Thoughtcrime, the sinister legacy of Macpherson
by Peter Mullen, The Conservative Woman:
SIR William Macpherson has died, aged 94. He was the judge who chaired the inquiry which followed the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993.
His subsequent report invented the ill-defined concepts of ‘institutional racism’ and ‘unconscious racism’ and declared the Metropolitan police force to be institutionally racist.
When sceptics asked for a justification for these tendentious neologisms, Sir William declared loftily: ‘We do not pretend to produce a definition which will carry all argument before it.’
In other words, we won’t answer your awkward questions. Just like the secret police.
There was much worse to follow. The Macpherson Inquiry proceeded absurdly to define a racist incident as: ‘Any incident so described by the victim, or any other person.’
This definition is meaningless to the point of insanity, but it is now preposterously enshrined in our legal practice. It is the catch-all, you’re-guilty-even-when-you’re-innocent terminology of the gulag.
If anything can be legitimately described as a racist incident, then when I ask you if you’d like a cup of tea, you can, according to Macpherson, report me to the race relations authorities.
Meaningless jargon, politically correct or not, is not merely spurious: When a nonsensical expression is made the basis of our criminal jurisdiction, it is a prescription for confusion and chaos – one which causes irreparable damage to so many lives.
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