For Those Who Think Priti Patel Is Useless...

The UK's head of counter-terrorism policing has urged the Home Office to consider relaxing positive discrimination laws to ensure police can hire more BAME recruits.

What?! Who on earth would have the cheek to ask this?

Oh. Of course.  

Neil Basu raised the issue at the last National Policing Board meeting chaired by the home secretary Priti Patel...

Can anyone imagine how Teresa May would have answered? Yes, me too. But not Priti. 

...who reportedly stood firmly against the idea.

Yes, she might be all talk when it comes to illegal immigration, but she's not standing for this, thankfully.  

Recent figures reported that police forces all across the UK had failed to hire a representative number of black, Asian and minority ethnic police recruits despite a high number of BAME applicants.

If police forces aren't hiring them, despite them applying, it's because they don't meet the required standards. 

We have enough of those already, we don't need any more even if they do come in different colours... 

The Dark Side Of Positive Discrimination...

Chinyere Inyama, who was Britain’s first black coroner, was suspended on full pay from his £120,000 post as Senior West London Coroner in October 2016 following complaints about his behaviour.

After a 14-month inquiry, he was reinstated in December 2017 by the coroners’ watchdog, the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO), and ordered to undergo retraining.

Which hasn't sat well with his colleagues. And seems odd to me too, particularly in light of some other cases where such leniency hasn't been forthcoming....

Five sitting coroners, none of whom are permitted to speak publicly, have told The Mail on Sunday that they believe Mr Inyama’s Nigerian heritage lies behind the decision not to dismiss him.

Well, why not? After all, it was what got him the job in the first place!

‘It’s no secret Inyama got the West London job because of positive discrimination. Others were better suited,’ claimed one.

‘But there was a feeling in the coronial service that more should be done to boost diversity ... Diversity now seems the reason it’s proving impossible to get rid of him.’

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Former chief coroner Sir Peter Thornton was said to have been an observer when Inyama was interviewed for the West London post.

‘He knew about Inyama’s past,’ said the source. ‘But neither he nor Inyama mentioned it. There was a reasonable expectation Thornton would be frank about Inyama’s history. He doesn’t seem to have been.’

 That 'past' referred to? Well, it's a murky one, all right.

A council source claimed the Inyama scandal has cost his employer, Hammersmith and Fulham Council, almost £500,000.

Nope, not even close. It's cost the taxpayer. Just as it always does.

They're Depraved On Account Of They're Deprived. Forever!

Louise Taylor on the bizarre decisions of the Australian legal system:

Yesterday Australia's high court found that social disadvantage should be taken into account in sentencing, and does not diminish over time.

This is for Australian aborigines, of course, but can’t you just see it being rolled out to other groups in time? I'm sure the Southern Poverty Law Centre is looking at this and wondering which useful idiot will swallow it for African Americans...

Lawyers for William Bugmy, an Aboriginal man who had intentionally caused grievous bodily harm to a prison officer, had asked the court to consider principles for recognising Indigenous disadvantage in sentencing.

Yes, it was his 'deprivation' that made him assault a prison officer, clearly..

During the hearing of the appeal, one of the appellate judges likened Bugmy’s tragic life history as a “cheque that could no longer be cashed”. Underpinning such statements appears to be a stark judicial ignorance of the social realities of life in many Aboriginal communities.

Well, no, actually it's more like a common-sense attitude that we should see a lot more, but sadly, it isn't shared by the rest of the Aussie judges:

His lawyers further sought to transform the approach to the sentencing of Aboriginal people by asking the high court to accept that the time had come for the socially destructive effects of the over representation of Aboriginal people in our prisons – Indigenous Australians make up more than a quarter of Australia's prisoner population– to be used in sentencing to guide courts in exercising restraint before jailing Aboriginal people.

'Give 'em a break! It's totally not the soft bigotry of low expectations, yer honour!'

But here is what the Bugmy case is certainly not. It is absolutely not a get out of jail free card for Aboriginal offenders. It is also not permission for Aboriginal offenders to "excuse" their crime on the basis of their Aboriginality. Bugmy was never asking for that.

Oh, Louise, that's exactly what it is...

Let's Celebrate Diversity!

