This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
The handcuffing of the dying Henry Nowak has put Britain’s “two-tier policing” in the spotlight. But how did it come to that? That there is a general culture of anti-racism within our institutions, and indeed within police forces themselves, is no secret. Few, however, outside the ranks will be aware of what is promoted in police training or the manuals used to ensure that new police recruits have the correct progressive values.
In Scotland, for example, the training manual for trainee officers has an opening section. It is titled “Diversity” and runs for 56 pages. I’ll come back to this manual, but it is worth first making a few background observations about how criminology and the police operate today.
Go to almost any police conference and you’ll find two sets of speakers and audience members, typically made up of police officers and academics. On one hand you have the zealots, often the headline speakers, the academics, the professional anti-racists and the critical criminologists who share their empathetic wisdom with the attendees.
In the audience we have two types of police officer: the often younger cop who, having gone to university, is already well tuned into the correct ideas and language of the criminologists; and the older, slightly confused, senior, male cops, eager to rub up against the academics to gain a much-needed sense of virtue and purpose. Whilst conscious of the sexism and racism of the past, these older officers can see some of the problems and contradictions of the new normal but nevertheless adopt it enthusiastically, albeit with a slight sense of shame about what they were and what they have become.
By now everyone in the room has learned the language. Everything is structural and systemic. And just as radical criminologists and race academics handed Lord Macpherson the language to deal with the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, these officers, old and new, understand that taking the knee to anti-racism is an absolute must.
Few of the police officers are aware that the language they now use and the policies and the practices they enforce are a by-product of the radical and cynical dogma of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Bizarre though it may seem, many of the academics don’t even realise this themselves.
Nevertheless, the zeitgeist is there, the talk of “hate”, “prejudice”, “vulnerable groups”, “institutional” this and that, “unconscious bias”, “micro-aggression” and of course “diversity”. They have learned to never question a race complaint. To do so would be to doubly traumatise a minority. And so, the two-tier approach begins.
“It is right for me, as chief constable, to clearly state that institutional racism, sexism, misogyny and discrimination exist,” Police Scotland’s then chief constable, Sir Iain Livingstone confessed in a televised address to the Scottish Police Authority in 2023, adding, “Publicly acknowledging these issues exist institutionally is essential to our absolute commitment to championing equality and becoming an anti-racist service.”
Such confessions have become familiar, for we live in a post-Macpherson world — a world defined through the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry as being structurally racist. Here, it is not conscious and purposeful acts of racism by individuals that matter. Rather, racism has been redefined as something that is “unwitting”, so now we and our institutions can be racist without any intention of being so.
And so to the Handbook of Policing, the training manual for officers in Scotland. This is a book the police refuse to make public for “law enforcement” and “health and safety” reasons, but I have a copy of the 2018 edition.
As noted, the first 56 pages of this manual are about diversity, starting with Diversity Awareness. It opens with a little test, presumably to check out your multi-cultural mindset. The questionnaire, scaled from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree” asks you to tick a box under statements like this:
“The United Kingdom is a multi-cultural society”
“We must adapt our policing practices to suit various cultures”
“My prejudices could affect the service I provide”
It then moves on to sections on “Diversity: Racial and Cultural Awareness”, followed by “Diversity Related Legislation” and sections on “Stereotyping”, “Dominance” and so forth.
At this point, I feel the need to explain that I am not racist. In fact, I was involved in anti-racist campaigns for years when racism was a far more serious problem than it is today. I feel the need to say this because unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few decades you know that to be racist is the new secular sin.
But even from an anti-racist perspective, you have to ask the question: why is this the first thing a trainee police officer reads and gets taught when joining the force? It feels obsessive, particularly when at the time it was written (2018) Scotland’s population was 96 per cent white.
After “educating yourself” about different communities, from Muslims to Gypsy and Travellers, and all the Protected Characteristics — followed by another test — you learn about stereotyping. Stereotyping is defined as: “A prejudicial image held about particular groups of people which is based around false, simplified or incomplete knowledge about that group”.
It doesn’t occur to the authors of this document that their judgement about trainee officers holding prejudices may itself be a prejudice. Nor is there the awareness that giving entire groups a protected characteristic may in fact be a simplified prejudgement. Could it also be possible that giving the label of vulnerability to everyone in a group is a new form of stereotyping, as is the presumption that every black person is part of this thing called the “black community”?
The presumption throughout is that we live in a prejudiced world and that we all carry prejudices — it’s to do with our psychology, apparently, and we are introduced to a book by Gordon Allport from 1954 called The Nature of Prejudice. Then we drift more onto the terrain of CRT with the section on power and a reminder that “black and ethnic minorities” are likely to face “dominance”, presumably from the whites.
Much of the training manual is pretty basic, high-school-level stuff mixed in with a bit of common sense and a smattering of “correct” diversity thinking. It has a political dimension, ensuring you do not think that your culture is better than others and making sure you know that diversity is indeed our greatest strength.
Compared with subsequent documents written by the police across the UK, however, this one is relatively tame. Yet the building blocks for a race-obsessed force are clearly all in place: looking at some of the more recent documents in other parts of the country, I suspect an updated Police Scotland training manual will be far worse than this one.
In this 2018 document for example, there is no mention of “white privilege”, whereas this is commonplace in today’s College of Policing “Anti-racism training package for officers and staff”. Whilst the term “equity” often replaces that of “equality” in today’s police training, this older document does at least raise questions about positive discrimination.
Do the Scottish police trainers still raise questions about positive discrimination? Answers on a postcard. We know that the diversity drive in the Met has led to some appalling cases where previously blocked candidates who failed initial vetting process were purposefully allowed into the force. The outrageous case of the child rapist officer, Cliff Mitchell [see David Spencer, “Progressivism and the Police” March 2026] is a case in point.
We live in strange times — in a world where our politicians insist that we do not have a two-tier police service, whilst at the same time we classify different groups of people as vulnerable and having protected characteristics.
We obsess over race, create categories of hate and train officers to be “diversity aware”. We find BLM riots and police officers taking the knee, whilst the BBC describes a BLM protest that resulted in injury to 27 police officers as a “largely peaceful protest”, and certain tweets and online posts appear to be treated far more severely than others.
There is much that can and should be said about the Henry Nowak case. Whatever one makes of the specific policing in this case, it is very difficult to argue that the police, across the UK, are not obsessed with racism.
As thousands of rape victims, from Rotherham to Rochdale, would testify, this obsession has some profound and dangerous consequences.
