IN the Alice Through the Looking-Glass world of modern Britain it is entirely predictable that an official review into the kidnap, rape and murder of a young woman becomes a disquisition on racism and cultural attitudes towards homosexuality and lesbianism. It will be remembered that in Lewis Carroll’s book, when Alice entered the mirror she found a world where logic was reversed. The left’s war on reality similarly dispenses with logic – but not with cunning: for as I wrote here in 2021 the horrific murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens, and the criminal incompetence of the force in dealing with his offending before the killing, represented an irresistible opportunity for the equality and diversity monomaniacs to complete their takeover of the capital’s policing.
Thus Baroness Casey’s review ‘into the standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police Service’ is another landmark in the official capitulation to cultural Marxism which has been going on for 40 years. In Brixton, south London, in 1981 police were engaged in tackling widespread crime and drug-dealing, which many in the locality were unhappy about. That April two days of rioting and looting broke out which left buildings destroyed and caused millions of pounds worth of damage. A shaken Willie Whitelaw, then Home Secretary, toured the ruins and commissioned Lord Scarman to investigate. He found that the use of stop-and-search and ‘sus’, or suspicion of wrongdoing, policing against black people was disproportionate. Here was a first breach against logic and cause-and-effect: an area with high incidence of drug possession and criminal activity will naturally produce a high incidence of suspicion among police officers, whose business it is to identify and prosecute criminals. Yet the Scarman Report in effect argued that the preventative pursuit of crime was wrong in certain social circumstances. It stopped short of saying the police were racist, instead acknowledging that some officers committed ‘ill-considered, immature and racially prejudiced actions’, which I can well believe. However, wheels were set in motion. The shift from effective police work to politically motivated managerialism began: positive discrimination ‘was a price worth paying’ and ‘soft’, ‘consultative’ policing entered the scene, paving the road to hellish modern London’s crime problems, its epidemic of vandalism, violence, disorder, drugs, illegal weaponry and murder, and the left was handed one of its most effective weapons of cultural revolution: the ‘damning’ report.
In the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence knife murder in the Nineties, things went further. The Macpherson Report concluded that the Metropolitan Police was ‘institutionally racist’, and recommended a raft of proposals which would have any social justice warrior purring: our civilisation continued to fray and knife murders went on to soar, though none ever received the scrutiny of the highly troubling Lawrence case. Macpherson also wrote that ‘a racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. This was a disposal of objective truth – a prerequisite of much contemporary leftist thought – and a gateway to making anything you care to mention potentially racist.
Now, with the Casey Report, total institutional capture by the left is imminent. As is often the case with such reviews, it is what is missing that is significant. The contents section runs across ten chapters with numbered sub-headings referring to 363 pages, yet I cannot find the words ‘fighting crime’ or ‘burglary’ or ‘robbery’ there. However, I can easily find the words ‘racism’, ‘misogyny’, ‘LGBTQ+’, ‘sexism’, ‘homophobia’: the lexicon of the social justice warrior is dominant. Against the background of all this ideological navel-gazing it should be mentioned that crime in London, particularly sex crimes, is soaring.
The report shows the mandarin class is still struggling with reality. On page 312 Baroness Casey says: ‘Despite being subjected to substantially higher levels of policing in London, Black Londoners remain considerably more likely to be the victims of several serious and violent crimes than White Londoners. This leads to the view that London’s communities of colour are both over-policed and under-protected.’
The above paragraph, which is not accompanied by a demographic breakdown of who is perpetrating the crimes, suggests that crime levels in black communities are higher but despite the police’s efforts the problem persists. Questions about the roots of this problem are not tackled. The report proposes ‘a reset for stop-and-search’. If this means, as I suspect it does, a scaling-down in the practice, trouble looms. When this has been attempted before it has led to a rise in knife crime and killings, often of young black men. The recommendation therefore could easily lead to black Londoners being under-policed and therefore further under- protected.
As an example of grievances aired in the report, on page 307 senior police leadership are criticised by ethnic minority officers for not mentioning the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to them in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in the US. This made them ‘feel alienated’. If that is evidence of institutional racism we are far through the looking-glass. (The report makes no judgement about BLM, a racially bigoted extremist organisation.)
We should not be surprised at the tone. The career of Baroness Casey, a former DHSS benefits administrator, really began in the late Nineties under Tony Blair’s government of smarmed down Trotskyists and communists. By 2003 Casey was in charge of the Home Office’s Antisocial Behaviour Unit. I have no idea what the unit did – I tentatively assume it was trying to stop antisocial behaviour – but here we are 20 years later and antisocial behaviour is so widespread as to be endemic and normalised, and the kind of Clockwork Orange-style violence that once had the power to appal the nation now is a matter of routine reporting. Incidentally, for a document so concerned with the promotion of equality and diversity it is worth mentioning that Baroness Casey’s colleagues were almost entirely female: there was one man among the 11-strong review team.
Additionally, the report was commissioned by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, a Blairite leftist currently investigating the legalisation of drug abuse who in 2015 also pledged ‘to do everything in my power to end stop-and-search’. As I wrote here in 2018, he changed tack after the policy, which was supported by Theresa May, cost lives.
Khan welcomed the Casey Report which, as he said after its publication, he commissioned ‘because I was deeply concerned about the cultural issues and systemic failings within the Met’. You will notice how cultural issues come before institutional failings in that statement. Guess who Baroness Casey recommends to oversee the proposed cultural revolution in the Met? A board headed by none other than the Mayor of London.
There is no doubt the report does include many troubling incidences. In the case of Wayne Couzens the police were plainly incompetent: his offending before the murder was never dealt with and he was not removed from duty. The numerous reported episodes of boorish, rude, sexist and crass attitudes in the police mirror the demoralised society it serves and the trash culture that has engulfed it.
The incompetence of the police from top to bottom is not surprising: it is a branch of the public sector in a country whose civil administration, from transport to immigration to health, no longer works properly and parts of which are in open disarray. It also follows that the more the force is politicised and moved away from its core function, the more rank-and-file officers will grow indifferent to the job at hand.
The Casey Report recommends the disbanding of the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command, in which Couzens and David Carrick, the serial rapist and sex offender jailed for life in February, worked. It therefore seems likely that Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, will now be confronted with calls to break up the entire Metropolitan Police force. That will be an elephant trap for the Conservatives: such a move is highly unlikely to improve efficacy but if implemented it be will seen by the left as a coup de grâce, and proof that any institution whose aims and means – in this case the effective fighting of crime – they do not approve of can be destroyed and remade to their specification.