Bristol's next Lord Mayor wants to highlight the contribution minority groups make to the city.

All the contributions? Or just the good ones?

Liberal Democrat Councillor Peter Main...

Oh. Right. I can probably guess then...

...has been nominated as the successor to the current Lord Mayor, Councillor Geoff Gollop, at the end of his year of office in May... Bristol’s first openly gay mayor, he wants to reach out to minority communities across the city, from different races and faith groups, to people with disabilities, and to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

As one example of his approach to the year in office, Mr Main plans on learning sign language, so he can communicate directly with deaf people.

*bites lip*

Giving The BNP A Helping Hand…

The temporary jobs, which offer thousands of pounds for work in the summer, are billed as the internships ‘that could change your life’.

They provide students with invaluable work experience at a time of soaring graduate unemployment.

Not all students, oh no. Only the special ones.

But critics yesterday told of their anger at the decision by the Civil Service and the Metropolitan Police to exclude all but certain ethnic minorities from applying.

It seems to come back to something Leg-Iron wrote about collecting people, rather than employing them.

The Metropolitan Police said: ‘This scheme assists us to understand the needs of the diverse communities we serve.’

How?

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: ‘We think the Civil Service should represent the people we serve and we make no apology for that.’

Anyone wonder just how they manage to say that sort of thing with a straight face?

And why is the government not getting a firm grip of its public servants, and ensuring that they are aware that this sort of this is counter-productive to true equality?

At Last!

Basildon council has controversially pledged up to £8million towards the mass eviction of the illegal Dale Farm camp at Crays Hill.

It’ll be money well spent. Even if we do have to stump up for it...

Travellers, who held a protest outside tonight’s landmark meeting, reacted with fury and it is feared the hefty financial commitment could lead to even more council job cuts.

As far as I’m concerted, that’s a feature, not a bug…

Of course, over in the ‘Indy’, it’s all a terrible, terrible injustice:

The inhabitants of Dale Farm have vowed to resist any attempt to evict them. One resident, named only as Nora, told the Travellers' Times website: "We've things up our sleeves. It will be like Belfast if they come in here. They haven't a clue what they're up against."

They do now, Nora, they do now…

Last week the Prime Minister, David Cameron, encouraged the evictions by describing his "sense of unfairness that one law applied to everybody else and, on too many occasions, another law applies to travellers".

Precisely!

Since coming to power the Coalition has done away with a string of measures that were brought in to protect traveller communities from prejudice and encourage them to settle.

To settle legally. Obeying the planning laws.

Like everyone else has to.

Travellers fear that the new Localism Bill, which will give local communities more say in the planning process, will return Britain to the mid-1990s when travellers felt persecuted by the Conservative government of the day, and up to 90 per cent of planning applications by travellers were rejected.

I’d hope so. But we’ll see…

The Appliance Of (Politically Correct) Science...

Quoth uber-lefty Hugh Muir:

...I'm all for a bit less Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, Galileo and Copernicus, if it means a bit more McCoy, Banneker and Carver. It's a question of balance. It's important.

Who are they, you ask? What have they done to be bumped up ahead of those greats?

Well, I had to Google them. Carver was a botanist who got poor farmers to grow alternative crops, McCoy was a big cheese in the world of industrial lubrication (Woo!), and Banneker appears to be most famous for making a wooden clock...

Yes, really.

So, why should we elbow aside the greats of history? Only one reason:

It's a question of balance. It's important.

I talk it over with Joe, a black school governor. Get the black scientists on the curriculum, he says. Black engineers, black investors, black surgeons. "If I see another school trying to boost black achievement by talking about black pop and sports stars, I am going to do someone a serious injury," he says. At a young age, the only limit most kids have is their ambition, says Joe, and yet we limit those ambitions. "What's the best they see to aim for? A West Indian takeaway. A barber shop, if they are lucky. Who plants the seed in their minds that they might be a metallurgist or a physicist; that people who looked a bit like them have already done it?"

There you go.The only thing that can possibly give kids ambition is to see other kids that look a bit like them.

Never mind are they any good, are they the right size, shape and colour...

There is black history month, I tell him. We are lucky to still have that. No sign of a Polish history month, a Chinese history fortnight or even a Pakistani history week. But it's stuck, he says. On Mary Seacole, and Martin Luther King.

