Who inquires into the inquirers?

Notorious cases make bad law, and headline cases make for grandstanding. Arguably the factor that has most weakened the British government's response to Islamic jihadism has been the concept of 'institutional racism' defined as follows by the Macpherson report of the inquiry into the inexcusable police handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, published on 24 February 1999:

The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people. 

Presenting it to Parliament, then Home Secretary Jack Straw said: 'The Macpherson report challenges us all, not just the police service'. He expressed his government's determination 'to tackle discrimination wherever it is found' and emphasised that the report 'places a responsibility on each of us. We must make racial equality a reality'. Blair rose to declare a commitment to 'drive home a programme for change'.

Consequently, stop and search of young black males was banned, even though as a cohort they are responsible for a staggering disproportion of street crime. It did not take long for 'community leaders' in Brixton and other predominantly black areas to start whining about the surge in crime in their districts, but the police adamantly refused to expose themselves to further charges of racism.

Comes the 7/7 outrage in London, and the 'progressives' fell all over themselves to demand that Muslims should not be targeted, without specifying who - apart from young male Muslims - would be inclined to blow themselves up in the expectation of a concupiscent hereafter. The dependably contemptible BBC quickly aired a programme in which Muslims were the victims of a militant white, Christian group - Crusaders no less.

'Islam is a religion of peace' bleated one of the pretty-boy Muslims in the programme. No it's not: it is a militant religion whose basic texts are pretty damned unequivocal about what the true believer must do to the unbeliever. You will not find in the whole of the New Testament any support for the appalling acts blessed by the churches that claim to be Christian; the same absolutely cannot be said for the Qur'an.

I am not arguing that the Lawrence inquiry was any more than one symptom of the strong predisposition among 'progressives' towards pre-emptive appeasement. They have always been characterised as much by moral cowardice as intellectual dishonesty. What I do suggest is that Macpherson and, now, Saville, are responsible for putting a pompous legal veneer on that lack of moral courage and intellectual honesty. 

We require our police and armed forces to stand between us and those unconstrained by any concept of civilised behaviour, whether that lack of constraint comes from their debased social circumstances or from political indoctrination. In the performance of their duty the police and armed forces are regularly exposed to provocations far beyond even the second-hand experience of those who shelter behind them, and will from time to time, inevitably, commit acts that cannot be condoned and must be punished - as individual acts.

What the likes of Macpherson and Saville do by spreading the blame across the institutions involved is to chip away at the link between the public and those who defend the frontiers of civilisation. As we have all observed over the last decade, the police now have an 'us and them' attitude in which 'them' is everybody who is not a member of the police force. Much of that is down to Macpeherson, who pointedly failed to examine the reasons for the high incidence of black (mainly on black) crime, or the long-term complicity of the judiciary in police abuses.

By ignoring the overall political, judicial and social context in which the Bloody Sunday killings took place, Saville may have done the same for the army. One of the shooters on 30 January 1972 was later awarded a Victoria Cross for selfless heroism in battle. That was what they were selected and trained to do - engage the enemy, break his will and impose your own.

That some of the Paras decided to thin the crowd cover, knowing that armed IRA scum like Martin McGuiness were lurking behind it, was more understandable than the Saville report is prepared to admit; just as it applies an Olympian detachment to the subsequent judicial white-wash by Lord Chief Justice Widgery. It was the confirmation that there was no hope of justice under British rule, more than the killings, which tipped many Catholics over the line between passively enabling and actively participating in terrorism.

So, basically, I would like to ram a rolled-up copy of their reports up the arses of these be-wigged hypocrites; actually, maybe not - given their institutional proclivities, it might give them more pleasure than it would me.