I have been rubbing my eyes in astonishment at the blizzard of pronouncements over the past few days by the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair. He has long been referred to as the 'PC pc' on account of his relentless, on-message polyversity-speak. But now he has become Britain's most senior policeman, some of the things he has been saying and doing are, to put it mildly, alarming.

One of his first actions as Commissioner, it seems, was to change the Met's logo, at a cost to the taxpayer of several thousand pounds, because its motto 'working together for a safer London' was in joined-up handwriting and thus -- wait for it -- 'discriminated against short-sighted people'. A Met spokesman told the Sunday Telegraph:

'The old logo was not compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 because it was slightly italicised and it may have proved difficult to read for visually impaired people.'

Any longering hope that Sir Ian might have been having a bit of a high-spirited tease to celebrate his arrival was dispelled by the outbreak of highly opinionated remarks with which he peppered the newspapers over the weekend. In an interview in Saturday's Telegraph, appositely headlined

'Offbeat ideas of the nation's top policeman',

he was asked whether the Met was still 'institutionally racist'. He replied:

'Yes it's institutionally racist because all organisations are at the moment, but we've moved on hugely'.

All institutions? The whole of institutional Britain is racist? With this sally, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner not only repeated the notorious libel against his own force which has all but paralysed it, but also -- doubtless unwittingly -- lined himself up with the most extremist position which falsely portrays the whole of British society as racist in order to damn and damage it.

Next, we were treated to the kind of impenetrable jargon which has turned sociology into a joke:

'Most muggers are black because criminality is a function of other dysfunctions. This is about the link between criminality and deprivation, family dysfunction and poor education. All we in the police are is the anvil on which these inequalities are beaten.'

Uh-huh. No doubt they talk of nothing else in the anvil canteen. Next, we had Sir Ian's declaration of war on middle-class weekend cocaine-snorters, which predictably preoccupied the media who furnish a goodly proportion of those about to feel the warmth of sir Ian's interest. Any belief that this might presage a welcome zero tolerance approach to drugs, however, was alas quickly dispelled when Sir Ian informed us:

' "I'm relaxed about cannabis," he says. "My job is to deploy the resources I have in the best way, and I don't think [arresting people who smoke cannabis] is the best way." '

So it's zero intolerance of cannabis; in other words, business as usual in stoking the tinder of the rising drugs conflagration.

But maybe the most alarming observation of all was published in another interview in the Sunday Times, in which Sir Ian said:

'There is nothing wrong with being an Islamic fundamentalist. The question is how we help the vulnerable young who are attracted to violence.'

Ye gods. Even the normally cool interviewer, Jasper Gerard, was astonished by this. Does the Metropolitan Police Commissioner really not get it? He seems to believe that all religious 'fundamentalism' is the same -- bizarre or irrational views of which we should all be tolerant because we must not be nasty or prejudiced or bigoted towards what anyone else thinks. He does not seem to understand that Islamic fundamentalism is very different because it explicitly preaches hatred, violence, conquest or death for all unbelievers.

Sir Ian is now the police officer upon whose shoulders rests a large part of the responsibility for the security of the nation. Heaven help us.

Posted by melanie at February 7, 2005