Patrick Mercer and a case of racial cowardice

The media last week was full of two incidents which were labelled, at least in most reports I read, as racist. The first was the sacking of Tory spokesman Patrick Mercer, and the second was the alleged attack by a policeman on a girl.

Patrick Mercer pointed out that less than complementary terms about individuals which included an allusion to their skin colour or hair colour were commonplace in the army. He also commented along the lines that some ethnic minority members used their status as a way of swinging the lead.

Now the jolly middle class intelligentsia might find it reprehensible that a person's physical attributes are utilised in a mocking way. Surely, though, no one should be under any illusion but that this is commonplace behaviour everywhere from the primary school playground to the university common room.

Hair colour, physical strength or lack of it, height, weight, success with the opposite sex or lack of it, intelligence, education are all pressed into service to distinguish insiders from outsiders. So from time to time will racial characteristics be used in the same way. This is the way that human groups behave. Why therefore is it wrong if a person points out that such things go on?

So what of Patrick Mercer's other comment? It would be surprising if, knowing the leverage that the term 'racist' can engender, some members of specific ethnic groups did not trade on it. Trevor Phillips, for instance, has made a successful and lucrative career from doing just that. Once again, Patrick Mercer did nothing other than report the reality of human behaviour.

The alleged racist attack by a policeman on a young girl was available for all to see. Pursued by a policeman, following a separate incident, she and he fell down some iron steps. In his attempts to subdue her he was joined by another policeman. The girl was punched on the arm in order to secure her co-operation in having handcuffs put on. The police did not intervene until after the initial incident.

In an interview the girl claimed to have some cuts and bruises following the incident. Which was likely having just fallen down a flight of steps. This was claimed to be a racist attack. The BBC found somebody to say just that, which you can see on the BBC report here. In the interview with the girl, it is quite obvious that she is not black but of mixed parentage.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown managed to use the incident as evidence that what she terms 'a tide of filth' i.e. racism, is sweeping the country. She apparently initially greeted the reports that a girl had been punched by police with disbelief, but then subsequently discovered that she was black. That apparently being sufficient to explain the policeman's motivation in punching the girl. That his genitals were apparently being grabbed aggressively presumably not providing sufficient reason. Try doing that to any bloke, Yasmin, and see what the reaction is.

It is more than a little ironic that Ms Alibhai-Brown should call on erstwhile anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain to step in and put the situation to rights, by 'slapping down' John Reid, who she blames for many of the present ills. As Sec. of State for both Wales and Northern Ireland Hain should at least be able to advise her that geographical accidents of birth and adherence to different branches of the same religion can produce exactly the same apparent symptoms in society as skin colour differences.

The rifts in our society are not based on differences of colour but on differences of culture, although sometimes colour can be a proxy for culture. Invoking racial motives when none exists is a recipe for further disaster. There is a forty year history of racial equality legislation. I agree with Ms Alibhai-Brown, it doesn't work. It takes more than a few well-turned lawyer's phrases to change a million years of human evolution.

Neither of these two incidents had anything to do with racism or even with race. Cameron's cowardly action in sacking Mercer was designed to alienate even more of his traditional support as he repositions the Tories into the woolly liberal slot vacated by NuLabour. He fancies himself as an intellectual. That the MSM should have given any credence to the attempts to draw parallels between the drunken girl in Leeds and incidents in Los Angeles shows cowardice too. A cowardly refusal to confront reality.