In the wake of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the victim’s parents Neville and Doreen were portrayed by the mass media as icons of racial tolerance in pursuit of justice conducting a responsible campaign to bring their son’s killers to book, while at the same time exposing police corruption, incompetence and institutional racism. The Lawrences have received accolades galore from the media, politicians, even from the police.
On closer inspection though both Neville and especially Doreen Lawrence have been less icons of tolerance than enemies of individual liberty. They have condoned the use of such totalitarian practices as intrusive surveillance, the suppression of free speech, and the abolition of double jeopardy. Their much vaunted struggle against police corruption, apathy and racism is based on ignorance if not wilful blindness of police investigative methodology, while their attempts to convict the Acourt brothers’ gang of their son’s murder has ignored the fact that all the available evidence suggests that the five men branded murderers by a national newspaper are actually innocent.
This speech analyses and deconstructs the methods and the true motives of Doreen Lawrence and her gang, and methodically rubbishes the specious argument that they are champions of the downtrodden and the oppressed in pursuit of justice.
Good afternoon gentlemen,
First of all, thank you for inviting me to speak here, for a third time. I have rather a long speech to make on what for most of you and I suspect for most of the population has become a rather tiresome subject, but I hope I won’t bore you because as you’ll probably have guessed from the title, I will be approaching it from a radically different angle from the usual fawning “anti-racist” claptrap.
This subject is an infamous murder and its aftermath and consequences; that of a young man in Eltham, South East London, in April 1993. Its aftermath is known as the Macpherson Report.
The Macpherson Report or to give it its proper title THE STEPHEN LAWRENCE INQUIRY, Cm 4262 – I & 4262 – II (Revised), was published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in February 1999. It is technically a white paper, though curiously for a white paper, it is actually pink, and surprisingly for a white paper, it became something of a bestseller with the general public. The government is forever issuing white papers, and the overwhelming majority have very restricted readerships: media people, lawyers, doctors, teachers or whatever, but not this one.
That wouldn’t have been much of a problem if it hadn’t been taken seriously, but because it and Macpherson’s lunatic pronouncements have, it has become one of the most perfidious documents ever to be issued by a sovereign government, every bit as perfidious in its own way as The Balfour Declaration, or even the Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion.
Not only does Macpherson make wild sweeping statements that have absolutely no basis in fact, but he draws remarkable conclusions from little or no evidence. He also makes recommendations which extend far beyond the terms of reference of his inquiry, and which seek wilfully and with malice aforethought to undermine the rule of law in Britain.
Unfortunately for us, in spite of severe criticism, (1) Macpherson’s consequences are still with us and will be until the hysteria about so-called institutional racism, and racism in general, is purged from our media and other institutions. Being something of a pessimist I can’t see that happening for a good few years yet, if ever.
I’m sure you are all of you depressingly familiar with the background to this case, but I will go over it briefly for the sake of clarity.
On the night of April 22, 1993, eighteen year old Stephen Lawrence was stabbed by a youth, apparently a member of a gang, while waiting for a bus at a stop in Eltham. There were several witnesses to the stabbing, and the police arrived on the scene fairly promptly, as did an ambulance, but in spite of the prompt attendance of both these emergency services, Stephen Lawrence died, and his killer – or killers – was/were never caught, and most likely never will be.
The failure of the police to bring the killer or killers to book has been the subject of much debate, some of it legitimate, but much if not most of it both contrived and politically and racially motivated, and not a little of that overtly dishonest. Stephen Lawrence was, as you all know, black, and because of the hysteria over so-called racism and what we are told at times is the epidemic level of racially motivated violence or even racially motivated murder in our society, by whites, of course, the failure of the authorities to mount a successful prosecution was the subject of bitter recrimination and all manner of allegations.
That of course is only part of the story, because five suspects were arrested in due course, and charged with the murder, all five of them, but the case was thrown out because it was not considered strong enough. This is an entirely proper procedure; both the Crown Prosecution Service and the committing court may terminate a prosecution if the evidence is considered too weak to put before a jury, and the trial judge himself may do so after hearing pre-trial submissions, or even during the course of a trial.
The Stephen Lawrence case though was different, or so we were led to believe; there had to be an ulterior motive for the unsuccessful prosecution, and this was simply because the victim was black. A campaign was launched, not only to bring the suspected killers to justice, but to investigate the reasons they were not convicted, and to ensure that heads rolled.
