Perception rules

 I have written much in the past about how ridiculous attention to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion matters has developed over the years, with HR departments and leagues of new 'staff development' trainers delivering instructions to organisations across the country, mostly large and influential but also small and vulnerable, to the extent that most of us are scared to say or write anything relating to anything that might be considered a 'protected' minority characteristic. 

I have always blamed this intrusion into common sense left, right and centre on the last Conservative government's lax attitude and simply not spotting what was going on under their noses. I never thought they actively condoned or supported the changes happening but I did believe that they were very wrong in just letting it happen.

Now, thanks to an excellent article by Charles Moore in The Telegraph, I realise that the seeds of the racial element of much of this were sown far earlier, in 1999, when we were governed by Blair's Labour government. I reproduce most of the article here as it sets out so well how things went wrong.

When enormous official reports about terrible wrongs appear, most of those commenting on them do not have time to read them in full. The story breaks and everyone wants a quick reaction. This usually guarantees favourable reporting: much safer to praise than to interrogate.

In 1999, I was busy editing this newspaper, but I decided to take time out to read and analyse the whole of Macpherson. Something about the clamour surrounding it, and the mob intimidation from the public gallery in Lambeth Town Hall of witnesses to the inquiry, had made me suspicious.

Two things struck me about the report. The first was its tone. From the start, it was accusatory and rhetorical, not measured and professional. It assailed the character of police officers who appeared before it, like a prosecution, not an official inquiry. Its interpretation of events seemed settled in advance, whereas a well-conducted inquiry takes evidence on which to form its interpretation. Officers who dissented from the Macpherson view were exhibiting “their own unwitting collective racism”, it said. Hence, his concept of “institutional racism”. 

It seemed to me that the report never proved this. It simply asserted it.

The second point arose from the first. If the police, as the report said, were “unwitting” in their collective racism, it followed that self-selecting enlightened people – such as Sir William Macpherson, then in his 70s and living in a castle in non-diverse Perthshire – should order their re-education.

Thus the subject of racism gained the special privilege of not being defined by the criminal law in the ordinary way. A new, non-legal principle was invented and imposed. “A racist incident,” said Macpherson’s famous conclusions, “is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.”

So anyone who thought he or she had suffered a racist incident had indeed done so, no further evidence required. And since even declared non-victims could, by “perceiving” a racist incident, make it exist, you needed only one person to perceive a racist incident, and report it, to make it an event which must be officially recorded. What was the criminal law, whose job is to establish guilt or innocence, supposed to make of that?

“If this definition were to be accepted,” I wrote in this space at the time, “the statistics of racist incidents would suddenly shoot up, allowing the police to be attacked even more.” That is exactly what has happened.

Macpherson added something else: “The term ‘racist incident’ must be understood to include crimes and non-crimes. Both must be reported, recorded and investigated with equal commitment” (“24 hours a day”). That, too, is exactly what has happened, the official name for this extra branch of police work being “non-crime hate incidents”.

Finally, Macpherson recommended that his racist incident definition “should be universally adopted by the police, local government and other relevant agencies.” That has also happened. We are governed by Macpherson race theory.

Sir William, I wrote then, “imposes on his victims, the police, a concept of racism which makes them guilty whatever they do… It is contemptible that someone versed in [the English] law should have done such a thing.” By doing so, he would “inflame racial feeling.”

Today, the flames are crackling. They may even succeed in burning down our entire party system.

One of the “nine principles” of our police, deriving from Sir Robert Peel, who founded them, is that “The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.” The Macpherson legacy is quite different. It is to make the police – and many other public employees – the agents of a race doctrine they have been told they themselves do not understand.

The same doctrine teaches that, if they are white, they will never understand it. So now poor police officers run around gabbling half-digested jargon about identity and disable the native capacity of their own eyes and ears, even when someone is dying in front of them. How could such a police force ever win public approval? That is why, as Kemi Badenoch recently put it, we are “descending into tribalism”.

It is race, obviously, that makes this discussion so tense. But I think the problem runs wider and deeper. It is an irrationality of which racism itself is the worst but not the only symptom. After Macpherson, the British state decided to allow “perception” to trump the law’s traditional emphasis on provable fact. That irrationality has opened up other ones – such as the assertion that gender is a matter of choice not of biology, or the doctrine, in relation to sexual assaults, that “The victim must always be believed”, which has led to a slew of false, life-ruining accusations of child sexual abuse.

Racism remains a real and present evil, so the unpicking of the Macpherson legacy must be calmly conducted, but unpicked it must be.

It seems worth ending with one further point. In Britain today, by far the most virulent form of racism is anti-Semitism. A serious attempt is being made to drive out Jews, arguably the most well-integrated of all immigrant groups. And where have our post-Macpherson, “anti-racist” police been in all this? Just standing and watching as the Jew-haters march down the street.

Finally, after the publicity surrounding the attack on Henry Nowak, people are realising that the police have been acting as they have been trained to do and it is that training that needs to be changed - and quickly. That will not be easy. Many officers and legal minds have grown up over 25 or more years believing this concept of 'perceiving' a racist incident. It will take a long time to reverse much of teh arguments made before and, no doubt, there will plenty of push-back by those who wanted and made the instructions in the first place. No-one likes to admit they were wrong.

There is a long way to go before British society and legislation returns to the wonderfully simple elements of common sense and freedom of speech and thought that we were once well-known for. Some movement has taken place on trans matters with our Supreme Court declaring that you are either a man or a woman and you cannot change your biological sex. You may be free to dress or act as your please but remain as your were born and will be treated under the law as such. Anyone can choose to be a transvestite or announce that they feel most comfortable at any point they choose along some spectrum of gender from male to female and it is right that we respect their views in day-to-day life. We should not, however, be fired or arrested for asserting that a man is a man and should not be using a woman's toilet or changing room, or for referring to him as her and declining to engage with weird new pronouns like ze or expected to use they in contradiction of the grammar we have learned.

There is a long way to go but, at least, it appears we may have made a start.