Periodically it has been necessary for this blog to point out that, whatever their faults, the Metropolitain police are probably not institutionally racist. The force merely employs quite a lot of racist individuals, working in an environment where a disproportionate number of the criminals are black.
A couple of years ago I quoted here Dr. Richard Stone, one of the Macpherson inquiry's members, as follows (this was from the Guardian): "We couldn't believe the police investigated murders in general as they had done with the Stephen Lawrence case .... insufficient evidence was presented to us to draw the conclusion that it might have been corruption so we were left with one other possibility, that it had to be racism".
It didn't seem to have occurred to Macpherson that the Met might have messed up the Lawrence case because they were incompetent, a possibility which, from my experience of dealing with the Met as a lawyer in the 1990s, would have been the overwhelmingly obvious avenue to explore.
In April 2012 the press reported that the Home Secretary was considering instituting a new inquiry after it emerged that a senior police officer associated with the Lawrence case had links to a criminal associate of David Norris's father, Norris being one of the two convicted last January of the murder.
It now seems Macpherson might have been wrong about corruption as well.
Clearly Macpherson's decision will have had an impact on policing in this country, and there is a widely held view that this has been for the good. An institution, which in my experience was reasonably liberal at least at senior level, subsequently tried strenuously to be more liberal still. Inevitably, in the decade after Macpherson, individuals who could endorse this agenda wholeheartedly rose within the ranks to decision-making positions at the top.
It is interesting to consider the relationship between this issue and the successful prosecution yesterday of nine Asian men for offences against underage girls in Rochdale. "It is my firm belief", writes Julie Bindel in this mornings Graun, "based on interviews with a number of victims, family members, campaigners and professionals such as police and social workers, that where the gangs are of Asian origin there has been a tendency in some areas of England to ignore the issue for fear of being branded racist".
Now here's Allison Pearson, writing in this morning's Torygraph: "Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England, who at least had the guts to bring the case to court after social workers and the police turned away for fear of being seen as racist, admitted that “imported cultural baggage” played a role in the crimes. That’s the same baggage that brought quaint customs like forced marriages, honour killing and female genital mutilation to these isles."
Pearson quotes Afzal thus: “(The convicted men) think that women are some lesser beings. The availability of vulnerable young white girls is what has drawn men to them… These girls were on the streets at midnight. It made them easy prey for evil men.”
"So the case turns out to be a tale of two cultures", writes Pearson. "On the one hand, we have white girls, raised in a godless, under-parented, over-sexualised society, who have little respect for themselves or their bodies and – even worse – no adults taking responsibility. On the other, we have a different kind of “respect”, the warped creed of a sub-section of unreconstructed, brutally over-parenting men. Their own daughters and young female relatives must not be violated or they will lose their market value, so why not take out your sexual frustration on the despised native slappers instead?"
Pearson finishes, "Stymied by political correctness, social workers, carers, police, lawyers and council staff all failed to protect those young Rochdale girls. They were victims twice over. First, of the despicable men who traded and abused them, and second, of our well-meaning, foolish and deadly desire to avoid the issue of race at any cost."
To return to Stephen Lawrence for a moment, it's not difficult to see how the Macpherson report's findings should have contributed to a climate, at least as far as the police are concerned, where hypersensitivity about race should lead to decisions being made like the one alleged in Rochdale. What if a white gang had systematically abused Asian girls - could any of us conceive the police deciding not to prosecute in such circumstances? Not many, I think. Thus does overzealous political correctness rot a society from within. Just like racism, in fact.
Despite her promising start, Pearson ends up confusing race with culture. Mind you, so does Julie Bindel and just about everyone else. For example, Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, accused Pakistani community elders (in the Telegraph again) of “burying their heads in the sand”, insisting that race is “central to the actions of the criminals. They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought...”
But while the colour of the girls' skin might have helped dehumanise them for their exploiters, it was their willingness to enter into the alcohol-decked margins of the web spun by the paedophiles, and the lack of parental supervision and concern which helped make the abuse possible. The men would not have abused the girls if they had belonged to their own community, but it is equally true that Asian girls would not have behaved as these girls did.
These things are cultural rather than racial phenomena. To make only the most obvious point, his race doesn't seem to have made Nazir Afzal, the man who led the prosecution, a bad man, any more than race made David Norris, one of Stephen Lawrence's murderers, a good one. To that extent skin colour is irrelevant: it is no more than a (wildly inaccurate) marker for culture.
Culture is what makes some societies succeed and others fail. It is the background to everything we do, the context in which individuals make decisions about how to act. Whereas race is skin deep, culture goes right to our core.
In Rochdale, as in so many other Northern towns, there are two communities and, as Pearson says, two cultures living side by side. This case has arisen out of a ghastly mating of the two.
