Nick Timothy MP, is the Shadow Justice Secretary
The appalling murder of Henry Nowak has revealed the reality of the left-wing ideology now embraced by public authorities of every kind.
The pursuit of “equity” explicitly rejects the principle of equal treatment, insisting instead that people should be treated differently on the basis of their racial or religious identity. The absurdity of this idea was exposed in a sequence of media appearances by David Lammy, the Justice Secretary, Lord Chancellor and Deputy Prime Minister.
This week he has sought to explain why it was right to take the knee for George Floyd, but not for Henry Nowak. He has told the media that he believes to treat people equally we need treat them differently.
After proposing policies that aim to reduce the number of criminals going to prison and reduce the severity of sentences handed down on the basis of age and identity, he chose last week of all weeks to promote his scheme to increase the number of judges from ethnic minority backgrounds.
Justice is supposed to be blind, but of course David Lammy was the politician who attacked the appointment of Sir Martin Moore-Bick as the chairman of the Grenfell inquiry on the grounds that the judge was white.
No wonder, then, that the Left wants to shut down the argument after Henry’s murder.
There is a very obvious double standard in the way “anti-racism” ideology tells public authorities we must be treated. And there is the same double standard in the political response to this latest police failure. Whenever there is a controversy involving race and the subject is not white, we are told everything must change.
Politicians indulge protestors who chant the unmistakably menacing slogan, “no justice, no peace.” Yet when the subject is white, we are told not to “politicise” the case, and the suggestion that there may be wider lessons to be learned is dismissed.
The reason for this behaviour is very clear. Henry’s case and many others like it – Sara Sharif, the failure to disrupt Salman Abedi, the missed warnings about Axel Rudakubana, and more – demonstrate the terrible failure of the ideology adopted by public authorities and still supported by the likes of David Lammy.
Last year the Sentencing Council, an unelected body that instructs our judges, proposed guidelines that would have made an offender’s ethnicity, faith and background a factor in how they were sentenced.
We dragged those guidelines into the daylight and forced their suspension, but the mindset that produced them did not disappear. It remains in the police race action plan and the equal treatment bench book – a guide to advise judges in cases involving racial and religious minorities.
The rape gangs remain the most obvious example of how political correctness, left-wing ideology and a surrender to corrupting influences of clan culture and communalism are all poisoning our justice system.
In South Yorkshire a police chief inspector told the father of one of the victims that the abuse had been ignored because “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out”.
The stories are the same across our towns and cities – and there is no sign of the inquiry we were promised. We do not even yet know if it will cover some of the worst cases, like in Bradford.
Some will ask how this has happened, not least because while Labour are undoubtedly making things far worse, these problems built up on the Conservatives’ watch in government.
My explanation is that several things happened.
First, the intellectual fashion – of critical race theory, along with trans ideology – arrived from America and became entrenched remarkably quickly, especially after the Black Lives Matter movement. Conservatives were slow to fully understand just what these ideologies are.
Second, some in our party had sympathy with these ideas.
And third, those who did oppose these ideas were steamrollered by the bureaucracy of government and the organs of the state.
This happened for two reasons. First, progressive legal frameworks – from the Human Rights Act to the Public Sector Equality Duty – remained in place. And second, the unreformed and fragmented nature of the modern state – with quangos, politicised civil servants and laws leaving judges to second-guess policy decisions – made it difficult to impose a conservative approach.
This is not to make excuses.
This is a failure we must be honest about and learn from. We have to have the intellectual capacity and confidence and conviction to take on and defeat the postmodernist nonsense of these pernicious ideas.
We have to deal with the progressive legal frameworks that direct the state to act in a fundamentally unconservative and undemocratic manner. And we have to make the organs of the state more accountable.
Even in law enforcement and the criminal justice system – where officers and prosecutors and judges have a high degree of autonomy for obvious reasons – there must be accountability. Public authorities cannot be used to advance political agendas without consent.
We have made a significant start. We will leave the European Convention on Human Rights and scrap the Human Rights Act. We will get rid of non-crime hate incidents. We will abolish the Sentencing Council, returning the power to set sentencing guidance to the Lord Chancellor and scrap the Judicial Appointments Commission.
But there is much more to do.
We need to dismantle the whole structure of identity politics and return us to equality before the law.
