The Brit papers are all over Sir Ian Blair’s eggregiously correct Met this morning, following the fun news that a Muslim member of the Diplomatic Protection Squad was re-assigned at his own request from guarding the Israeli Embassy in London.

Apparently, the officer concerned, one PC Alexander Omar Basha, suffered moral qualms at his presence on the steps of the Embassy while the occupants’ friends and family were bombing Lebanon.  The last Merkava 4 has rolled back across the border and PC Basha is working normally again.  But the damage is done.  And, it seems to me, in a couple of ways.

First, professionally.  The man who is quoted everywhere this morning is John O’Connor, a former Flying Squad commander.  He told the Sun:-

This is the beginning of the end for British policing.  When you join the police, you do so to provide a service to the public.  If you cannot perform those duties, you leave.

But if it was just a question of professionalism Sir Ian would not have reacted so jumpily in ordering an urgent review of the decision to grant PC Basha’s request.  No Commissioner has been more political than this one.  He has made politics paramount in his beloved creation, the Metrocultural Police Service.  But leftist idealism like his always justifies its little political crimes by the presumption of Good, and that presumption is glorious, hypocritical toast if a discomforted Muslim must be moved from any duty on grounds, basically, of faith or even evil race.  Sir Ian’s progressive, inclusive Met is stripped of all moral force.  It’s a joke, and I or anybody else can refuse to give a witness statement, for example, to any minority garbed in blue simply because that is the dictate of conscience.  Muslim, Hindu, black, queer, they’re all fair game.

As multicultural luck would have it, Sir Ian’s truest friends have very quickly worked this out and come forward with a possible answer.

The chairman of the Association of Muslim Police, Superintendent Dal Babu, insists that the Basha issue was not one of conscience:-

This is about the welfare of an individual and not about a moral issue,” he said.

“I think we are going down a very, very slippery road if we start having postings based on individual officers’ conscience.

Of course, it’s all just sophistry.  There are no clear dividing lines between conscience and welfare in the aims of Mr Babu’s association.  They intertwine and dissolve within the peculiar whole of Islam:-

The AMP is formally recognised by the Metropolitan Police Service.  It is active in pursuing faith-friendly policies and has been instrumental in ensuring the provision of many facilities to the benefit of Muslim staff, including Hijaab for female officers, ability to wear Islamic/cultural dress when not in uniform, provision of Halaal food and facilities for Salaah (Islamic Prayer).

People are not cyphers.  That’s the problem.  But neither is multiracialism remotely normal.  As long as there are a hundred and fifty varieties of humanity in my capital city we must all be equal under the law, and the law must be enforced by serving policemen with as complete an impartiality as humanly possible.  Cyphers the police must indeed be.

In contrast, however, Sir Ian truly, madly, deeply believes that the Met must look like those one hundred and fifty varieties of homo sapiens wandering the streets.  He is simply wrong.