That campaign had many prongs, but the people who led it for the most part were the victim’s parents: Neville and Doreen. In the early days they conducted this campaign with dignity and restraint, and sought to keep it within a narrow remit and not to allow it to be exploited by people with political and racial agendas. In September 1993, they wrote to Marc Wadsworth and Palma Black of the Anti-Racist Alliance to dissociate themselves publicly from that organisation. The ARA had sent out statements in the family’s name without their permission. The Lawrences who had initially welcomed their support wrote “To our dismay we found that the political agendas and rivalries of different organisations began to take over the meetings.” They stressed that their son’s name was “too precious to be used in a cynical way”. (2) All credit to the Lawrences for that.
One of the ways in which the death of Stephen Lawrence was cynically exploited by the far left was in their attempts to blame the killing on the BNP – morally if not literally. (3) I was informed however by that Party’s Chairman – when I was on speaking terms with him – that such people who made up that street gang would not be welcome in the BNP, and I have no doubt that its previous Chairman who headed the party at the time of the murder, the late John Tyndall, held exactly the same opinion.
After the case against the five suspects collapsed, the Lawrences tried to mount a private prosecution. They did this on albeit poor legal advice, and this collapsed too. But by this time, Doreen, and probably Neville as well, were less interested in justice than in revenge; they can’t be blamed for that, but what followed next was absolutely disgraceful. The five so-called suspects were branded murderers by a daily newspaper, and became the subject of a nationwide campaign of harassment.
This harassment became so intense that they were subjected to intrusive surveillance of dubious legality which resulted in their private conversations being broadcast to the world. The Lawrences (and others) expressed shock and outrage at some of the language used to describe their fellow blacks. (4) They shouldn’t have, because people who eavesdrop on other people’s conversations seldom hear anything good about themselves, and when they do it illegally they don’t deserve to.
Then there was the public inquiry which the five so-called suspects were subpoenaed to attend, and where on legal advice they refused to answer any questions. They had obviously been better advised than Neville and Doreen.
Unable to obtain satisfaction by fair means or foul, the Lawrences rounded on the police and branded them institutionally racist, whatever that means. This vacuous pronouncement was echoed by the Macpherson Report, which even gave this mythical disease a definition. Of racism, Macpherson and his gang wrote:
“Racism in general terms consists of conduct or words or practices which disadvantage or advantage people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. In its more subtle form it is as damaging as in its overt form.” (5)
One doubts if even Doreen Lawrence would agree with that, for surely she would rather her son had simply been racially abused that night than murdered. But the Macpherson Report’s drivel knows no bounds, thus we are told that the words “coloured” and “negro” no less “are now well known to be offensive”. (6)
Macpherson spells the word Negro in lower case, which might just be construed as offensive in a purely grammatical sense, but it is doubtful if the members of either the Universal Negro Improvement Association or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People would consider either of these words offensive in their proper contexts. In the West, the word coloured refers to non-whites in general, with particular reference to blacks and Asians. In South Africa it means something more specific. Although it may be unfashionable, even antiquated, the word Negro is a perfectly correct term and no more offensive than the phrase “white Caucasian”. Until Malcolm X began referring to “the so-called Negro”, (7) most American blacks were happy to call themselves Negroes. And ironically, the word nigger, which is most definitely an offensive term, is used far more freely by blacks, particularly in the States, than by any so-called white racists. (8)
The Macpherson Report speaks not only of racism and institutional racism but of unwitting racism, unconscious racism and even of unintentional racism.
It also puts forward a large number of bizarre and at times outright dangerous recommendations.
How’s this for bizarre: recommendation 12, concerning the definition of a racist incident:
“A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”
Any other person? Any other person in the world?
And another recommendation: racist incidents must be reported and investigated – even if they are non-crimes!
And who are going to investigate these racist incidents? The police? What business have they investigating incidents which are neither criminal nor related to maintaining public order or the smooth flow of traffic? Couldn’t they be better utilised in the fight against Al-Qaeda, or the Continuity IRA?
Recommendation number 38 is outright dangerous: “That consideration should be given to the Court of Appeal being given power to permit prosecution after acquittal where fresh and viable evidence is presented.” (9)
And recommendation 39: “That consideration should be given to amendment of the law to allow prosecution of offences involving racist language or behaviour, and of offences involving the possession of offensive weapons, where such conduct can be proven to have taken place otherwise than in a public place.”
Doreen Lawrence and her gang didn’t simply endorse these lunatic recommendations, they complained that Macpherson hadn’t gone far enough.
I stress that everyone in this room should sympathise with Doreen Lawrence over the murder of her son, and I would stress that they should sympathise with Neville Lawrence even more; not only did he lose his son but he was married to Doreen for twenty odd years. (10) In view of her subsequent pronouncements and behaviour this must have been quite an ordeal.
