real and profound change is essential if we’re to retain the public’s trust and confidence”. This combines illiteracy with presumption, vagueness and anti-racist code. Presumably it is change rather than the need for it that she deems essential, but why is it needed if the police have the public’s trust and confidence? She means “gain” rather than “retain”. Why does she describe the review as a reminder? Did the police know that real and profound change was needed? Nor does she say what this real and profound change must be. Had she wished to make herself clear, she might have said that the police must look the other way when Black people commit crimes, thereby reducing the disproportionality.

As for “the public’s trust and confidence”, this is a stock phrase that requires translation. “The public” doesn’t mean the public here but the Black public, whose trust and confidence the police are supposed to have forfeited by their “racism”. This is an anti-racist pretence, for the police didn’t have Black people’s trust or confidence to start with. The police adopt the pretence so as to appear to admit to their imaginary guilt. Nor does “trust and confidence” mean trust and confidence; it means approval. The police seek the approval of Black people, specifically criminals, who want them to keep away from their crimes. This the police will never be able to do entirely, for there are times, such as when a murder is committed, when they are expected to get involved. Thus they must perpetually try to please their masters, knowing that they will never quite succeed.

Sarah Crew reports that she has had “encouraging conversations … around institutional racism”. That’s nice, but what is institutional racism? You might think that it would be pervasive racial discrimination in an institution, but Sir William Macpherson defined it as in effect any lack of pro-Black discrimination. Sarah Crew, however, has no doubt that it exists at Avon and Somerset, going by four criteria given by Baroness Casey, which she lists. But Baroness Casey’s criteria are meaningless for she does not define racism, in terms of which she defines institutional racism. Is racism a sentiment, such as aversion to immigration, or an empirical belief, such as that Black people are prone to crime? Is it an act performed by an agent of an institution, such as treating people differently by race, or indeed failing to treat them differently by race? Baroness Casey gives no clue even as to which ballpark her concept might be in.

But “I must accept that the definition fits”, says Sarah Crew, referring to Baroness Casey’s definition of institutional racism. In what way does she think it fits? Even if we imagine that she knows what Baroness Casey means by racism and hence by institutional racism, what took her to her conclusion? For example, if she thinks that Baroness Casey’s third criterion fits, which is that “Racism and racial bias are reinforced within systems”, where does she see racism and racial bias being reinforced at Avon and Somerset? Could she give us some examples? Apparently not.

Baroness Casey’s fourth criterion is that a police force “under-protects and over-polices Black heritage people”. This was a popular slogan with anti-racists in the 1980s, but, again, what does it mean? What are the police failing to protect Black people from that they are protecting others from, and if over-policing Black people means paying too much attention to their crimes, how much attention should be paid to them?

“This”, writes Sarah Crew, “is about recognising the structural and institutional barriers that exist and which put people at a disadvantage”. What structural and institutional barriers? She doesn’t say.

She states that “Not being racist is no longer good enough” but doesn’t explain why not. Surely if all her officers refrained from being racist, whatever that might mean, there would be no racism in her force and all would be well. But she thinks that not doing something means standing by while others do it, who should be pounced on: “It is no longer okay to be a bystander and do nothing, to be part of a system that disadvantages one group of people over another”. What she means is that one must be not merely non-racist but anti-racist. One must identify an enemy class, putting oneself on the side of good, and have an ideology that requires non-Whites to be given special treatment.

What does she mean by one group being disadvantaged over another? It’s the disproportionality again. Black people commit crimes at a higher rate than others, therefore they get convicted at a higher rate, therefore they go to prison at a higher rate, therefore they are disadvantaged.

Why must Sarah Crew always speak of the “system” rather than the level at which things actually happen, the level of the individual? It’s because there is no “racism” at the level of the individual. It can only be found in the statistics, which can tell us about “the system”. Or, it is the system that must be transformed, therefore it is in the system that racism must be found.

