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For all its uncritical reception, and its profound and mainly pernicious impact on policing, the Macpherson Report is blatantly a fatally flawed document.
Macpherson states plainly, right at the beginning of his report, that he had been un-able to find any evidence of police racism. On personal racism, Macpherson said that his inquiry had ‘not heard evidence of overt racism or discrimination’ (para. 6.3, p. 20). On institutional racism (in the ordinary meaning of ‘institutional’) Macpherson wrote that it was ‘vital to stress that neither academic debate nor the evidence presented to us leads us to say or conclude that an accusation that institutional racism exists in the Met implies that the policies of the Met are racist. No such evidence is before us. In fact the opposite is true’ (para 6.24, p. 24).
So he simply turned the term ‘institutional’ completely upside-down. He made it mean racism for which there was no evidence either in the regulations of the Met or in the demonstrable culture or behaviour of police officers.
Whether or not rogue racism or racism sanctioned by the rules or informal culture of the Met could have been found by Macpherson, or will be proven to exist now, is another matter entirely. The astonishing truth is that Macpherson states clearly that he found neither. But by requiring no evidence, Macpherson gave a bundle of blank cheques to grievance-based pressure groups. They have been gleefully cashing them ever since.
Norman Dennis
Civitas, London SW1
Intervention in Oman
Sir: The Malayan counter-insurgency campaign was not alone in its success (High life, 11 October). In Oman, in the 1970s, a handful of British officers masterminded and led a successful campaign against a Russian-supported insurgency which would otherwise have established communism on the shores of the Gulf and a stranglehold on the strategically important Straits of Hormuz.
Major-General Ken Perkins (Rtd)
Via email
Stuff the wife
Sir: Thurber himself (And another thing, 11 October) commented on his cartoon ‘This is the present Mrs Harris. That’s my first wife up there’ — a naked woman on all fours on top of a big bookcase — in an interview for the first series of Paris Review’s Writers at Work.
Thurber said the New Yorker editor Harold Ross had asked him if the woman was supposed to be alive, stuffed or dead. ‘After a while I called him back and told him I’d just talked to my taxidermist, who said you can’t stuff a woman, that my doctor had told me a dead woman couldn’t support herself on all fours. “So, Ross,” I said, “she must be alive.” “Well then,” he said, “what’s she doing up there naked in the home of her husband’s second wife?” I told him he had me there.’
Harvey Smith
Purley, Surrey
New Labour, no publisher
Sir: Denis MacShane (Diary, 13 October) asks why someone doesn’t produce a novel on the Blair–Brown years. Five years ago I penned a pastiche which I thought might come well from an Oxford contemporary of Peter Mandelson. But the agent to whom Sandra Howard referred me wasn’t up for it, despite describing the draft as ‘amusing and imaginative’; Ian Hislop didn’t serialise; Politico’s told me that political novels won’t sell…. Whatever the true explanation, my favourite was offered by a Westminster spin doctor. ‘You’re up against it,’ he said. ‘Which publisher’s going to jeopardise his chance of a peerage?’
John Bunyard
Ashford, Kent
Cheques and balances
Sir: In the Spectator’s Notes (13 October) we learn how to write a cheque, including ‘the Geoffrey Wheatcroft technique of sending it promptly but omitting the date’. I have been puzzling over these words. They are obviously meant to be sarcastic or abusive or something, but what do they mean? When I was younger and even poorer I certainly used various expedients to avoid immediate payment of unwelcome debts. You can postdate a cheque or forget to sign it or simply not send it, but if it’s merely undated, then any recipient can add the date and present the cheque forthwith. Perhaps this is just an example of ‘the Charles Moore technique’ for writing a column, or a little welcome variety amid your columnist’s somewhat attenuated collection of anecdotes about hunting, Eton and Debo.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Bath, Wiltshire
A minor error
Sir: Dot Wordsworth (Mind your language, 11 October) wrote Lord Kitchener off too soon. It might have been he who headed the force that relieved Khartoum from the Mahdi’s siege, but it was General Gordon who was dispatched by the fuzzy-wuzzies two days before that relief arrived. Kitchener died 31 years later when HMS Hampshire was hit by a mine off the Orkneys and sank.
Nigel Milliner
Tregony, Cornwall
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