One of these pronouncements was reported in the Guardian on February 11, 1997: “When my son was murdered the police saw my son as belonging to a gang. My son was stereotyped by the police, he was black then he must be a criminal and they set about investigating him and us.” (11)
And another from the Macpherson inquiry: “We were patronised and were fobbed off”. (12) She assumed this was because she was black and a woman.
This sort of nonsense tells us less about police so-called racism than it does about Mrs Lawrence, in particular about her gross ignorance of police procedure and criminal investigative methodology. But if she can be forgiven for making such pronouncements on the grounds of grief, or insanity, others can’t, nor can they be forgiven for allowing this nonsense to be spread throughout the media and into Parliament where sundry groups are to this day using the bizarre recommendations of the Macpherson Report to attack the very fabric of our freedoms.
So let us go back to basics, in particular back to the night Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death, and see what if anything the police actually did wrong.
On reading Macpherson it is clear they made two mistakes, both of which could have been serious, but neither of which in fact would have altered the outcome of the case in any way.
Macpherson tells us that no attempt was made by them to administer First Aid to the victim. One of the first people on the scene was a 14 year old schoolgirl who seemed to know better than them what to do. This is actually more of a compliment to the girl in question than an indictment of the police. Police officers are not paramedics, and though they are trained people and expected to behave in a professional manner in the face of human tragedy, it is an unfortunate fact that sometimes the situation gets to them as much as it does to the rest of us. As things happened though, First Aid wouldn’t have saved the victim because his wounds were too severe. (13)
The other criticism that can be made of one very senior police officer who worked on this case has more legitimacy. Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Osland (who retired in March 1994), told the Inquiry that he didn’t realise a suspect could be arrested without hard evidence but merely on reasonable suspicion. (14) This sounds a strange admission for any police officer to make, but anyone who has ever been falsely arrested, as I have, will not condemn him too harshly for this. The usual criticism made of the police in this regard is that they overstep the mark, not that they are too timid. Far better for all of us if they make too few arrests rather than too many.
The implication that has been drawn from the failure to arrest the five original suspects at the drop of a hat is that it permitted them time to destroy forensic evidence, and perhaps to concoct alibis. This doesn’t wash. If one of them had indeed been responsible for the murder, the forensic evidence could have been disposed of that same night, within twenty-four hours at most, because the story was all over the media by the following day.
Now let us turn Dotty Doreen’s criticism that the police treated her son’s murder as though it was the murder of a criminal and that they investigated her family. Another person who was unhappy with this approach was Duwayne Brooks, who was with his friend on the night of the murder. He was unhappy not only because he was stereotyped but because he had been treated like a suspect.
If however you refer to the evidence of the police who attended the crime scene, you will understand why. According to WPC Smith, when she arrived that night, Duwayne Brooks was “irate and aggressive”. I was going to quote directly from The Macpherson Report, but in view of the tender age of one member of our audience I will say only that his remarks directed towards WPC Smith included rather strong sexual swear words. (15)
I think most people will agree that if Duwayne Brooks was stereotyped by WPC Smith as a foul-mouthed, anti-police street black, it was on reasonable suspicion. (16) Ironically, it wasn’t only the police who – quote unquote – stereotyped him. It is obvious from his own pronouncements that Doreen in particular wasn’t too happy with her industrious, upwardly mobile son hanging around with the likes of him. (17)
And who will dispute the suggestion that if Duwayne Brooks rather than Stephen Lawrence had ended up on the wrong end of a knife that night, there would have been no Macpherson Report and far, far less outrage over another senseless murder? I say this not to disparage Duwayne Brooks, simply to point out that, to paraphrase Orwell, some blacks are more equal than others.
Duwayne’s other big complaint was that the police treated him like a suspect. Well, put yourself in the position of WPC Smith; you turn up at a crime scene where a youth is lying bleeding to death, and you are assailed by a man shouting obscenities to the effect that you are not wanted there, that he only called an ambulance. What would you think?
Of course he was treated like a suspect, at least in the initial stages. Fortunately there were other witnesses to the stabbing, otherwise he could have found himself in serious trouble. If though you read the Report you will see that in the early hours of the next morning while he was still at the police station, Duwayne Brooks made a long statement, and during the taking of that statement they broke off so that he could see his mother. They offered to let him go home first, but he refused and stayed until 5.30am. (18)
So, within hours of his friend’s murder, Duwayne had been ruled out as a serious suspect. He wouldn’t have been ruled out altogether though, and indeed Doreen Lawrence herself would have been a suspect, although not a very strong one. This has absolutely nothing to do with racism, and everything to do with police methodology.