Nick Timothy MP, is the Shadow Justice Secretary
The appalling murder of Henry Nowak has revealed the reality of the left-wing ideology now embraced by public authorities of every kind.
The pursuit of “equity” explicitly rejects the principle of equal treatment, insisting instead that people should be treated differently on the basis of their racial or religious identity. The absurdity of this idea was exposed in a sequence of media appearances by David Lammy, the Justice Secretary, Lord Chancellor and Deputy Prime Minister.
This week he has sought to explain why it was right to take the knee for George Floyd, but not for Henry Nowak. He has told the media that he believes to treat people equally we need treat them differently.
After proposing policies that aim to reduce the number of criminals going to prison and reduce the severity of sentences handed down on the basis of age and identity, he chose last week of all weeks to promote his scheme to increase the number of judges from ethnic minority backgrounds.
Justice is supposed to be blind, but of course David Lammy was the politician who attacked the appointment of Sir Martin Moore-Bick as the chairman of the Grenfell inquiry on the grounds that the judge was white.
No wonder, then, that the Left wants to shut down the argument after Henry’s murder.
There is a very obvious double standard in the way “anti-racism” ideology tells public authorities we must be treated. And there is the same double standard in the political response to this latest police failure. Whenever there is a controversy involving race and the subject is not white, we are told everything must change.
Politicians indulge protestors who chant the unmistakably menacing slogan, “no justice, no peace.” Yet when the subject is white, we are told not to “politicise” the case, and the suggestion that there may be wider lessons to be learned is dismissed.
The reason for this behaviour is very clear. Henry’s case and many others like it – Sara Sharif, the failure to disrupt Salman Abedi, the missed warnings about Axel Rudakubana, and more – demonstrate the terrible failure of the ideology adopted by public authorities and still supported by the likes of David Lammy.
Last year the Sentencing Council, an unelected body that instructs our judges, proposed guidelines that would have made an offender’s ethnicity, faith and background a factor in how they were sentenced.
We dragged those guidelines into the daylight and forced their suspension, but the mindset that produced them did not disappear. It remains in the police race action plan and the equal treatment bench book – a guide to advise judges in cases involving racial and religious minorities.
The rape gangs remain the most obvious example of how political correctness, left-wing ideology and a surrender to corrupting influences of clan culture and communalism are all poisoning our justice system.
In South Yorkshire a police chief inspector told the father of one of the victims that the abuse had been ignored because “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out”.
The stories are the same across our towns and cities – and there is no sign of the inquiry we were promised. We do not even yet know if it will cover some of the worst cases, like in Bradford.
Some will ask how this has happened, not least because while Labour are undoubtedly making things far worse, these problems built up on the Conservatives’ watch in government.
My explanation is that several things happened.
First, the intellectual fashion – of critical race theory, along with trans ideology – arrived from America and became entrenched remarkably quickly, especially after the Black Lives Matter movement. Conservatives were slow to fully understand just what these ideologies are.
Second, some in our party had sympathy with these ideas.
And third, those who did oppose these ideas were steamrollered by the bureaucracy of government and the organs of the state.
This happened for two reasons. First, progressive legal frameworks – from the Human Rights Act to the Public Sector Equality Duty – remained in place. And second, the unreformed and fragmented nature of the modern state – with quangos, politicised civil servants and laws leaving judges to second-guess policy decisions – made it difficult to impose a conservative approach.
This is not to make excuses.
This is a failure we must be honest about and learn from. We have to have the intellectual capacity and confidence and conviction to take on and defeat the postmodernist nonsense of these pernicious ideas.
We have to deal with the progressive legal frameworks that direct the state to act in a fundamentally unconservative and undemocratic manner. And we have to make the organs of the state more accountable.
Even in law enforcement and the criminal justice system – where officers and prosecutors and judges have a high degree of autonomy for obvious reasons – there must be accountability. Public authorities cannot be used to advance political agendas without consent.
We have made a significant start. We will leave the European Convention on Human Rights and scrap the Human Rights Act. We will get rid of non-crime hate incidents. We will abolish the Sentencing Council, returning the power to set sentencing guidance to the Lord Chancellor and scrap the Judicial Appointments Commission.
But there is much more to do.
We need to dismantle the whole structure of identity politics and return us to equality before the law.