Apparently she isn’t interested in criminals and their wrongdoing; she is interested in the police and their wrongdoing. This is what attracted her to the job, she says: “the fight against injustice and unfairness”. It’s about “a recognition that the system is unfair, and our job is to make it fair”. She doesn’t say how it is “unfair”, but we can guess. It’s the disproportionality.

She wants to apologise. “Accept it and say sorry” is her policy, and again: “What we can do is say … we’re sorry”. She doesn’t say what she wants to say sorry for or to whom. Presumably it’s to Black people, for the disproportionality again. She wants to apologise to all those who have been convicted of crimes that a better system would have overlooked to make itself more proportional.

She repeats her reference to the “trust and confidence of our communities”, seeming to think that it is because this is lacking that more Black people don’t report crimes committed against them. She has had enough of Black people as offenders; she wants Black victims. We read the heading: “Supporting Black heritage victims of crime”. She’s not bothered about protecting anyone else from crime.

She doesn’t want the police to transform themselves alone. She wants Black people to take part so that “communities [will be] involved in changing our systems”. It’s not enough for her that Black people, through their activists, largely control the police already. She wants them to have more control.

It’s the same with complaints made against the police. Presumably she gets plenty already, but she wants more, so she is “working on a programme … to support young people in understanding … what to do if they feel a police power is not being used legitimately”. This recalls the case of Sarah Everard, a young woman who was killed by an off-duty policeman in 2021. United behind the idea that all men are mortally dangerous, especially policemen, feminists were obliged when the police encouraged women to question the legitimacy of a policeman who might question them.[19] He might be a murderer like Wayne Couzens. The guilt-addicted police welcome anyone who might accuse or suspect them of wrongdoing.

She mentions a scheme that allows people to “avoid a criminal justice outcome for low-level or first-time offences”. The trouble is, she says, that disposing of a matter out of court requires an admission of guilt, “which research has shown can be a barrier to young men of Black heritage”. In other words, young Black men rarely admit they have offended, which leads to “harsher and disproportionate criminal justice outcomes”. So it is hard to see how the scheme is going to work unless the police avoid all contact with these offenders.

She mentions “cultural trauma”, a concept that is just catching on. When Edward Kemp, director of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, confessed to the academy’s “institutional racism” in 2020, he wrote: “We are profoundly sorry for the role we have played in the traumatic and oppressive experiences of our current and past Black students”.[20] The following year, Goldsmith’s, part of the University of London, proposed to narrow the “achievement gap” between Black students and others by allowing Black students extra time to finish their assignments. They would also be able to defer their exams if they had suffered “racial trauma”, it being up to them to say whether they had or not.[21] Neither Kemp nor Goldsmith’s said what racial trauma was, and nor does Sarah Crew, which is not surprising since the term’s only purpose is to give White people something new to accuse themselves of inflicting on Black people, who can use it as yet another excuse for their failures or offences. But Sarah Crew’s force is “committed to becoming a ‘Trauma Informed’ organisation”.

And so in nothing but repulsive English Sarah Crew bows and scrapes to Black people, conceals her meaning, assumes that we already accept what she wants us to accept, talks vaguely about “the system” but never about what is actually done, and uses meaningless slogans and undefined terms left and right. As she goes, she not only puts on a display of institutional self-abasement that would make a statue cringe, but presents herself as noble. Her aim in all this is to persuade us that the police and the rest of the criminal justice system mistreat Black people but might redeem themselves by turning a blind eye to their crimes.

It is to this level of sycophancy, dishonesty and desertion of principle that the police were reduced by anti-racism more than twenty years ago, when the last memory of their original job of preventing and detecting crime without regard to race began to fade. Since then, race has been all-important. “Was this crime committed by someone White? Then let’s get him! Someone Black? Ignore it!” This is the thinking that was pressed on the police throughout the 1980s and ‘90s by anti-racists, aided by the occasional Law Lord or retired High-Court judge, which in this century became the police’s second nature. It is second nature to Sarah Crew, it was second nature to whoever made her a Chief Constable, and it is presumably second nature to all our other Chief Constables. These are the sort of people who like to think, even as they bestow one favour after another on young Black men, that our society and especially they in the police have it in for young Black men.