The British police bring to book a far higher percentage of murderers than most if not any other offender. If you are burgled, it is not unlikely that the crime won’t even be investigated in any meaningful sense because unless there is hard physical evidence, or some other salient factor, the crime will be routinely screened out. They simply don’t have the resources to investigate every single burglary thoroughly. Murder though is different, because of its seriousness, the resources they put into such investigations are enormous. A few examples will suffice.
In the hunt for the triple killer Trevor Hardy, the police interviewed twenty-three thousand people. (19) In 1955, a man named Ernest Harding murdered 10 year old Evelyn Higgins. The only thing they had to go on was a report of a car, a Flying Standard Nine, 1937-8 model. So they ordered up a microfilm of the numbers of all 9,617 Flying Standard Nines produced in this period and went through the lot. (20) No mean feat before the present generation of super-computers.
In May 2000, Ronald Jebson was gaoled for life for a double murder committed in 1970. It was not established conclusively at the time that the victims, a boy and a girl, were indeed murdered, because their bodies were not found for several months. All the same, they interviewed 14,272 people and searched 4,356 houses in the course of the original inquiry. (21) In the Jill Dando case, they investigated everyone she knew. A press report the month following her murder claimed that “Police have checked the bank accounts of people who knew her for withdrawals of large sums of money that could have been used to pay a hitman.” (22)
Exactly whose bank accounts they checked and under what lawful authority they accessed so many of them was not specified, but they would undoubtedly have checked out in great detail the finances and movements of both her fiancé and her parents. The police are sometimes referred to by the criminal element as The Filth, (23) but at times they do a filthy job. It can’t be pleasant to have to grill the parents of a murdered woman or teenager about their relationship with their loved one, and to make enquiries, confirm alibis and so on behind their backs, but some filthy jobs have to be done.
In this connection I can do no better than relate the tale of the notorious October 1989 murder of Carol Stuart. Mrs Stuart was heavily pregnant and was being driven home from a childbirth class at a Boston hospital by her husband Charles, when a black gunman forced his way into their car, made them drive to another location where he demanded cash and jewelry, then shot her dead and shot her husband in the abdomen.
Mr Stuart managed to call the police on his mobile phone, and in due course a black man named Willie Bennett was arrested after Stuart identified him as looking “most like” the killer.
However, the story doesn’t end there, because the shocking truth was not only that Willie Bennett was totally innocent of this crime (24) but that Charles Stuart had murdered his wife and then shot himself in a bizarre attempt to claim a life assurance policy. Subsequently, his brother went to the police and confessed to being an accessory after the fact. Before he could be arrested, Charles Stuart committed suicide by throwing himself into the river.
If the British police and forces worldwide didn’t have dirty, foul, suspicious minds, the likes of Charles Stuart would never be brought to book, and it is not impossible that in this particular case a totally innocent man – a black man, don’t forget, Doreen – could have been convicted of this terrible murder. In the Lawrence case as in this one, there was absolutely no impropriety in the investigation and elimination as potential suspects, of the victim’s family, and of his friend Duwayne Brooks.
Since the murder of Stephen Lawrence there have been two very well publicised cases similar to that of Carol Stuart. In 1994, a woman named Susan Smith reported that her car had been hijacked by a black man who had driven off with her two young sons on the back seat. Nine days later she led the authorities to where she had dumped the car with the boys still inside, in eighteen feet of water. (25) And another case you will many of you recall because it happened here, was the 1996 murder of Lee Harvey by his mistress Tracie Andrews, who claimed he had been the victim of a racially motivated road rage attack. She’s now serving a life sentence. (26)
Returning to Stephen Lawrence, when the police arrived at the Eltham bus stop, the victim was still alive, but it soon became a murder investigation.
Now what would they have done? They would have sealed off the crime scene to try to preserve forensic evidence; they would have trawled the area to try to identify the suspects; they would have interviewed as many people as possible who were in the area at the time and followed this up with door to door enquiries; and they would have set up an incident room. These are all standard procedures, although they will vary from investigation to investigation. There is no evidence they did not follow proper procedures here.
As stated, Doreen Lawrence told the Macpherson Inquiry that “We were patronised and were fobbed off”. She assumed this was because she was black, and a woman. Again, she is ignorant of police methodology. While they would release some information to the family of a murder victim, the police have a duty first and foremost to bring the perpetrator to book. They do not in general release all manner of information to family and friends, much less to the media. In many cases they withhold certain information for sound operational reasons.
