Just because people you don’t like, whether it’s the ghastly Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage, say something is happening doesn’t mean it isn’t. The problem with the knee-jerk denial of the allegation that there is a new form of bias in policing, the so-called two-tier claim, is that this is exactly the response the police used to make to credible allegations of racism — and we know where that got them. Why should we believe them this time?

Perhaps Rowley should arrest himself? 

Another problem is the rather obvious signs of bias on our TV screens ever since rioters started — quite rightly — being arrested. Almost everyone in Britain, me included, is currently cheering on the robust legal response to those who looted libraries, attacked police officers or joined mobs threatening violence outside mosques or refugee centres. Skelp it into them, as my Glaswegian grandmother used to say. But one reason the public reaction has sometimes bordered on the ecstatic is this is in such contrast to the treatment of the hoity-toity vandals of the likes of Just Oil. The posh morons who sprayed Stonehenge with orange dye were released on bail rather than being jailed before their feet could touch the ground. The CPS did not take to social media to warn double barrelled supporters of eco-terrorism they better stop spreading misinformation. Or else. Class bias? You bet there is.

The big question though is whether there is a bias, as is alleged, that treats white protesters behaving badly differently from others and specifically because they are white. Heidi Alexander, the new Minister for Courts, exemplified the horror of the great and the good for this more serious two tier claim when she dismissed it as “a completely baseless accusation that I won’t entertain”. Quite how she came to this rigid conclusion despite only being an MP, never mind a Minister, for all of six weeks she did not deign to explain. She’s probably been too busy trying to remember her chauffeurs’ names to investigate the claim seriously.

Metropolitan Police Chief Sir Mark Rowley, who is developing a touch of the Voldemort about him, went further; warning while no doubt repressing a sinister cackle that anyone who suggests there is bias in policing is endangering the safety of officers. 

If he really does believe that I suggest he fingers the collars of the people behind a recent publication that relentlessly condemns what it says is … police bias. The “Police Race Action Plan” is a 57 page long ragbag of unhinged rants against British policing that argues bias runs so deep in the force it has undermined the legitimacy of cops. It’s the two tier claim on steroids.

There is one small problem though. The Police Race Action Plan was published by the police themselves, or to be precise the College of Policing, England’s centralised police training body, and the National Police Chiefs’ Council, of which Rowley himself is a member. Perhaps Rowley should arrest himself? 

The bias highlighted in The Police Race Action Plan is, of course, not the sort that some people are complaining about now. You’ll find no explanation here why a man might be warned by cops that he looked “quite openly Jewish” and was therefore causing a “breach of the peace”. Nor any clue why, when cops were attacked by antisemitic pro-Palestine protesters, the culprits were not fast-tracked through the judicial system and given harsh sentences that were celebrated gleefully by PC Voldemort. 

The Police Race Action Plan isn’t interested in that sort of bias. Perish the thought. It concerns itself with only one sort of bias; the one towards Brits who happen to be Black. Or in the words of its authors,

We accept that policing still contains racism, discrimination and bias. We are ashamed of those truths, we apologise for them and we are determined to change them.

No one would seriously deny that racism was deeply embedded in the force in the past. Perhaps it still is. But if the cops themselves accept there is this type of bias and that the resulting “trust deficit presents a significant challenge to police legitimacy and effectiveness,” why can’t others suggest there might simultaneously be another potential bias without being instantly denounced?

The two tier claim centres on the suggestion that white working class people are treated unfairly when they protest about immigration. This is then contrasted with, say, the tactical retreat of the cops from a Roma protest in Harehills. To be fair to the cops, while thugs did set a bus and a police van in flames they were not threatening to burn down places where refugees or indeed anyone else was housed, and had they done so it is inconceivable that the response would have been “light-touch”. Palestinian protesters have intimidated Jews on the street. But they have not dragged people out of cars as a few anti-immigrant protesters did, nor punch random men of a different ethnicity on the street.

Thus how the police and courts deal with the extraordinary violence of a gang of Muslim thugs in Birmingham who attacked a pub and severely beat a man should serve as an important litmus test of their much-trumpeted even handedness.

All that said, the Police Race Action Plan suggests that something unhealthy is brewing in the cops’ own corridors of power. And it looks and sounds very much like bias, whether we want to call it two tier or not.

 “Only being ‘not racist’ is not enough,” say the two Chief Constables who signed the report’s foreword

For the uncomfortable truth is that this Plan is packed to the gunnels with the kind of unhinged rhetoric that reeks of the coded contempt for white people that shelters under the umbrella term Critical Race Theory. One clue is that it was commissioned in 2020 as a response by police in England and Wales to the death of George Floyd, 4000 miles away in Minnesota.

We now know the death of Floyd, a violent career criminal and drug dealer, was far from the cartoon moral tale presented in its immediate aftermath. Yet the opening words of this official police document could have been scripted by the discredited grifters of Black Lives Matter.

In the summer of 2020, nations across the globe were rocked by the outpouring of emotion following the murder of George Floyd. It provided a catalyst for the expression of deep concerns about the social injustice experienced by Black people.

