How Macpherson wrote identity politics into law

When it comes to racism, Britain can appear to be in a bizarre state. By any objective standards, there is far less serious racism in British society than there was 20 or 30 years ago. Yet many seem more obsessed with race and racism than ever, searching for and apparently finding evidence of it in almost every public statement or private thought. We in the UK, one of the most ethnically diverse and tolerant societies in the Western world, are forever being told that racist attacks and hate speech are on the rise, with more people being locked up for what they say or write than at any time in modern history.

What’s going on? One key figure we have to thank for this state of affairs is a retired judge called Sir William Macpherson, the 27th hereditary chief of the Clan Macpherson. The report of the Macpherson inquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, published 20 years ago this week, codified what were nascent trends of the time and marked the start of a new era in political life.

The Macpherson report put identity politics and victim culture at the heart of UK public life and British law. It formalised the status of ‘the race question’ as the central issue to be prioritised over all other questions in society. It recast the British state, long seen as the villain of racist violence and discrimination, in the role of protector of vulnerable minorities against an allegedly racist majority. To that end, it demanded – and largely got – illiberal changes to the law and more far-reaching restrictions on freedom of speech.

That might seem like a lot to lay at the door of one judicial report, even if it was 350 pages long. What mattered, however, was not Macpherson’s words, but the way that the entire British political class threw its weight behind the proposals, from left-wing anti-racist campaigners through to Tony Blair’s New Labour government to Tory MPs and the Daily Mail.

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