Oooh, that reminds me! Wasn't it MLK who said that he wanted to see a world where the only criteria that mattered was the colour of a man's skin?

No, wait, that's not right, is it?

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Oh, Martin. You'd turn in your grave if you saw what passes for today's 'leaders'...

Update: As NickM over at 'Counting Cats...' shows, that's something the ladies want in on too.

‘Positive’ Discrimination…

A council has been accused of discrimination after white people were barred from applying for two £18,000-a-year jobs.

Oh, great. The election just saw off the BNP, and now the councils want to encourage them again…

One jobseeker, who did not wish to be named, described the posts as 'totally racist'.

I guess he didn’t get the memo that ‘racism’ seems to depend on the whim of whichever politicallycorrect group has the local council by the short & curlies…

'I feel the job would be an excellent opportunity for me to make use of the skills and qualifications that I have acquired but, being white, I am excluded.

'Equal opportunities means giving everyone an equal chance to succeed rather than discriminating against people because of the colour of their skin.'

Yup, he definitely didn’t get the memo. The old idea of equal opportunities long since left the building.

Bristol council has 9,000 members of staff, not including teachers, of which 630, or seven per cent, are from ethnic minorities.

Because 12 per cent of Bristol residents come from minority backgrounds the council has begun trying to redress this imbalance.

You see, unless the councillors look like you, they can’t possibly ‘represent’ you. That’s right, isn’t it?

I mean, people shun supermarkets and civic amenities and public transport if the make-up of their staff doesn’t match the percentage of ethnic minorities in the area.

Don’t they?

James Easey, a spokesman for the council said advertising ethnic minority-only posts was allowed under race relations legislation.

Sometimes, ‘allowable’ does not equal ‘advisable’…

Sunder Katwala - Positive Discrimination Is The Answer!

Sunder Katwala is in favour of racist and discriminatory policies – but only so long as they favour ethnic minorities, naturally:

This could be the fifth general election since the black and Asian breakthrough in 1987 where the Lib Dems fail to elect any non-white MPs to parliament. As you report: "Only four minority candidates are fighting for the Lib Dems in the party's top 100 target seats." And yes, the Lib Dems have "recently begun a programme of mentoring young minorities"; but this won't make much difference without a far clearer understanding of the problem.

You do realise, Sunder, that it's not the party that elects those MPs to Parliament? It's the people? The voters?

Because you speak as if it were a foregone conclusion that if the party put up an MP, they would make it. Are you sure that's an assumption you want to make about this year's campaign?

Last year I gave evidence to the Speakers' conference on the underrepresentation of minorities. It is clear that Labour and Conservative progress has accelerated. Only four of New Labour's 183 new MPs in the landslide class of 1997 were non-white, but Labour selections now are more than five times as likely (over 10%) to see black and minority ethnic candidates win.

Note that, for Sunder, it's only 'black and minority ethnic' individuals who count as 'minorities'.

The Conservatives elected only one non-white MP in the 20th century. But David Cameron's efforts to change the face of the party have paid off: they are now selecting black or Asian candidates in more than 5% of all selections, with a higher rate in Conservative-held seats.

And it's proved immensely divisive, and until May 7th, no-one will know if it was a worthwhile gamble..

The Lib Dems have often boasted that they have more minority candidates than the major parties. But these have nearly always been in seats with large minority populations, where the party is weak. A diversity strategy far too heavily based on an "ethnic faces for ethnic voters" approach is bound to fail.

So we don't need ethnic minority candidates in heavily-ethnic areas, eh? Where do we need them, Sunder?

So the Lib Dems need to start selecting non-white candidates when they replace retiring MPs in Lib Dem seats like Winchester, York or St Ives.

Ah. OK. Well...

Lib Dem members are resistant to A-list style pressure from "above"; but they need to do something if they want a parliamentary party that looks anything like Britain.

Errr...

But a minute ago you were suggesting that we needed black and ethnic candidates in regions known mainly for their lack of them?

Now, you are concerned that we need a parliamentary party that 'looks like Britain' from candidates for areas that don't look anything like those areas?

Is anyone else confused by that 'reasoning'?