[1] Avon and Somerset Police, June 16th 2023, “Chief Constable Sarah Crew on Institutional Racism”, https://www.avonandsomerset.police.uk/news/2023/06/chief-constable-sarah-crew-on-institutional-racism/.

[2] Stuart Hall et al., 1978, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, Basingstoke: Macmillan, p. 3.

[3] In 1975 a march was held under the slogan “Stop The Muggers. 80% of muggers are Black. 85% of victims are White” (Paul Gilroy, 1987, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, London: Routledge, p. 120). Twenty years later, Paul Condon as Metropolitan Police Commissioner stated in a letter to prominent Black figures such as Diane Abbott MP that eighty per cent of London’s muggers were Black. He invited them to a meeting where their support would be requested for a planned drive against the crime. Several recipients, including Diane Abbott, declined to attend the meeting. One passed the letter to the media, who quoted activists condemning Condon for saying that Black people committed so much crime. The police were out to get them; the statement was a licence for racists, and so forth. What all this did, as intended, was encouraged the idea that mugging was not the problem; the problem was that someone had said that it was mostly the work of young Black men. See Independent, Aug. 4th 1995, “Mugging: criminal or political offence?”, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/mugging-criminal-or-political-offence-1594666.html.

[4] In 1973 the headline appeared: “Muggings reach four a day in London” (Hall et al 1978, op. cit., p. 8).

[5] In his memoir of his days at a comprehensive school in London in the 1980s, John-Paul Flintoff writes that a Black classmate came in one day and gave him an empty wallet to look after. The next day he did the same. Flintoff does not tell us whether the pattern continued. See John-Paul Flintoff, 1998, Comp: A Survivor’s Tale, London: Indigo Orion, pp. 103-04.

[6] J.F.Cronin, no date (possibly 2000), “The forgotten victims”, Right Now magazine.

[7] Darcus Howe, 1988, From Bobby to Babylon: Blacks and the British Police, London: Race Today, p. 52.

[8] Paul Gilroy 1987, op. cit., p. 96 quotes the Telegraph.

[9] Howe 1988 op. cit., p. 52.

[10] Metropolitan Police, no date, “MPS Historical Timeline: Broadwater Farm Riot 1985”, http://www.met.police.uk/history/broadwater_farm.htm.

[11] This was John Grieve. See Metropolitan Police, Feb. 22nd 2000, “Press Conference Held Re the Anniversary of the Lawrence Inquiry Report”, http://tap.ccta.gov.uk/[…]/b3cb2697adf8d9e1802…OpenDocument.

[12] Muggings went up nineteen per cent in March 1999 alone (Telegraph, April 24th 1999, “Muggings soar as police tread softly”). Towards the end of June 2000 they were reported to have risen 38 per cent in the previous twelve months (Sunday Times, June 25th 2000, “Straw on rack as muggings soar”). This means, on reasonable assumptions about figures month by month, that for every 100 muggings in London at the end of February 1999 there were 178 fifteen months later.

[13] Lord Scarman deemed that the police’s duty to maintain public tranquillity trumped their duty to enforce the law (Lord Scarman, 1982 [1981], The Scarman Report: The Brixton Disorders, 10-12 April 1981, Harmondsworth: Pelican-Penguin, Paragraphs 4.57-4.58). Therefore if an attempt to enforce the law might not be received in a tranquil manner, they should not make the attempt. Secondly he advocated policing with the active consent of the public, which in a place like Brixton the police would never have (Scarman, Paragraph 5.46). Thirdly, he said that the police must exercise discretion, quoting a senior policeman saying that to believe in enforcing the law without concessions to any section of the community was too simplistic. Some groups had different cultural backgrounds (Scarman, Paragraph 5.76).

