Institutional nonsense
Sir: Charles Moore warns against the danger that a new inquiry into police racism by the Metropolitan Police Authority might ‘feed the monster’ of racist lobbying (The Spectator’s Notes, 11 October). He reminds us of the ‘unfairness’ of the Macpherson Report. ‘Unfair’ is an understatement.
For all its uncritical reception, and its profound and mainly pernicious impact on policing, the Macpherson Report is blatantly a fatally flawed document.
Macpherson states plainly, right at the beginning of his report, that he had been unable to find any evidence of police racism. On personal racism, Macpherson said that his inquiry had ‘not heard evidence of overt racism or discrimination’ (para. 6.3, p. 20). On institutional racism (in the ordinary meaning of ‘institutional’) Macpherson wrote that it was ‘vital to stress that neither academic debate nor the evidence presented to us leads us to say or conclude that an accusation that institutional racism exists in the Met implies that the policies of the Met are racist. No such evidence is before us. In fact the opposite is true’ (para 6.24, p. 24).
So he simply turned the term ‘institutional’ completely upside-down. He made it mean racism for which there was no evidence either in the regulations of the Met or in the demonstrable culture or behaviour of police officers.
Whether or not rogue racism or racism sanctioned by the rules or informal culture of the Met could have been found by Macpherson, or will be proven to exist now, is another matter entirely. The astonishing truth is that Macpherson states clearly that he found neither. But by requiring no evidence, Macpherson gave a bundle of blank cheques to grievance-based pressure groups. They have been gleefully cashing them ever since. Norman Dennis
Civitas, London SW1
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