We have heard a lot about stereotyping from Doreen Lawrence and her gang. Stephen Lawrence was stereotyped; Duwayne Brooks was stereotyped. And so on. But stereotypes are not necessarily always a bad thing, although they don’t always fit.
The Acourt brothers and their gang were stereotyped as white, black-hating, knife-wielding thugs, apparently with more than a little justification, but that does not make them murderers.
Eventually, the five were arrested but the case against them collapsed because of “insufficient evidence”. This term is a police euphemism for no evidence whatsoever, or no evidence that should be put before a jury. It is used with the following implications:
a) we got the right man
b) the courts let him off for purely technical reasons
c) if we had more powers (like the right to hold suspects indefinitely or to beat confessions out of them) this sort of thing wouldn’t happen
d) don’t blame us, blame the liberals and the do-gooders
None of this applied in the case of the Acourt brothers and their cohorts. The so-called evidence against these five unsavouries was a) their well-documented propensity to carry knives; b) the fact that they lived in the area; and c) a couple of anonymous letters implicating four of the five in the murder.
Unsavoury knife carrying youths of all races are two a penny in London, and anonymous letters can be used for all manner of purposes, in particular to play cruel games with the police, and to point the finger of suspicion away from the real perpetrator(s). (27)
The branding of the five as murderers by the Daily Mail newspaper was disgraceful, but it was not only disgraceful, it was almost certainly wrong, as a reading of the Macpherson Report makes clear. Duwayne Brooks was the principal eyewitness to the crime, yet he failed to pick any of them out of a line-up. But he wasn’t the only witness, another man who was extremely confident that he would recognise the youth who wielded the knife also failed to identify anyone. (28) The knifeman was said to have had long, blond hair; none of the Acourt gang did. Incidentally, in his first statement, Duwayne Brooks said that Stephen Lawrence was attacked by six white youths rather than five, and it is agreed that there were indeed six youths in this gang.
In February 1999, nearly six years after the murder, it was revealed that “In an extraordinary development, police now believe Gary Dobson, and perhaps Luke Knight, are innocent. They believe Dobson, and possibly Knight, were at home at the time of the attack.” The same report claimed they were to launch a new investigation focusing on two or three new suspects. (29) If that sounds unlikely, you should consider that also in 1993, a white youth named Peter Thompson was gaoled for the knife murder of an Asian youth, Rohit Duggal. Thompson was from Eltham. In common with the Lawrence case, this murder was represented by the organised left and “anti-racists” as racially motivated; the police however dismissed this claim. (30) Rohit Duggal was the victim of a youth knife culture which is rampant in South East London.
Ironically, it was not until the year 2000 that any further developments happened. Three entirely new suspects were eventually arrested. This means that a total of (at least) eight people have now been implicated directly in this killing. As at most the gang was six strong, simple arithmetic dictates that at least two of them must be totally innocent. Not as if Doreen and her gang care about that.
On the subject of so-called racism, we might note that for all her abhorrence of this mythical disease, Dotty Doreen doesn’t seem too averse to practising it herself when it suits her. She told the Macpherson Inquiry that “I personally have never had any racism directed at me...I went to a racially mixed all girls school and I do not remember any. I don’t have any close white friends from my school days, but I do have five black school friends who I am still very close to.” (31)
No close white friends. What can she mean?
The following year she was interviewed by the Daily Mirror in Jamaica where she had taken her son’s body for fear that his grave might be desecrated if he were buried here. In that interview she told the paper that “England doesn’t deserve his body after what it did to him.” (32)
Now who’s being racist?
Mrs Lawrence also took the opportunity to whine to The Mirror that “He was a black boy, he must have been in a fight, he got what he deserved.” and “They weren’t concerned with what Stephen’s friend Duwayne was telling them. They didn’t want to hear that.” (33)
Well, WPC Smith certainly didn’t want to hear the abuse Duwayne Brooks was shouting at her, but once he’d been eliminated as a serious suspect, the police did indeed listen to what he said, and took no less than nine statements from him. (34) Doreen Lawrence ignores all this though; she sees only racism.
As time goes by, Dotty Doreen sees even more racism; in October 2000, she was quoted thus in the Voice, Britain’s self-styled best black newspaper: “This country has never made me feel welcome even though I want to belong”. (35) It doesn’t occur to this stupid woman that it may not be racism but her paranoia and authoritarianism that leads to increasingly lukewarm receptions from the British public.
On the subject of so-called racism, what evidence is there that the murder of Stephen Lawrence was indeed racially motivated? The answer is precious little. He was killed because, like many murder victims, he happened simply to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. All experience of street gangs shows that their victims are overwhelmingly young and male. Had the motive for this attack been robbery then it is quite likely that an older person, possibly a woman, would have been attacked, but this wasn’t robbery, and it was bravado and arrogance as much as sadism.