[14] The anonymous author of “The street where I live” (Independent, Nov. 2nd 1993) thought that in the previous three years someone must have decided to turn his road into a no-go area for the police, where crack dealers could trade openly. Since a policeman had been killed nearby, the police had kept their heads down. Until the shooting the author had been blanking the dealers out, but then a bullet had been fired through the window of a betting shop over the road, which acted as a crack and dope market. Angry at drugs being sold outside his son’s bedroom, he had called the police and told them that the problem was getting worse. “Yes”, they said, “it will get worse. There’s a lot of money involved.” He never saw a police car arrive.

[15] Lord Scarman had required the police to acquire more Black officers, the aim being “that the composition of the police fully reflects that of the society the police serve” (Scarman 1982, op. cit., Paragraph 5.13). In 1989 a superintendent attributed discipline problems with West Indian officers to the fact that non-White recruits were below par. A White officer couldn’t see “why some other bugger shouldn’t have to [study every night] just because he happens to have a different colour skin”. See Roger Graef, 1989, Talking Blues: The Police in Their Own Words, London: Collins Harvill, pp. 134-38.

[16] Telegraph, Feb. 26th 1996.

[17] Metropolitan Police, March 15th 1999, A Police Service for All the People: Report of the MPS Ethnic Minority (Recruitment and Advancement) Working Group. http://www.met.police.uk/police/mps/mps/press/1099.htm.

[18] ThamesTv, Nov. 27th 2020, “1970s London | Poverty in the 70s | North Islington | Community Tension | This week | 1970”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYhYdsHh2p0.

[19] BBC, Oct. 1st 2021, “Sarah Everard: Challenge plain-clothes officers, Met Police says”, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58757375.

[20] Ikon London Magazine, June 30th 2020, email from the Director of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, https://www.ikonlondonmagazine.com/rada-goes-woke/.

[21] History Debunked, June 18th 2021, “How British universities plan to boost the achievement of Black students”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOb9CO8qLGI.

Anti-racists have never approved of racial impartiality. Only discrimination in favour of non-Whites, especially Blacks, is acceptable to them. They especially object to any lack of pro-Black discrimination in the police. For fifty years it has been their goal to get the police to ignore Black crime. They have largely achieved it.

In 1981 the police decided to crack down on street crime in Brixton, where it was rife. The result was the Brixton riots, where young Black men spent a weekend hurling bricks and petrol bombs at the police and setting fire to vehicles and buildings. This was their reply to the police’s impertinence in seeking to hold them to the law.

A report on the riots by Lord Scarman, a Law Lord, called on the police to go easy on Black crime on three grounds, one of them being that their duty to maintain public tranquillity was more important than their duty to enforce the law.[1] If an attempt to enforce the law might be met with violent resistance, in other words, it should not be made. The police took the message so much to heart that within ten years they were letting young Black men engage in open drug dealing on the street.[2] Such responses to Lord Scarman’s call were the first great success for anti-racism, which had emerged as a recognisable political movement in the 1970s.

Anti-racism took a second great leap forward in 1983, when its activists badly needed racial incidents with Black victims to back up their claim that non-Whites were commonly abused by Whites. The predominance of incidents with White victims, as in mugging, could not help them portray Whites as the aggressor race. Then they realised that a fake racial incident was as good as a real one if the public believed that it was real. It would go into the statistics like a real incident, attract the same publicity and have the same political effects.

As it happened, the Home Office also needed racial incidents with Black victims. In 1981 it had produced a report called Racial Attacks, which manipulated statistics to portray Whites as aggressive racists. This was all well and good, but actual attacks on Blacks were needed to give the manipulated statistics substance. Frustrated by the shortage, the Home Office too realised that fake attacks would be as good as real ones. The attacks might be fake but the statistics would be real.

And so in 1983 the Home-Office-funded Association of Chief Police Officers supplied the police with a definition of a racial incident that could be used to manufacture racial incidents at will. According to the definition, a racial incident was “any incident which includes an allegation of racial motivation made by any person”.[3] All that was required was an allegation. It did not need to be backed up by any evidence.

