Daily Mail, 22 October 2007

Keith Jarrett, president of the National Black Police Association (NBPA), has stirred up a hornets’ nest with his call for the police to make greater use of stop and search in order to control gun and knife crime, including areas where the concentration of black residents would mean stopping and searching more young black people.

Mr Jarrett speaks no more than pure common sense. Yet he has provoked outrage among the so-called representatives of ethnic minorities.

The NBPA’s own legal adviser, Chief Superintendent Ali Dizaei, has said, for example, that stop and search is of limited value and that greater use would merely ‘increase tension in the black community’. But as Mr Jarrett says, it is what black parents themselves are calling for — and for one outstandingly good reason.

Their children are getting murdered at an appalling rate: some 20 black youths have been mown down this year in London alone.

Stop and search is a useful policing tool in the fight against crime. The argument that it isn’t effective is a blind.

The real strike against it is that ever since the Scarman report more than 25 years ago, it has been thought more important to avoid upsetting the sensibilities of minorities than to fight crime effectively.

Hugely reinforced by the subsequent Macpherson report’s verdict of ‘institutional racism’ against the entire British police service, the idea took hold that if an ethnic minority was over-represented in the criminal justice system this was proof of racial discrimination.

Of course, logically this doesn’t follow at all. It might simply mean that in some areas, ethnic minorities are disproportionately involved in certain kinds of crime. But logic doesn’t enter the equation where race is concerned.

The result has been a police stand-off in black areas — with the result that black people are being killed.

Now, black people themselves are saying enough is enough. They want a return to realism. As Mr Jarrett stressed yesterday, this doesn’t mean repeating the police incivilities of the past. But nor should the police be prevented from protecting black lives by the pernicious diktats of a victim culture which holds that ethnic minorities can do no wrong.

This is yet another symptom of the desperately worrying trend to force our society to express only those attitudes which are permitted by those who shout the loudest.

Last week, the Nobel Prize-winner Dr James Watson was stopped from speaking at London’s Science Museum and now faces being drummed out of his U.S. laboratory after stating that Africans did not have the same level of intelligence as Caucasians.

The writer Martin Amis has been denounced for racist bigotry after saying that he felt ‘morally superior’ to Islamists who were ‘anti-Semites … psychotic misogynists … and homophobes’.

And now that the law against incitement to religious hatred has belatedly slid into operation, the Justice Secretary Jack Straw says he will introduce legislation criminalising incitement to hatred against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals — with the disabled to follow.

But while these attitudes are attacked, other vile prejudices are ignored or encouraged.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who piously declared that James Watson’s views were not welcome in London, himself publicly embraced Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has called for the murder of Jews, supports the killing of homosexuals and endorses the beating of wives.

And next month the controversial American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are to be welcomed by a range of establishment institutions such as the Royal Institute Of International Affairs, Oxford University and the House of Lords to publicise their book which, through a series of distortions and untruths, promotes a pernicious updating of the ancient libel that the Jews manipulate the world and put it at risk to advance their own interests.

The fact is that we are in the most frightful muddle over what we should and should not allow to be said.

Freedom of speech is not an absolute. A liberal society should permit free expression only as long as there is no harm done to other people.

Sometimes, the limits to free speech are pretty obvious: preventing racial hatred, for example, or incitement to commit a crime. While debate about drug legalisation is legitimate, there would rightly be an outcry if drug users went on TV to extol the pleasures of drug-taking and show people how to snort cocaine.

Often, though, it’s difficult to decide where legitimate discussion stops and harm starts. What has fuelled the confusion is the widespread assumption that prejudice simply means saying harsh things about people. It doesn’t. It involves instead telling lies about people that will incite others to hate them. Even though it may cause offence, telling the truth can never be wrong.

The distinction between truth and lies is the dividing line between bigotry and argument.
The controversy over race and intelligence is a good example. There is a huge argument over the interpretation of research into intelligence.

As the neurobiologist Professor Colin Blakemore has said, in his brave defence of Watson’s right to be heard and challenged, it is true that some surveys show that average IQ differs between ethnic groups.

But the variations within groups are far greater than the differences between them, and IQ tests are flawed because they take too little account of cultural factors.

Erroneously interpreting that research should not turn Watson into a pariah. This is an argument that has gone on for more than a century because neither side has been able to knock out the other. So the truth has not yet been established.

Until it has, it is important to allow that debate to be had. That is very different from a prejudice which has no basis in fact at all.

Worse still, this ostensible attempt to squeeze prejudice out of our society is making it more and more difficult to tell the truth.

Martin Amis was correct to say that radical Islamists were prejudiced against Jews, gays and women. Yet he was misrepresented as speaking about all Muslims, which he was not, and denounced as a bigot for telling the truth about those who are waging war upon our society.
The same thing will happen in future, if Jack Straw has his way, to those who speak the truth about the harmful or anti-social consequences of gay lifestyles.

All this has nothing to do with defeating prejudice. It is instead an attempt to control public discussion through smears and character assassination, and drive out any thinking that challenges a range of ideological fixations.

We can see this already in the successful attempt to suppress debate over man-made global warming, with sceptical scientists deprived of grant funding and subjected to venomous smears, of which the most odious is the charge that they are ‘climate-change deniers’ — which equates them with neo-Nazis who deny the Holocaust ever happened.

It is perhaps no coincidence that Professor Chris Rapley, the director of the Science Museum who prevented Watson from speaking, is himself a global warming zealot — and has also expressed the view that there are too many people in the world, implying that somehow they should be reduced by more than half.

That, of course, is a point of view associated with eugenics, the creed that was once regarded as too disreputable to be aired — and which is not a million miles removed from Watson’s own alleged thought- crime.

In the soft-totalitarian society we have now created, however, it seems that prejudice is merely whatever the people in charge ordain it to be.