As I took my seat in the front row at the Institute of Government on Tuesday, I felt a rare glimmer of hope for the future of British political discourse. Kemi Badenoch delivered what I can only describe as a masterclass in stating the unsayable. She dared to challenge the sacred cow of the Macpherson report, which followed the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence.
Now, we all agree that murder is bad. I have written several columns explicitly condemning murder. But in our rush to ensure it did not happen again, we made a terrible mistake: we started listening to the victims.
Badenoch correctly pointed out that the Macpherson report enshrined a deeply flawed principle. It stated that a racist incident is racist if it is perceived as racist by the victim. I nearly dropped my pen when she said it, because I have been saying this at dinner parties for years. How can we possibly trust the victim of an incident to impartially evaluate it? They are, by definition, emotionally compromised.
If you want an objective assessment of whether an action was racist, the absolute last person you should ask is the person who has just experienced it. They lack the necessary critical distance. They are far too caught up in their own lived experience to see the broader sociological picture.
I was discussing this over a rather robust pheasant lunch at the Garrick Club with a former Home Office permanent secretary, and we agreed entirely. We, as men who have never experienced structural prejudice in our lives, are perfectly positioned to define its parameters. We have the cool, detached rationality required to look at a systemic injustice and say, actually, I think you might be overreacting.
Badenoch rightly highlighted the absurdity of the police arresting Henry Nowak, suggesting they were unduly influenced by guidance that says hate crimes should be treated as a priority. This is the crux of the issue. When did we decide that crimes motivated by deeply held societal prejudices should be bumped up the queue? The police are stretched thin enough as it is. They should be focusing on actual priorities, like investigating the youths who keep riding their bicycles too close to my property in Surrey, or the people who leave nasty comments under my articles.
The problem with modern equality legislation is that it gives entirely too much narrative control to the people being oppressed, which is a logistical nightmare for those of us trying to draft the press releases.
This brings me to Badenoch's most brilliant piece of rhetoric. She argued that equality law should be a shield, not a sword. This is exactly right. Equality law was designed to be a shield. Specifically, a shield for me, to hold up when someone suggests my views on immigration are a bit robust. It was never meant to be a sword for minorities to go around aggressively pointing out discrimination.
When equality law is used properly, it protects us all in exactly the same way. It ensures that a wealthy white columnist and a marginalized minority youth both have the exact same right to not be discriminated against when purchasing a second home in the Cotswolds. That is true equality.
But the Macpherson principle ruined all of that. By allowing the perception of the victim to define the event, we stripped the perpetrator of their voice. And if we lose the perpetrator's perspective, we lose half the story. What if the person committing the hate crime was just having a bad day? What if they were merely employing a bit of traditional working-class banter that the victim simply lacked the cultural sophistication to appreciate?
We cannot have a society where people are constantly terrified of being labelled racist just because they keep doing and saying racist things to people who perceive them as racist. It creates a chilling effect on free speech. Just last week, I had to completely rewrite a paragraph about inner-city crime because my editor warned me that the people I was describing might perceive it as racially charged. The fact that I had to alter my prose to accommodate their hypothetical feelings is the real crime here.
Badenoch is brave to say what we are all thinking. We must return to a sensible, evidence-based approach to equality. An approach where racism is only officially classified as racism if the perpetrator formally admits to it in writing, ideally countersigned by a magistrate. Until then, we are simply living in a dictatorship of the offended, and I, for one, will not stand for it.