It was reported at the time that as the victim was stabbed, one member of the gang uttered a “racial remark”, (36) and in the subsequent inquiry this remark was identified as “what, what nigger?” (37)
On the basis of this one remark, Macpherson concluded that “Stephen Lawrence’s murder was simply and solely and unequivocally motivated by racism.” (38) Never in the entire depressing history of race relations has so much inference been drawn from so little evidence.
It is quite likely that had Stephen Lawrence been white he would still have been stabbed, but that if had he been black and twenty or thirty years older, he would still be alive today.
But, alas he isn’t, and Doreen Lawrence, who once complained that her son’s name was “too precious to be used in a cynical way”, decided latterly to use his name in an even more cynical way than did the Anti-Racist Alliance. She and her now estranged husband sought to make money out of his murder.
In February 2000 it was reported that having already rejected a settlement of £175,000 – every penny of which would have come out of the public purse – the Lawrences intended to sue the police for over half a million, including for psychological damages and the cost of running the campaign. (39) The police decided to fight the action, although later under pressure from, among others, the Mayor of London, they elected to settle. If they hadn’t settled, the Lawrences would probably have got nothing, which is what they deserve, because if the court were to rule in their favour then logically anyone who was the victim of an unsolved crime could sue the police for incompetence, or whatever, a scenario that would be absolutely ludicrous. One of the people the Lawrences served with a writ was an off-duty police officer who attended the murder scene, which may just explain why some policemen might make the odd racist remark. (40)
Eventually, the Lawrences were lined up to receive a cool £320,000 which included, and I kid you not, £98,898 for loss of earnings caused by psychiatric illness, and £7,000 for trips abroad to relieve stress. (41) And this at a time when it was revealed that forces throughout Britain were shutting down stations left, right and centre to save money.
As well as capitalising on their son’s death for personal profit, Doreen and Neville Lawrence have sought to use this tragedy to destroy the freedoms and liberties that generations of Englishmen gave their precious blood to secure.
I say Englishmen because it was England more than any other nation which developed the legal system which has become the envy of the world. Everyone in this room will doubtless agree that there are many things about this legal system of which we should not be proud, principally but not exclusively the mindsets of the people who administer it. But the system itself as a whole has worked remarkably well over the centuries and has been exported to North America, to India, to Africa, and even to the Caribbean from which Doreen Lawrence herself hails, and to which she can’t return quick enough for me.
It was the English legal system which gave the world trial by jury, the Grand Jury – which is sadly no longer extant, (42) the presumption of innocence, the concept of double jeopardy, the right to petition for habeas corpus, and many others. All these concepts are designed to protect the rights of the individual, and to check abuses of state power. Doubtless you’ve all seen the Clint Eastwood film Dirty Harry, or if not then films of the same genré in which heroic maverick policemen struggling against the red tape erected by liberal legislators, break every rule in the book to bring obviously guilty and usually gloating perpetrators to justice.
The reality though is that without strict rules of procedure and limitations on state power, we would be living in a police state where we could each and every one of us be kidnapped by force by the likes of Dirty Harry, or even worse by John Grieve and his goons from the Racial And Violent Crimes Task Force, thrown into a cell without legal representation or advice, and browbeaten or tortured into confessing to anything the authorities wanted us to confess to. Or for those of us who refused to confess, we could be verballed up and our faked confessions and untested hearsay evidence used to indict and convict us in jury-less courts.
The abolition of double jeopardy means that a defendant who has been cleared can be re-arrested, thrown into gaol for perhaps another year, then retried on the same or substantially the same charges if the police can adduce fresh evidence – quote unquote. In practice this could be achieved by suppressing evidence from the first investigation, by finding new witnesses – quote unquote – or by any of a dozen or a hundred shoddy practices any defence solicitor or barrister will tell you about.
Incidentally, Neville Lawrence is also a supporter of capital punishment; shortly after his son was murdered he said he’d like to see hanging brought back. (43) And presumably he would like to have seen all five so-called suspects hanged after they had been tried two, perhaps three times and convicted of his son’s murder on no evidence whatsoever. This is what Doreen Lawrence, Neville Lawrence and their gang want, to abolish the rule of law and to turn Britain into a police state. For us that is, but not for themselves.