You might think British cops might be concerned that this outpouring of emotion sometimes descended into violence, arson and looting as well as attacks on police officers, but apparently not. This is the first suggestion in the Race Action Plan of a two tier approach, one that seems to assume that when black people loot and burn they might be trying to send a political message. Unlike those white thugs. Having taken the rhetorical knee to BLM the Plan goes on to lay out an ambition that may strike British taxpayers who spent £2.5M on it as a tad surprising.

 “Only being ‘not racist’ is not enough,” say the two Chief Constables who signed the report’s foreword, despite the fact the vast majority of Brits would I suspect be delighted to have a ‘not racist’ police force. It might make a pleasant change after the likes of the Stephen Lawrence debacle. Instead the Plan “sets out changes needed to become an anti-racist police service”. 

The term anti-racist may sound benign but, as the Plan underlines, it does not mean the same as not racist and that’s because it now comes with more baggage than Heathrow airport. Anti-racist is the buzzword that has become the lynchpin of an ideology that insists white people can never be “not racist” because their white privilege permeates Western societies and institutions. 

Ibram X Kendi one of its champions and the author of the best-seller “How to be an Anti-racist” argues white people must always be assumed consciously or unconsciously to be trying to prevent black people realising their full potential. Anti-racist is the equivalent of a yellow star Critical Race Theory proponents demand white people wear in public as a badge of shame to acknowledge this. 

How can a police force that promotes this ideology as its official strategy not end up creating suspicion and bias towards white people since it has endorsed the view that white people are ineradicably racist? Kendi has emphasised that every policy and every decision is either racist or anti-racist. In his world, the one our police have now elected to inhabit, anything white people do that is not overtly anti-racist, like say a protest about immigration, MUST by definition be racist. Given that racist behaviour is considered a hate crime, the police have unwittingly made it almost impossible to avoid them viewing such protests as…other than criminal.

The embrace of the dogma of anti-racism by police top brass isn’t a once-off error either. When an organisation opts to call itself anti-racist it commits to an ongoing process in which it must continually prove it is  actively working in every way it can against the structural and systemic racism from which white people within it are alleged to benefit. 

Who should decide though what is racist or anti-racist? Organisations who sign up to be anti-racist are told by race activists they can only be genuinely anti-racist if they actively welcome critical scrutiny. Not just by any black people of course but those versed in the dogma of Critical Race Theory. By race activists themselves in other words. It’s a brilliantly circular grift by which agitators create work for themselves and intensify purity spirals.

Their protestations that they can be relied on to police without fear or favour are rendered utterly unconvincing

This requirement was why our police top brass dutifully created a whole new body to ensure the implementation of the Police Race Action Plan was sufficiently anti-racist. The Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board,  “will actively challenge this work” they announced. It has not gone well.

When questioned by journalists at the launch of the Race Plan on 23 May 2022 the two Chief Constables who led the project could not bring themselves to agree the police were still “institutionally racist” as the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry had labelled them in 1993. “I find it hard to answer as a yes or no answer,” said Sir Dave Thompson, despite having just spent a well-paid two years on a Plan that was all about assuming they were indeed racist.

This sparked a furious response from Abimbola Johnson the new ISBO Chair who declared, “It’s not down to policing to say whether it is institutionally racist. It has been found to be.” 

Johnson’s appointment was a rather surprising one given she had argued at the high watermark of BLM that the movement “is meant to make us think harder about how we could run a safe and fair society without the need for a police force”. 

Even after her recruitment she has shown a disregard for the normal rules of supposedly independent bodies. She lambasted, for example, Sajid Javid’s decision in 2019 to strip the British citizenship of Shamima Begum, the schoolgirl who travelled to Syria and married an IS fighter, as…stop me if you’ve guessed…”symptomatic of racism”.  

More recently she dismissed “the far right’s ridiculous assertions of two-tiered policing” as “racist gaslighting”. To ram home just how proportionate her reactions are, she retweeted a post that compared the riots in the UK, in which the most notable injury so far was a white thug bitten by a police dog, with the Tamil genocide, a series of massacres in which an estimated 250 000 were murdered.

Another ISBO member Katrina Ffrench has previously retweeted a BLM post with a distinctly anti-cop vibe “No justice, no peace, get the Met’s knee off our neck.” Her colleague Glynn Jones regularly retweets his support for Extinction Rebellion, has compared the arrests of their activists to justice in Russia and retweeted a post by the group’s founder Roger Hallam that compared his conviction for disrupting infrastructure to…enabling fascism. All three have also publicly expressed their hatred for the Tories. Obviously.

Don’t get me wrong. All these opinions are perfectly legitimate. It’s just that they don’t exactly reek of the moderate tone we tend to expect from those in public bodies. Especially those who are paid £400 of taxpayers money a day.

It hardly needs saying that a police force that is paying activists as extreme as these to scrutinise its actions and correct them, is unlikely to treat seriously claims by working class white protesters that they are being unfairly policed. The Police Race Action Plan is tragic proof that at its highest levels the police have surrendered the objectivity and balance that are the prerequisites of genuinely fair policing. Their protestations that they can be relied on to police without fear or favour are rendered utterly unconvincing. And for that they have only themselves to blame.