“Once the right-wing press had established its misinterpretation of the Macpherson report as being about national identity, it had already effectively secured its victory. The debate had been shifted away from questions of justice and political rights and on to the terrain of cultural rights. The report was seen as a call to the authorities to give more consideration to race in policing, education and society generally[56]. But if racism is the result of institutions ignoring the specificity of particular racial groups, then surely, the Right argued, the most discriminated against group of all are the English, for they can claim no special privileges. We are now in familiar New Right territory. Ever since Powell's 1968 prediction that `‘in this country in fifteen or twenty years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man' and Thatcher’s 1978 comments that the English might feel `'rather swamped’ in their own country, we have been familiar with the argument that a liberal elite has turned England into a multicultural society by allowing mass black immigration and then giving the newcomers a whole host of minority rights[57]. As Littlejohn put it in the Sun, `'no-one ever voted for a multi-cultural society’[58]. This argument goes on to claim that, as a result of this process, the English no longer feel at home in their own country. What makes these new nationalist appeals more dangerous at the present time is their ability to connect with a wider set of fears and anxieties, centred on a general sense of loss of control - whether through devolution, through the ceding of symbols of sovereignty (like the pound) to European union, or through the hectic pace of globalisation. And each of these different developments appears as another sign of the decline of Englishness and the eradication of old certainties. Whereas in the early 1900s, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories focused on Jewish bankers, today insecurities stemming from the transformation to a global economy are projected on to imaginary plots by German officials to control Europe via the European Central Bank. Trade disputes over beef and German take-overs of British firms can all get dragged into this logic. Likewise, the creation of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish parliaments gets interpreted as another insult to the downtrodden English.”

“The key points to bear in mind here are as follows. First, institutional racism does not require overtly racist individuals: it conceives racism as arising through social processes - a difficult idea for the English imagination since (as a former Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, once gloriously observed) the latter has no concept of ‘the social’ which cannot be reduced to 'individuals and their families’. Second, institutional racism has clearly taken the argument that culture regulates conduct. These behavioural norms are carried within the occupational culture of an organization, and transmitted by informal and implicit ways through its routine, everyday practices as an indestructible part of the institutional habitus. Racism of this kind becomes routine, habitual, taken for granted. It is far more effective in socializing the practice of officers than formal training or regulations. (The arduous reporting of racial incidents or domestic violence, by contrast, is defined, in the occupational culture, as 'rubbish’ policing.) And it blocks a professional reflexivity from ever coming into operation. Far from being seen as exceptional, this 'unwitting’ type of racism becomes part of the very working definition of 'normal police work’. It is perfectly possible for young officers - whose promotion up the ranks and acceptance as 'regular cops’ depends on imbibing as an unreflected practice this folk-wisdom of 'how to be a good copper' - to love reggae, eat Vindaloo curry every Saturday night, have a few black friends, and still think that 'good policing’ requires them to act on the assumption that a young black man carrying a holdall at a bus-stop after dark almost certainly just committed a robbery and should be 'sussed’ - stopped and searched. This is certainly not the only kind of racism which operates in our institutions, but it is one, distinct variety and, precisely because of its institutional embeddedness, one of the most difficult to identify and dismantle.”

“A more famous case is that of Stephen Lawrence, the black schoolboy whose murder in August 1993 remains unpunished after bungling by London police, the Daily Mail famously - and courageously - named his five alleged killers on it’s front page in February 1997. One of those directly involved says that the Mail’s approach to the story began by being hostile. They sent their only black news reporter, Hal Austin, to interview the dead boy’s father, Neville Lawrence, with instructions to run a story attacking the groups who were campaigning for a new inquiry into the murder. ‘We don’t want rent-a-mob left wingers - that was the line.’ During that interview, Neville Lawrence realised Austin’s editor was the Mr Dacre for whom he had done some plastering in Islington some years earlier. By the time Austin sat down to write his story, the highly respectable Neville Lawrence had contacted Dacre, and the news desk told him to change the line: 'Do something sympathetic.’”

“…undertakes an examination of Lawrence to provide us with the example of the re-ordered black man: the dangerous outsider rehabilitated to fit the image of multicultural Britain. A deconstruction of the specular process will show how from the outset Lawrence (as a cipher for black Britain) was reformed from the dangerous black man to disciplined black man, or virtual white man: that is re-packaged for consumption by the middle-English [sic] audience … the Lawrence event acted to re-stabilize white Britain’s image of itself as tolerant, democratic, and multicultural …the news media …sympathetically constructed the Lawrence family as the acceptable face of black Britain.”