In the early hours of December 27, 1999, Neville Lawrence was stopped by the police while driving his car in the affluent St John’s Wood area of North London. It appears that a woman reported being mugged by two black men in that area, and Mr Lawrence had a black passenger, his cousin. The car was checked on the Police National Computer but wasn’t searched. The news of this non-story didn’t leak out for two months. A report on a London news radio station on February 26, 2000 referred to his “ordeal”. He’s detained for about twenty minutes, and he suffers an ordeal. (44)
This is the man who along with his little shrew of a wife wants to make it a criminal offence to use racist language – quote unquote – in a private dwelling, a suggestion so outrageous that even Gerry Gable doesn’t support it. (45) This is the man who supports the abolition of double jeopardy. This is the man who conspired with the police to break and enter a private dwelling and plant a camera so that they and the world could spy on the inhabitants. And when he himself is stopped and questioned by the police, and not even arrested, he suffers an ordeal.
Now a few words about our wonderful police force. Doreen and Neville Lawrence, Macpherson, and the rest of their rag-bag mob, have identified something they refer to as institutional racism, or institutionalised racism. This disease, like racism itself, does not exist, it is a delusion. There is no meaningful evidence that the British police treat the murders of blacks any less seriously than they do the murders of whites. That is the good news. The bad news is that there does exist amongst the police, and amongst the people who run our criminal justice system, a cabalistic mindset.
In its most benign or perhaps I should say in its least malignant form, this amounts to treating members of the public with contempt. In its more serious form it amounts to what is mistakenly referred to as noble cause corruption. (46) If the police have it in for you, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, or if you’re Protestant, Jewish or non-believer. Sometimes it doesn’t even matter how much money you’ve got. I personally have met at least two extremely wealthy men who were the victims of police/state harassment and persecution and who would not have ended up in prison had they not been rich.
On the 42nd day of its sitting, Doreen Lawrence told the Macpherson Inquiry that “No black person can ever trust the police.” (47) She’s not wrong there, but of course what she didn’t say is that no white person can ever trust them either.
If – and I stress if – Doreen Lawrence was treated in any way improperly by the police, it was not for reasons of race, or sex, or class, but simply because she came up against the usual wall of silence, air of superiority, closing of ranks, and bureaucratic contempt for the general public. But any fair-minded person who examines the evidence dispassionately will conclude that the Lawrences were not treated improperly by the police, and that with the usual caveat of wisdom in hindsight, they did everything in their power to bring the killer or killers of her son to justice.
The death of Stephen Lawrence was a tragedy, but it was hardly unique. It remains and most likely will remain forever an unsolved murder, but in spite of the enormous resources the British police put into murder investigations, they don’t solve every murder. And it is quite likely that many more murders will remain unsolved if they divert precious man-hours away from sundry inquiries to investigate frivolous complaints from the likes of Neville Lawrence that they were stopped unlawfully while driving in residential areas at two o’clock in the morning. Or if they sit around for weeks on end at Macpherson style inquiries and conferences, wasting precious resources on such specious nonsense as “racism awareness training” rather than clearing up crime.
The Macpherson Inquiry sat for a grand total of 59 days, and a further ten days were allocated to hear and consider recommendations, (48) like the lunatic recommendations alluded to here.
It is a sad irony that the Metropolitan Police, who are renowned for their macho image and canteen culture – so we are told – have become too emasculated to stand up to this pathetic, whining, whinging, snivelling, little woman and her even more pathetic wimpish husband and tell them and their gang where to get off.
Doreen Lawrence and her cohorts have misled the public with their specious rhetoric, and they have brainwashed blacks as much as whites.
In a bizarre sort of way the police are to be commended for failing to bring the killer(s) to book, because in view of the pressures brought to bear on them there must have been a real temptation for some officers to fabricate evidence against one or more of the prime suspects. A temptation they appear to have resisted.
There have been bungled police investigations, in particular the murder of another black man, the musician Michael Menson. He was set on fire in the street and initially his death was not treated as murder, not because he was black, but because he was suffering from schizophrenia, and the police simply assumed that he had set himself on fire, even though he told them otherwise. This murder was also branded – bore, bore – racist. Whether or not that is the case remains to be seen, but his killers were eventually brought to book, and as I’m sure you all know, they weren’t exactly white. (49)
In spite of all the talk of racially motivated murders, there is a subtle irony here, or maybe a not so subtle one. The most prolific killers by far of young black men are not white racists but other young black men. On September 30, 1999, a Rastafarian was shot dead in South London. His was the sixteenth such murder that year, that is black/drug-related. (50) There have been so many black-on-black murders in London in recent years that the police have set up a special task force to tackle them: Operation Trident. The murder rate in Jamaica, where there is a culture of gangs, drugs and guns, is far higher than here, which might just have influenced Doreen Lawrence in her decision to return to racist Britain after laying her son’s body to rest in his spiritual homeland. Or perhaps his spiritual homeland should be South Africa, where young black men immolate each other with blazing car tyres, or Rwanda where they hack each other to death with machetes.
