‘Macpherson came with another important qualification — he was self-evidently a fully paid-up member of the British establishment (Scottish division). He was twenty-seventh chief of the Macpherson clan and had had a distinguished military career in the Scots Guards and the SAS.”
With these words Jack Straw explained why, as home secretary in 1997, he had picked the retired high court judge Sir William Macpherson to chair a judicial inquiry into the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
In his memoir, Last Man Standing, he added this: “If his inquiry came up with tough and uncomfortable conclusions, as I suspected it might, it would be much harder for anyone to dismiss them than if he had been known as some kind of ‘soft liberal’.”
For this judgment, as for the inquiry itself, Straw deserves much credit. Macpherson did indeed come up with tough and uncomfortable conclusions and they were indeed hard to dismiss, even though people tried. This week, aged 94, the judge died. And, as we find ourselves again debating the questions he raised, it seems a good moment to revisit the great achievement represented by his report.
I want to do that from a particular perspective. That of a conservative. Not just because I am one but because there are interesting things to be said about the Macpherson inquiry from a conservative point of view.
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When he reported in 1999, his most controversial conclusion was that there was institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police. Describing it as a “corrosive disease”, the inquiry argued that it represented “a collective failure” to provide a proper service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. The cause might be unwitting prejudice or ignorance but it persisted because of a failure to recognise and confront it.
The finding was powerful and began a much-needed process of change. But many conservatives with a big and small C fought against it at the time.
Some of the opposition was pure party politics: trying to find a way of getting at the seemingly invulnerable Blair government. But many also resisted the idea that an entire organisation, as opposed to individuals, could be “guilty” of something through mere omission. And there was a concern too, which Boris Johnson subscribed to in a Spectator article at the time, that the police would be demoralised by the finding and too busy worrying about racism to do their job properly.
These arguments look much less impressive with the passage of time, assuming they ever did. Distance makes it clearer that the police as a whole had a problem with recognising and tackling racism. Its “canteen culture” wasn’t limited to a few individuals.
More than twenty years later they are still struggling with the issue, as last month’s story of horrendous racial abuse in the Hampshire force demonstrates. And the argument that the inquiry’s conclusion would harm the fight against crime looks less persuasive now we can see that it was published near the beginning of a sharp and sustained 20-year fall in offending.
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Conservatives have changed too. Naive individualism is less fashionable. All types of conservatives are more likely to acknowledge that organisations have cultures of their own which exist beyond the conscious behaviour of individuals within them. After all, central to the argument for Brexit is that Britain has a singular democratic and entrepreneurial spirit that comes from its history and geographical position. How could it be true that a country can have an institutional culture but not, say, the police?
And it is also true that Tory attitudes to policing have changed, with the right now being far more critical of forces’ effectiveness and restrictive practices.
Yet there remain those who wonder if all this talk of hidden biases and “institutional racism” isn’t just so much liberal nonsense, and an attack on the country disguised in academic jargon.
Here’s why that view is wrong. First, conservatives are realists about human nature. This realism is at the heart of the conservative rejection of socialism and that doctrine’s absurd assumptions about the perfectibility of human behaviour. Of course we have unconscious instincts and of course we aren’t perfect.
Just because hidden bias training doesn’t work (and it doesn’t) does not mean we don’t have hidden biases. In fact conservative realism would lead us to expect exactly that.
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Conservatives reject the socialist idea of equality of outcome precisely because we acknowledge and celebrate human diversity. To assume that different people will become alike is a utopian absurdity.
In fact conservative realism is why Tories can reject with confidence the idea (fashionable among the more activist parts of Black Lives Matter) that racism is the product of capitalism and Britain’s imperial history. Conservatives understand that it is much more serious and deep-rooted than that. Prejudice is a part of human nature and racism exists in all political systems: Soviet Russia, modern China and Rwanda, where the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis claimed approximately 600,000 lives.
We have an evolutionary instinct that leads us to co-operate with people who are like us and to reject or even fight those who seem unfamiliar. That is why creating multicultural societies is hard and why every one of them experiences racial tension. Recognition of this difficulty is why I’ve always been slightly more cautious about levels of immigration into this country than my liberal friends. I think it takes time for people to learn to live with each other.
From all this it follows that, far from being resistant to ideas such as “institutional racism” and the work to combat prejudice, conservatives should be the most supportive. Because we are realists, because we know people aren’t perfect, and because multicultural societies are hard. We know that treating everyone with the dignity they deserve and as equal citizens is morally right and essential to social harmony. And we know it won’t just happen by itself.
Every day I see an example of conservative defensiveness about change that Tories should be comfortable with and should be supporting. The most important argument to be made for our ancestors and our history is that they left us a society with the ability to change and to grow. Of course we should be honest about the crimes and mistakes we made as an empire, because being able to learn from our mistakes is the greatest gift British history has bestowed.
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And we can take pride that Straw was right in his instinct about this country. He was able to appoint Macpherson, a quintessentially British establishment figure, to lead the inquiry and to get from him justice and the truth.