A cautionary tale for policemen

“I have that victim report you asked for, sir,” announced WPC Brook, a Leeds lass and The Fragrant Linda to the small and dwindling coterie of officers over 40 who, like Boulder, had yet to fully internalise the rigorous standards of a-sexuality required in the work context of the, of course, perpetually modernising and by no means hysterically anti white male, post-racial, post-gender Met.  Delicately, she laid thirty-four sheets of densely-typed A4 paper on Kevin Boulder’s desk.  He looked down at them, then up, questioningly, at her face.  He leafed through the first dozen.  A crime report typically filled a single page - maybe two in exceptional circumstances. “Where’d all this come from?” he asked.

“He gave me a memory stick he’d smuggled past the custody desk in the waist band of his trousers,” she said, “He must have had it all ready when you arrested him.  There was one Word file on it, just needing me to copy and paste, and quite a few screenshot images I copied but did not print out with the report because we’ve no colour cartridges until tomorrow.”

“Well, thank fuck for that.” Boulder sighed, picking up all thirty-four pages and headed for Bennett’s office.

“I think we’ve been ‘ad, guv?” he said as he went through the door, “This guy Holly is playin’ us.”  Like Boulder, Bennett was fazed by the sheer bulk of the document.  He flicked through back-to-front, like a pack of playing cards.  It consisted of fifty numbered quotes and URLs, beneath each of which were two or three paragraphs of commentary in sparely-written legal language.  Bennett read the first and longest numbered quote:

“Karu nadu 20 hours ago
Like all fµƈking racists you are obsessed with defending a non-existent purity.  This is a constantly invaded land.  The people who came here were Basques and Romans from Africa and Jews from the Middle East and now they are Pakistanis, Indians, black Caribbeans and black Africans as well.  The English you obsess about have only ever been immigrants and then mongrels.  There is nothing to defend because there is nothing to replace, though replacing you naȥi retards will improve the gene pool a thousand times over.  Hatred and intolerance will die with you.  In fact, why don’t you just fµƈk off now?  It is the beautiful black and brown native people of England who own the future.”

Bennett took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.  “Well, Prakash Ghosh isn’t a very diplomatic fellow,” he observed dryly, “But yeah, Ghosh thinks he’s playing Holly, but it’s clearly the other way round.  Holly knew he was going to be questioned sooner or later.  He wanted us to question him.  He was all ready for us to question him.  He’s playing Ghosh and he’s playing us.  What’s his game?”

“What are you going to do about it?” Boulder asked.

“Well, I can’t plough through all this now.  Got a paedo op on this afternoon.  Telegraph Hill.  Man tried to take a child away last week.  Been seen since approaching children in the park.  You’ve done your shift.  You need to get off home.  So, we’ll do what we should have done in the first place: give it to Crabtree, copy to Slice, and wait for word from on high.”

Assistant chief constable Andy Crabtree was, as it happens, at a loose end.  He was due to have lunch at the Terrace with Sammy Jogulkar and some of the BAMELabour group.  They were all going to meet the mayor of Sao Paolo, who was doing great things on disadvantage and crime, apparently, and was here with a delegation from the Global Parliament of Mayors.  Unfortunately, ze was held up at gun-point in Tottenham in the small hours, and was too distressed to meet anyone.  So when DCI Bennett’s email and attachments landed in Crabtree’s in-tray there was literally nothing for it but to print the lot out and read it, or most of it, over a feta salad and latte from the Curtis Green canteen.

He was utterly horrified by page 2.

It was true, of course, that Crabtree was quite easily horrified.  The expression of an apparently sincere horror on certain matters had served him extremely well since his fast-track from Hendon back in the glory days of summer 2005.  As the Met’s Schools Outreach Lead he was responsible for the much praised Prevent: I_Am_for_London strategy, with its twin programmes I Am A Human Being and I Am A Racist.  The Daily Mail hated it, which went down very well at the Home Office.  From time to time he still heard talk that it might be dusted down and launched nationally. 

But now he, of course, had moved on to bigger things as the Met’s Lead on Hate Crime.  Hate was the hot ticket, career-wise.  Fortunately, not everybody understood its potential.  The planned National Hate Crime Hub, for example, was a typical Tory sticking-plaster measure.  Far too limited.  Far too reactive.  But …  with the right leadership (his), the right Prevent strategy (his again), and a proper budget and manpower, it could be developed into something that would make a real difference.  He just needed to be able to make his case in the right political quarters, and for that he needed to maintain a high profile.

By page 4 his mind had begun to turn to the three tasks he knew from past experience he must now undertake:

1. Get control personally of matters on the ground.  So no nasty surprises.  Nobody’s personal agenda but his.

2. Inform certain parties higher up the food-chain so that an admiring, receptive, and influential audience is on hand, and career prospects remain seriously undimmed.

3. Get the CPS involved so that, in the unlikely event it all goes belly-up, there will be somebody else to blame.

Within not many minutes he had circularised his immediate superior at Curtis Green, three contacts in the Home Office department for Countering Extremism, as well as the Minister’s private secretary, and the relevant CPS contact.  Now he needed to interview the young man who was at the root of all this.  He put in a call to DCI Bennett but, as there was no reply, moved up the food-chain … only ever up, of course ... to Bennett’s Chief Constable Ronald Breadwardine.