Anti-racist activists were delighted. Now they only needed to persuade the police to apply the definition to any incident with a Black victim where somebody — possibly the victim, possibly an activist, possibly the police themselves — made an allegation of a racial motive and they would have all the evidence, real or bogus, of White racial aggression that they could wish for. The police obliged and started describing crimes as racially motivated with no evidence of a racial motive.[4]

Indeed, they needed no evidence that White people had been involved. They could conjure White offenders into existence by accepting an allegation that the motives of imaginary offenders were racial. It was this definition that enabled the police to make their biggest ever gift to anti-racists by blaming the murder of a young Black man on White people after an agitated young Black man found with the body blamed the crime on Whites of whom there was no trace.[5]

That was in 1993, when it looked as if the progress of a new social movement called political correctness might be unstoppable. In that year Giles Auty wrote in the Spectator: “Within the next five years I fully expect to see the full horrors of political correctness imported lock, stock, and barrel from American academic institutions to our own”.[6] This occurred, nor was it just academic institutions that accepted political correctness but every public institution.

Political correctness is a kind of super-ideology whose main job is to enforce its sub-ideologies and make life uncomfortable for those who do not go along with them. From the start its two main sub-ideologies were anti-racism and feminism, which, although some of their more bizarre doctrines jarred with many people, were presented by the media as necessary and good. To cite two bizarre doctrines, the basic proposition of anti-racism is that the races are essentially the same, and the basic proposition of feminism is that the sexes too are “equal”. Thus any difference between the circumstances of the races or the circumstances of the sexes can only be due to the oppressive effects of White power or male power. And so it turned out that the idea of universal human equality made a supposedly unanswerable case against White people and especially men. To be politically correct was to condemn one’s own society.

The compulsory and punitive nature of political correctness brought us a new age of hypocrisy. Unless people wanted to be shunned as retrograde and nasty, they had to profess agreement with its doctrines, however obviously untrue or pernicious they might be. There was no room for frankness or clarity now that public discourse appeared to be governed by an overriding need to protect an invisible, slightly deranged and ultra-sensitive woman from the risk of fainting, as she might do if any fact she found distasteful happened to be mentioned. As one generation followed another, pretence was followed by credulity. Soon there were young people who actually believed the dogmas of political correctness.

Political correctness was a new name for cultural Marxism, not that that phrase was yet often heard. Appearing in America towards the end of the 1980s, it offered fresh hope to Marxists just as Marxism as we knew it was being discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1992, a jocular guide to what today might be called the clown world that was descending on us was provided by The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook, which told us that so as not to allude to sex we must call waitresses “waitrons”.[7] To show that we saw no difference between human beings and other animals, we were supposed to call animal trainers “inter-species communicators”. A milkman was a “milkperson”, vegetarian cuisine was “non-violent food”, and a book was a “processed tree carcase”. According to Mary Koss, women who denied that they were oppressed were “trying to pass as non-victimized”. Leonard Jeffries, head of Afro-American Studies at City University, New York, found the destruction of the Challenger spacecraft something to be applauded since it might deter White people from “spreading their filth throughout the universe”. The scientific method was to be despised as a “patriarchal conspiracy”.

A thorough journalistic treatment of political correctness came in 1994 in the book Dictatorship of Virtue.[8] Academic treatments started to appear, with titles like “Political correctness in Britain: A blueprint for decline”,[9] “Who placed American men in a psychic ‘iron cage’?”[10] and “The Historical Roots of Political Correctness”.[11]

By the turn of the century, political correctness was more or less mainstream. People who still used their faculties of thought and observation were marginalised as enemies of society, as they are even more today, when the continuation of political correctness is called “wokeness”. Naturally, anti-racism received another great boost when political correctness made it in effect obligatory.

