Monday, February 23, 2009

One out of three

The BBC and others decided to celebrate 10 years of the Macpherson report by considering whether the Met police is still "institutionally racist" with former Home Secretary Jack Straw concluding that they are not.

Mr Straw told the BBC: "If you are asking me whether I believe the Met as a whole is still institutionally racist, the answer is no."

Instead, Mr Straw suggested that there are "pockets of racism" in the force, but that it is not institutionalised. Actually, for those of us who never bought into the "institutionally racist" claptrap that's all there ever was - pockets of racism - just like as there has always been in society in general. The Met - being a product of society - reflects that.

What nobody bothered to ask is whether the other two issues the Macpherson report highlighted have been addressed as well. Along with "institutional racism" the report suggested that the Met also suffers from "professional incompetence" and a "failure of leadership".

Ten years on and they still do. Two out of three ain't bad - one out of three is pretty bloody awful.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Two things strike me when considering the treatment of the Macpherson report by the MSM over the last decade.
Firstly, the fact that "professional incompetence" was consistently overlooked as a likely cause of the Met's lamentable investigation.Many of the team working on the Lawrence murder also worked on the Green Chain Rapist case (Robert Napper)- and look how they failed to link that with the Rachel Nickell murder, much to the disadvantage of Colin Stagg. I suppose it helped Lawrence's parents heal the void of his loss to imagine they were victims of racism rather than laziness or incompetence. Seeing their perception of events echoed and magnified by the media clearly had a bandwagon effect- to which Macpherson provided the fitting climax.
Secondly, the MSM can usually be relied upon to trot out the 'it's a cock up, not a conspiracy' line when offialdom is found out to be complicit in tragic events. Yet in this case they bought into a concept, 'institutional racism' more opaque, and more lacking in hard evidence, than many 'consipracy theories' that are widely ridiculed (such as the 'David Kelly was murdered' theory).