The superior ethical reasoning of the British police service continues to be a source of ever greater wonderment. You and I might fondly imagine that the purpose of policing is to prevent or detect crime and to treat everyone equally under the law. We could not be more wrong. For if lawbreakers belong to a minority group which comes under the magic heading of ‘diversity’, the police will treat them instead as victims and devote time and money to protecting their ‘rights’.
The priority for the police appears no longer to prevent offences, but rather to prevent the giving of offence. Thus Cambridgeshire police have just spent £10,000 on CDs encouraging travellers to take legal action over incidents they claim are racist or discriminatory. According to the Telegraph, 2000 of these discs — entitled Del Gavvers Pukker Cheerus, a Romany phrase for ‘give the police a chance’ — are being distributed to travellers in the Fenland district, with a further 500 being sent to local police officers to make sure they are up to speed on travellers’ rights.
Not surprisingly, local residents are outraged. For they say they are the victims here, suffering from anti-social behaviour, intimidation and criminality by travellers setting up illegal camps in the area. In their innocence, they thought the police would protect them by enforcing the law. Instead they find themselves effectively demonised as racists for making such an outrageous suggestion.
Clearly, they need to attend a few diversity training courses to reprogramme their brains into the permitted mode of thinking. This would teach them that it is racist ever to speak about travellers breaking the law, even though that may be precisely what has happened. They would be taught that Humpty Dumpty’s rule now prevails — that something is racist merely if someone thinks it is. So if the travellers call locals racist for protesting at the harassment they are enduring at the travellers’ hands, racist is what they are.They would learn that travellers have become a protected species, immune from the tiresome obligations that other mortals have to endure such as obeying the law. That is because they are deemed to be a minority group that is persecuted by the majority who are ‘intolerant’ of their alternative lifestyles.
The fact that these alternative lifestyles are often anti-social or unlawful is irrelevant. Tolerance now means tolerating the intolerable when practised by a designated victim group. Not to tolerate it is racist.This crazy and sinister thinking, which makes victims out of law-breakers and bigots out of the true victims of crime, has become the orthodoxy throughout the public services, including the police. Once the thin blue line defending a society’s fundamental values, the police have now grotesquely turned into a weapon against them.
Rather than upholding justice and order, they have become the enforcement arm of a culture which thinks that prejudice and discrimination are the worst crimes that can be committed. For PC Plod, now read Politically Correct Plod.
The rot set in after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, when the police cravenly accepted the politically malevolent verdict of the Macpherson report that the whole police service was institutionally racist. Absorbing this gross libel made the police service institutionally demoralised. Already weakened by a collective loss of nerve over earlier corruption scandals and miscarriages of justice, it set about purging itself not only of racism but of all politically incorrect thinking.
At the same time, it tried to raise its game by taking on a senior officer class with social science degrees. But because the universities had become the intellectual crucible of political correctness, these senior officers arrived programmed by idiotic and lazy thinking. Sound policemen further down the ranks were thus led by senior officers with no practical experience and heads full of ideological junk. Worse still, the only way to gain promotion was to go along with this betrayal of policing values and common sense. The outcome was ‘diversity training’, which made self-designated victim groups such as women, gays or travellers virtually untouchable. Eradicating prejudice became a major preoccupation. Instead of hating all crime, the police now targeted hate crime.
This led to the Metropolitan Police Diversity Directorate’s Orwellian diktat urging the public to report to the police anyone who had committed a thought crime -- abusing people because of their faith, race, religion or disability or because they were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual. It led to the Met's posters on the London Tube, offensively suggesting that men reading them might be contemplating violence against women and warning them they will be pursued even if the woman does not make a statement — ignoring the fact that domestic violence is equally committed by women.
It led to the absurd decision by the new Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair to change the Met’s logo — at huge expense — not only to stress its inclusiveness but also to remove the italic script in which it was written, on the grounds that this discriminated against short-sighted people.
Enforcing approved attitudes like this — however ludicrous — is as inefficient as it is frightening. It necessitates the creation of burgeoning bureaucracies to promulgate and service the whole diversity obsession. A surreal aspect of the Fenland travellers’ initiative was the emergence into the public spotlight of one Sergeant Vic Galpin, ‘hate crime manager’ of Cambridgeshire police. Why on earth should the police need a hate crime manager? Pursuing hate crime is bad enough; but why does it have to be ‘managed’? Would the police have a ‘murder manager’? Of course not; it would be the head of the murder squad. People are getting robbed and violent crime is rising on streets abandoned by the police to the gangs because we are told there are not enough officers to go out on patrol. Yet somehow there is enough money to pay for a hate crime manager.
Bogus values produce bogus employment. Throughout the public sector, ‘diversity’ has created whole empires of ludicrous jobs at public expense. The current issue of the BBC’s house journal Ariel, for example, devotes an entire page to Jonathan Man, described as ‘diversity assistant, radio drama’. He wants to see ’10 per cent gays and lesbians on air…and British Chinese faces too’. As he asks: ‘As a British Chinese gay man, where are the faces and voices that represent me?’
Where indeed. No doubt we would all wish to see more gay Chinese faces on BBC television, and no doubt we would all applaud this principled use of license-fee payers’ money. The fact that many playwrights now refuse to write plays for the BBC because they are required to include not only the required quota of Chinese gay characters but other racial, sexual and differently-abled individuals — thus wrecking all creativity — is of course neither here nor there.
How reassuring it is that while the BBC is making some 5000 staff redundant, and the police moan that they don’t have the manpower to put more officers on the beat, they can still find the cash to fund a diversity assistant and a hate crime manager. How comforting that these public servants have got their priorities so right — and that those who want them instead to do bizarre things like preventing crime or making quality TV programmes are merely bigots and reactionaries, to be scorned, smeared and simply ignored.
(Melanie Phillips in ‘Melanie Phillips Diary’, April 1, 2005)
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/2005_04.html
"It's not my Yob man". - Freddie Prince, Chico and the Man
Wow, she's really good. This is the second thing I've read by her. At the risk of sounding unPC, that gal writes like a man!
A great article; thanks very much for posting :-)