An abiding aim of anti-racist activists was to get the police officially described as institutionally racist. No one knew or particularly cared what the term might mean; the important thing was that if it was formally attached to the police, they would be conclusively disgraced. The establishment would have turned on its own and, by condemning itself as racist, have proclaimed itself to be anti-racist.

Lord Scarman had refused to call the police by the dread term. It was left to Sir William Macpherson, a retired high-court judge, to do this in 1999 in his report on an unconcluded murder case. Under pressure from anti-racists,[12] he used a purpose-built definition that allowed any institution to be described as racist if it did not discriminate in favour of non-Whites or do so sufficiently.[13] As soon as his report was published, every institution in the country, from the British Medical Association to the church, the universities, the judiciary and the political parties, as well as the police, dramatically stepped up the degree of its pro-Black discrimination. Pretending or perhaps really believing that they were doing something good, they put an end to the principle of equal treatment, an ancient cornerstone of British justice, forever.[14]

One anti-racist activist, who as a student revolutionary had been described by the Foreign Office as a troublemaker acting with malice aforethought,[15] was particularly chuffed. This was Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, who had commissioned the Macpherson report and stated on receiving it that he intended to use it to create “permanent and irrevocable change … across the whole of our society”.[16] He did just this by imposing racial quotas on the public services,[17] thereby institutionalising racial discrimination. Institutional racism, supposedly being dispelled, was installed, which Straw described as a great step forward for society.[18] Foreseeably, the public services became the home of incompetence and corruption as anti-racism itself took another great step forward.

Things went on in the same vein, as when in 2017 Lord Thomas, the Lord Chief Justice, called for judges to treat Black criminals more leniently and White criminals more harshly than they had been doing.[19]

Lord Scarman, Sir William Macpherson, Lord Thomas: it was those at the very top of the criminal justice system who introduced anti-racism to it and drove it deeper and deeper in, presumably with the support of the Home Office or at its behest.

Anti-racism’s next great surge came in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement, which prompted another dramatic increase in the desired form of institutional racism. Bodies such as the British Museum, the British Library and the National Trust made a point of showing how ashamed they were of British history and culture, apologised for oppressing Black people and promised to give them more important positions with immediate effect.[20] Needless to say, they had in no way wronged Black people; they were expressing a purely visceral urge to racial self-abasement. So lacking was any anti-Black discrimination that the media had to borrow the death of George Floyd from Minneapolis to suggest that something was amiss. With no injustice to point to, they spoke ambiguously of “racial inequality”, intended to be taken to mean inequality of treatment but in fact referring to inequality of circumstance, which is a natural product of differences between the races.

Lord Scarman’s injunction to the police to go easy on Black crime had sunk in so deeply by this time that when they came across a mini-riot in Brixton, they ran away. They actually took to their heels sooner than confront Black criminals.[21] During an interview with Sky News, a former Metropolitan Police chief was cut off when saying that the police had given up trying to stop young Black men carrying weapons. It was more than their careers were worth to attempt to hold Black people to the law, he was saying when he was interrupted.

It was now police policy to stand by and allow rioting and looting if those doing the rioting and looting were Black. This policy was causing concern in cities like Nottingham and Manchester, where retail chains were thinking of closing down, so much of their stock were they losing to young Black men, whom the police would not arrest.[22]

Anti-racists must have split their sides as they congratulated themselves on the extent of their achievement. It was already years since they had disposed of the principle of equality before the law. For years the police had been free to pursue crimes committed by Whites with as much vigour as they could muster, and law-abiding acts as well, such as posting limericks on social media that were not to the liking of favoured groups, as long as they did not lay a finger on Blacks. Now, this had induced young Black men to make rioting and looting a weekly pastime, which threatened to change the face of the high street, and still the police would not act. What could be more satisfying?

[1] Lord Scarman, 1982 (1981), The Scarman Report: The Brixton Disorders, 10-12 April 1981, Harmondsworth: Pelican-Penguin, Paragraphs 4.57-4.58. Secondly Scarman advocated policing with the active consent of the public, which in a place like Brixton the police would never have (Paragraph 5.46). Thirdly, he said that the police must exercise discretion, quoting a senior policeman saying that to believe in enforcing the law without concessions to any section of the community was too simplistic; some groups had different cultural backgrounds (Paragraph 5.76).

