Rod Liddle
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The Met commander Ali Dizaei was a corrupt copper, a bully, a liar, a thug, a swaggering braggart and, most importantly of all, a criminal. He is, at last, behind bars and likely to remain there for a couple of years. Astonishingly he has not yet been sacked by the force which employed him and which, time and time again, overlooked serious evidence against him because it feared that Dizaei would immediately play the race card, would accuse them all of being racist. In this he had the support of what is now called the National Black Police Association — an organisation which is itself, you might think, a racist construct and should not therefore exist. As the former assistant commissioner Andy Hayman said upon Dizaei’s conviction: ‘He knew he could push the boundaries and how to use the Met’s fear of appearing racist to make it difficult to investigate him.’ He rose through the ranks despite severe reservations about his character and conduct, forever barking about the ‘cancer of racism’ within the force, forever poised to sue for discrimination. Investigations into his criminality were scuppered on the orders of the highest authorities within the force. He was untouchable. His case is the epitome, the quintessence, of institutional anti-racism. He believed — almost always correctly — that he could get away with anything because he was not white. It is an extreme case of institutional anti-racism, just as you might argue that Stephen Lawrence was an extreme case of institutional racism. From such things we sometimes learn, although not always.
The problem here is that the institutional anti-racism is not tidily contained within the police force, as it was with the Lawrence affair. It almost goes without saying that another institution which decided that this devious, manipulative thug was worth championing was the BBC: Radio Four chose his autobiography to be its prestigious ‘book of the week’.
You can see institutional anti-racism pretty much wherever you look; as I mentioned last week, it is there in the closing down of any debate which touches upon race, unless it is to prove a charge of racism. It is there in the ludicrous sackings of people who are not remotely racist but who dare to speak their minds about issues concerning race; from the Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford back in the 1980s, to the Conservative MP Patrick Mercer — who, it should be remembered, was booted off the opposition front bench for suggesting that it was not unheard of for some sub-standard black soldiers in the army to use race as a weapon when challenged as to their poor performance. What a shocking thing to allege; who could believe it, etc.
And institutional anti-racism is there in a subtle but no less corrupting way in your office, right now, or maybe on your TV screen; the suspicion that someone has been given promotion, or preference, or leeway, because they are not white and that as a consequence someone else has been done down. It is there in what sometimes seems to be an over-representation of non-white people on the news programmes, or in drama productions and that in both cases these people are treated a little differently because of their supposedly defining non-whiteness. And sometimes all of this is a misperception, and then again, sometimes it isn’t. Who knows? Either way, it springs from the same source.
Ali Dizaei will have undoubtedly been helped by the most explicit piece of institutional anti-racism you could wish to imagine: that the Metropolitan Police must, by order, consider allegations of racism to be de facto true and beyond dispute. That if someone says they have been subjected to racism, then they have been, and there’s an end to it. No inquiry, no investigation; their perceived racial slight is a fact, an unalterable truth. You imagine how this judicial innovation must have been greeted by Dizaei. He could pretty much henceforth do no wrong, by law. If he complained of racism to his bosses in the Met they had no alternative but to concur. You can blame the last, unlamented, commissioner Sir Ian Blair for that.
It also goes without saying that the people most likely to lose out as a consequence of institutional anti-racism are those from our ethnic minorities; the very people whom this ur-philosophy was brought in to protect. In the case of Dezaei, it was a young bloke called Waad al-Baghdadi who had done some computer design work for the commander but had not, allegedly, been paid for his services. Baghdadi confronted Dezaei about this and was attacked and then framed by the commander, dragged down to the cells.
Is institutional anti-racism worse than institutional racism? Hell, who knows, it’s a close call. Either way, it seems the same people get stuffed.
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