Crabtree made an habitual point of filing away in his memory any snippets he heard about senior Met officers.  He only knew Breadwardine by reputation, that being of a serious and intelligent officer and an able administrator, close to retirement.  Perhaps he had not risen as far as was once expected.  There may have been a question mark over his political dexterity.  Neither was he known to be a networker.  Management in the modern Met had left him behind.

“Call me Andy, please,” he urged, shaking Breadwardine’s hand with a pronounced masculine firmness calculated to communicate trust and sincerity.  “Do you mind if I call you Ronald?”

He had arrived at Breadwardine’s office door within an hour of the telephone call.  He had a short, pudgy-faced black woman in tow, who he introduced as his “colleague from the CPS”, Anique Ojjey-Bailey.  She was, apparently, acting hate crime coordinator for London, southern area.  Two for the price of one, thought Breadwardine.

Crabtree didn’t waste time on small talk, “I appreciate Ian Bennett’s concern about Mr Holly’s very, erm, untypical hate crime report.  But there’s also the matter of Mr Ghosh’s report against him.”

“I think it unlikely that you would want Holly charged, given the manner in which Mr Ghosh has comported himself.” Breadwardine replied.  “However, the likelihood that Mr Ghosh will face a charge is much higher, Assistant Chief Constable.”

“Andy, please.  So, Ronald, you don’t think that both could be administered here at this station via the Racist Incident Log?”

“Mr Ghosh’s complaint, possibly,” Breadwardine replied, “But Mr Holly has made fifty related allegations, ranging over a period of several months.  It’s far too substantial to be assigned to the category of a racist incident.”

The CPS’s acting hate crime coordinator for London, southern area, piped up, “Even a hearing in a magistrates court would not be good for us.”

“With respect, Miss … Annika …,” said Breadwardine, “with respect, given the scope and fundamentality of the principles involved and the obvious hostility and ambitions of the parties, I don’t see how a magistrate could avoid referral of Mr Holly’s complaints against Mr Ghosh and his associates to the Crown Court.  Doubtless, a full trial before a jury of his peers is precisely what Mr Holly is seeking, and I don’t think he cares whether it is him being prosecuted or his adversary Ghosh.  His concerns are political.  But a magistrate’s decision, our decision and yours are not.  Law and order is a structured and judicially-bound process.  What choice do we have?”

“I take it you have you read it yourself - the Holly document?” asked Crabtree.

“I’ve only managed to look at it superficially myself.  But I did find some novel and interesting thoughts.”

There was an awkward silence.  “One in particular,” he continued, picking up a hard copy of the Holly document from his desktop, “I have seen on page ... page 19.  This is Mr Holly, posting under his own name, addressing Mr Ghosh, posting under a pseudonym I believe, on the Independent website on 15th September.  I will read it out loud.

“The difference between us, Prakash, is that you post from hatred while I post from love (which, being the person you are, and having the cause you have, you call hate).  That the political and media classes, the governing classes, the liberal classes, the law and academia agree with people like you and condemn people like me is a great and mysterious reversal of logic, and one of many highly vexing betrayals we natives have suffered.  And yet people like me speak of objective human truths, natural justice, and absolute moral principles.  There is, for example” ...”

Breadwardine stopped and looked up, “You might find this passage a bit hard to swallow.”

“There is, for example, a primary and universal principle at issue in this discussion, which is that all peoples grouped by kinship naturally self-identify, and naturally express self-concern.  But to these necessities of life, native peoples can add the natural recourse to defence of the homeland and defence of kind against foreign intrusion and colonisation.  No native people can fairly be told it must yield its life and land for the benefit of another people.  No native people can be excepted from that natural rule because of its race or ethnicity.  No traitor from within or intruder from without can withhold these necessities from the natives and yet lay claim himself to a moral cause.  For example, your anti-racism, which arbitrarily labels my people’s self-concern and self-defence ‘hate’, is not a moral cause.  But then not the universalist humanitarian view, not the Christian view, not the internationalist view, not the egalitarian view, certainly not the multicultural view, nothing surpasses the unimpeachable moral cause of a native people’s will for life, and a life given free and sovereign rein in the ancestral land.”

“There is more,” said Breadwardine, “But that seems to be the heart of Mr Holly’s argument.  Well, here is what I think.  He is telling us that in regard to questions of race and immigration, British law and common morality have become strangers to one another.  He is seeking to re-acquaint them by moralising the native British cause.  I think his intention is to invest it, via the courts, with the power to kill the government claim of racial diversity as moral action.  At the very least, he is posing a question which is dangerous to that.  As far as I can see, there is no answer that any of us can give him.”

Breadwardine gave them a chance to come forward with some sort of response.  There was none.  “Well, can you?” he asked, forcing the point home.  They looked dumbly at him.  He nodded sagely back.  “Do you know what I find most amazing about this?” he said, “It’s really happening.  It’s real.”