[2] The anonymous author of “The street where I live” (Independent, Nov. 2nd 1993) thought that in the previous three years someone must have decided to turn his road into a no-go area for the police, where crack dealers could trade openly. Since a policeman had been killed nearby, the police had kept their heads down. There was a sense that the dealers were winning. Until the shooting, the author had been blanking them out, but then a bullet had been fired through the window of a betting shop over the road, which acted as a crack and dope market. Angry at drugs being sold outside his son’s bedroom, the author had called the police and told them that the problem was getting worse. “Yes”, they said, “it will get worse. There’s a lot of money involved.” He never saw a police car arrive.

[3] In full the definition stated that a racial incident was “any incident in which it appears to the reporting or investigating officer that the complaint involves an element of racial motivation, or any incident which includes an allegation of racial motivation made by any person” (from “Race Equality in the UK Today: Developing Good Practice and Looking for Reform: The Police”, a handout distributed by John Newing, President of the Association of Chief Police Officers, on December 8th 1998 at QMW Public Policy Seminars: Developing New Legislation and Strategies on Race Equality, Royal Over-Seas League, London SW1).

[4] In 1991 a Black teenager named Rolan Adams was killed by a White one in South-East London in a fight that broke out between two gangs. Activists called the murder racially motivated on the basis that one gang was Black and the other White, although neither gang was in fact racially uniform (Transcripts of the Proceedings of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, 1998, http://www.blink.org.uk/slinquiry/transcripts.htm, pp. 4,209 4,575 and 7,883-84). In 1992, also in South-East London, a sixteen-year-old Indian named Rohit Duggal was killed by a White youth in an altercation that had nothing to do with race (Ibid., pp. 7,878-79). The police classified both murders as racial as soon as they heard about them (Ibid., pp. 7,885 and 7,887-88).

[5] Ibid., pp. 5,747 and 4,653.

[6] Spectator, July 31st 1993.

[7] Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, 1992, London: Grafton-HarperCollins.

[8] Richard Bernstein, 1995 (1994), Dictatorship of Virtue: How the Battle Over Multiculturalism Is Reshaping Our Schools, Our Country, and Our Lives, New York: Vintage.

[9] Frank Ellis, Jan. 9th 1994, “Political correctness in Britain: A blueprint for decline”, Academic Questions, vol. 7.

[10] Gerald L. Atkinson, 1998, “Who Placed American Men in a Psychic ‘Iron Cage’?”, https://culturalmarxism.blogspot.com/2007/07/who-placed-american-men-in-psychic-iron_06.html.

[11] Raymond V. Raehn, no date, “The Historical Roots of Political Correctness”, http://arcofcc.freeservers.com/Documents/pc.html.

Other useful sources include Brian Mitchell, 1998, Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster, Washington, DC: Regnery; William McGowan, 2002, Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism, San Francisco: Encounter; and Occidental Observer, March 10th 2017, “No Campus (Or Country) for White Men” by Edward Connelly, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2017/03/10/no-campus-or-country-for-White-men/.

[12] The activist Lee Jasper threatened Macpherson with riots if he did not call the police institutionally racist: “We are set for repetitions of police attacks, community reprisals, civil disturbances. I do not say that lightly. …I know very well … that unless this matter is sorted out, sooner or later there is going to be huge explosions on the streets of Britain.” He went on: “Our own community would say … maybe we should have a couple of riots anyway to focus the minds, maybe we should burn down a couple of buildings and beat some police officers in order that you can get the focus”. (1990 Trust, 1998, The 1990 Trust Human Rights Programme, London: 1990 Trust, p. 665.)