Mrs Lawrence doesn’t seem to have noticed that, nor do the brain-dead readers of the Voice; I say brain-dead because in its Millennium issue, that unseemly tabloid announced that she had been voted Woman Of The Century in a readers’ poll. (51) Not woman of the year or even woman of the decade, but Woman Of The Century. One would have thought that Madame Curie, Mother Theresa, or even Madonna would have had a more legitimate claim to that title than Dotty Doreen.
The consequences of Macpherson do not extend simply to aiding and abetting those who would destroy our civil liberties, they can be seen all around in the attempts of professional race-mixers and mischief-makers to restructure British society by relocating non-whites to every field of endeavour on peril of the irrefutable charge of racism for the slightest non-compliance. The most graphic illustration of this is in the media, where not only are blacks and other non-whites being pushed and promoted often at the expense of their equally or more talented white counterparts, but where race-mixing has been normalised.
This has become so blatant, so sickeningly transparent and embarrassing that even the likes of Ludovic Kennedy have commented on it. (52) The soap operas are perhaps the worst of the worst, and programmes such as Coronation Street, Emmerdale and Eastenders which between them have a viewer base literally in the tens of millions go out of their way to promote miscegenation, usually featuring a black male and a white female. One soap opera, The Bill, even featured a gay quote unquote mixed race couple quote unquote. Unfortunately or otherwise the black police constable in that series was murdered by a homophobe, a storyline that would no doubt have gone down well in Jamaica, where racism aside the indigenous population has resisted all attempts at brainwashing by the so-called “gay rights” lobby, and where homosexuality and homicide go hand in glove.
Incidentally, The Bill is one of the many police-oriented series to grace British TV. In addition to soaps and the usual American cops ’n hookers celluloid trash, we have been blessed over the years with numerous real life series: quasi-documentaries, in-depth, extraordinarily well researched and didactic documentaries, reconstructions, and even programmes which invite public participation, such as Crimewatch. Although unlike this enlightened audience most ordinary people will not be au fait with many of the cases I have discussed here, all informed members of the public understand how murder inquiries and other serious criminal investigations work.
They know what an incident room is, they understand the basics if not the detail of forensics and DNA; they understand the difficulties of identifying suspects and the problems of false leads; they know why the police do not, cannot discuss the minutiae of murder investigations even with the parents, siblings and children of victims. This begs the question why didn’t Macpherson, and why did he, his team, and the media give any credence whatsoever to the criticisms levelled by Doreen Lawrence; they were understandable, but were symptomatic purely of a mother’s grief rather than of bore, bore, racism.
I am now going to make a statement which some people will consider ludicrous, but I’d like you all to give it some thought. The murder of Stephen Lawrence generated more hysteria, more hand wringing, and more hypocritical righteous indignation than the atrocities of September 11, 2001 and June 7 last year combined.
In the wake of these unparalled crimes against humanity we saw the mass media wringing its hands and bending over backwards, forwards and sideways to appease Moslems. Oh, we mustn’t blame all Moslems, we must show tolerance, we must all stand together, blah, blah, blah. In recent months the British media has excelled itself with documentaries and discussions explaining what a wonderful religion Islam is, and how Moslems – or all but a tiny handful of them – are wonderful people. Can you imagine the reactions if Stephen Lawrence had been murdered by Al-Qaeda, and the Twin Towers and the London Underground had been bombed by racists?
It is probably no exaggeration either to suggest that the murder of Stephen Lawrence has to some extent replaced the Holocaust – whatever it was – as the principal instrument of media brainwashing on race issues, particularly of the young. For most people nowadays the gruesome images of piles of bodies stacked in a makeshift mass concentration camp grave cuts no ice, especially as they have been literally deluged with such images from later horrors such as Cambodia and Rwanda. But the senseless murder of a young well-mannered black kid who might have been a neighbour, classmate, or even a friend of yours, that is something with which we can all identify.
I will say again, the death of Stephen Lawrence was a tragedy, but it was hardly unique, and however tragic it may have been and may continue to be for the Lawrence family, no human tragedy is worth destroying our freedoms for, to do that would not make us all equal before the law, but all equally subject to the tyranny of the law, something Neville Lawrence should bear in mind next time he’s stopped by the police while driving through a London suburb at two in the morning.
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