In March of last year the Trotskyite newspaper Socialist Worker screamed More police powers equal more racism, and with de rigueur dishonesty spouted the self-serving statistic:

“Black people are already a staggering seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.

This discrimination is getting worse. A year ago blacks were five times more likely to be stopped by the police.”

While we should all be concerned about increasing police – and state – power and the abuse thereof, racism is the least of black Britain’s problems. As the black establishment has itself come to realise, albeit slowly and painfully, the fact that more blacks are stopped and searched by the police, arrested, charged and convicted, is due less to racism than to a far more serious, and real, menace. Just how serious I didn’t realise until last Friday when I was sitting in the public gallery at Kingston Crown Court. I was there to take notes on a pre-trial hearing of a major fraud case; the hearing was due to start in the morning but was delayed for all the usual reasons. Prior to its opening, the judge was due to sentence no less than five defendants. All five of them were black, and, incredibly, all the cases were drug-related.

The first case was a man in his late twenties or early thirties. He had been caught in possession of firearms, which he had apparently been carrying for his own protection. After giving him “credit” for pleading guilty, the judge sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment saying “the contamination of firearms” had to be removed from our streets.

Another man, who had been supplying relatively small quantities of Ecstasy and Cocaine, was sentenced to three and a half years. The fifth defendant was a young British black woman who although a first offender, was sentenced to a staggering twelve years for importing Class A drugs valued at some three hundred thousand pounds.

Earlier, two young black men who had been involved in drugs purely as users were treated far more leniently, both received non-custodial sentences, although one was warned that if he didn’t make a proper effort he would be hauled back before the court to receive the sixteen months the judge had promised him at an earlier hearing.

Gun crime is allied to drug crime, and both appear to have been imported from the United States. In July 2001, the American black magazine Ebony published an article The 10 Biggest Killers of Blacks in which it revealed that for blacks in their late teens to early 20s, homicide was the most frequent cause of death, “often at the hands of another African-American”.

In 1998, the Metropolitan Police set up Operation Trident to tackle specifically black on black shootings. Originally it had a ten strong intelligence gathering team. By the Autumn of 2000 there were no less than a hundred and sixty officers working on it; there were more than a dozen such murders in that year alone.

The cry of racism is a red herring; however much poverty, exclusion and social deprivation there may be in Britain nowadays, no black man today is worse off financially or socially than the white Britons or black Americans who lived through the hungry thirties when gun crime was infrequent and drug related murders were unheard of.

One can argue – and I would – that Britain’s Draconian anti-drug laws make a bad situation worse. Take the profit out of drugs – by legalising them – and the murder and violence will disappear. But drug addiction will not. Only by facing up to the real causes of their problems instead of blaming them all on the Great White Bigot will blacks in Britain and everywhere be able to confront and defeat the real cancer in their midst.

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