[13] Macpherson did not define institutional racism briefly and comprehensibly, such as by saying that it referred to pervasive racial discrimination in an institution. According to his lengthy and obscure definition, it was:

the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

(Sir William Macpherson, 1999, Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, CM 4262-I, The Stationery Office, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/277111/4262.pdf, Paragraph 6.34.)

This definition did not condemn racial discrimination. On the contrary, by suggesting that different treatments could be “appropriate” for the different races, it permitted it. It did not require any discrimination to have been going on for an institution to be deemed racist; only something amounting to discrimination, such as the races being treated equally, which, given differences between the races, produces race-correlated outcomes. It did not require evidence of any wrongdoing but said that institutional racism could be “seen or detected” in various things, meaning that it could be detected where it could not be seen. It did not require any individual to have done anything wrong but allowed “collective” guilt to be assigned directly to an institution. It did not intend the concept of institutional racism to be applied to any race impartially but singled out “minority ethnic people” as potential victims, thereby placing no limit on the amount of discrimination that could be aimed at Whites. This kind of discrimination could be inflicted in the name of combating “institutional racism”.

[14] Macpherson made his purpose a little too apparent when he called for the police to be legally compelled to discriminate by race. “Colour-blind policing must be outlawed”, he decreed (Ibid., Paragraph 45.24).

[15] Telegraph, March 7th 2003, “Straw was student trip’s chief troublemaker”, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/03/07/npro07.xml.

[16] BBC, Feb. 24th 1999, “Lawrence: quotes at a glance”, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/285535.stm,.

[17] Home Office (1) March 1999, Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Home Secretary’s action plan; (2) July 28th 1999, Race Equality: The Home Secretary’s employment targets.

[18] Hansard, Feb. 24th 1999. Vol. 326, col. 393, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1999-02-24/debates/9571f44b-9ee7-4662-a096-0858e1e656a9/StephenLawrenceInquiry.

[19] Sarah Corriher, Dec. 7th 2020, “U.K. prisons are for Whites only”, https://www.bitchute.com/video/spFFzyYAn7nM/. Sarah Corriher’s video shows a Daily Star headline from 2017: “Judges will go softer on minorities as punishments get tough on White kids”.

[20] For example, the British Library was explicit in its support for Black Lives Matter. Resources disseminated there urged employees to donate to the organisation and educate themselves about their “privilege” by reading Marxist authors. Internal emails revealed a staff group which claimed that being colour-blind was a sign of “covert White supremacy” (Telegraph, Aug. 23rd 2020, “British Library should lose taxpayer funding over support for BLM and Labour, say MPs”, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/23/british-library-should-lose-taxpayer-funding-support-blm-labour/).

In July 2020, the library’s leadership declared that the library intended to become “actively anti-racist” rather than merely non-racist (British Library, July 2022, “British Library commits to becoming an anti-racist organisation”, https://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2020/july/british-library-commits-to-becoming-an-anti-racist-organisation).

Deploring the lack of non-Whites in its senior management, it said it would “add the Chairs of the BAME Network to the Library’s Strategic Leadership Team” without delay and announced that its future approach to race would be determined by members of this network. The library, a national repository of culture, had already stated its intention of reviewing its collection of documents accumulated by Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), who founded the British Museum (The Sun, Aug. 30th 2020, “RACE ROW British Library’s chief librarian claims ‘racism created by White people’ as she supports plans to ‘decolonise’ displays”, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12537707/british-librarys-librarian-racism-created-White-people/). This raised the question of how many of its 50,000 Sloane books and manuscripts would end up on its anti-racist bonfire.

[21] The man was Kevin Hurley (The New Culture Forum, July 17th 2020, “Ex-Met Police Chief: Police Leaders Have Lost the Confidence of their Front Line Police Officers”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42shmoKwSSU).

[22] History Debunked, Aug. 4th 2023, “Disorder on the streets of England is on the increase, although we don’t like to talk about it”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b53l2k8TuI0. Simon Webb comments: “Low level riots and looting expeditions are becoming common parts of some English cities, fuelled by a particular demographic group”.