Morning:
8°c
Zaheer Ahmad, the president of the National Association of Muslim Police, has urged the Home Secretary to launch a "critical review" of racism in the police, after almost half the police forces in Britain refused to co-operate with an audit of their treatment of Muslim and black officers.
Ahmad quite rightly points out that it's a nonsense for some of these forces to claim that they didn't "have time" to take part in the audit, or that they were prevented from so doing by the Data Protection Act, while 23 other forces had no difficulty in complying.
This comes as Britain's most senior Muslim officer, assistant commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, is preparing to sue the Met over alleged discrimination. So where does the truth lie? After all, it was Sir Ian Blair, the current Met commissioner, who came into post pledged to clear the augean police stables of the "institutional racism" identified by the Macpherson inquiry into Stephen Lawrence's death; that one of his own top officers should be alleging that infighting and discrimination are still impeding the careers of Muslim and black officers suggests that Blair's strategy has failed.
Not so, says Stephen Humphrey, the recently retired chairman of the Met's Superintendents' Association; on the contrary, he lauds Sir Ian's fairness and consistency over diversity, and blasts Ghaffur - together with two other senior black officers - who he says "have benefited from positive action and have been elevated through the ranks".
So there you have it in a nutshell: Ghaffur and his pals are uppity types, fast-tracked beyond their abilities, and now they've the gall to bite the hand that feeds them. But can't both contentions be true? I don't doubt there are some black and Muslim officers who may have - wrongly - benefited from positive discrimination but that doesn't necessarily mean these are the ones. At the same time, the most significant finding of the National Association's audit was that Muslim officers were almost "entirely absent" from counter-terrorism operations.
It seems to me that we cannot expect to police extremists consensually within the British Muslim community unless we attract more Muslim officers to the Met, then zealously defend their equality of opportunity - and that means deploying them on such operations. The likes of Humphrey, whose remarks implicitly challenge the loyalty of three senior Muslim officers, have no place in such a force - it's just as well he's retired.
Of course, given the snake pit that the upper echelons of the Met has become in the past few years, it's no wonder these sort of accusations continue to fly about the place. It would be nice to think Jacqui Smith had the necessary antidotes to deal with all this venom but somehow I doubt it.
God only knows, it's a grey gig
To the lovely Kenwood, stomping ground of my youth, for a concert featuring that old Beach Boy, Brian Wilson. To begin, we tramped around the Heath, since in its desire to placate local residents - and save the pipistrelle - English Heritage had moved the stage from behind the ornamental lake to a more exposed location.
Then there was a certain perplexity on my part, as Mr Wilson - in a delightfully anachronistic falsetto - cooed: "I wish they all could be California girls". Surely, what we were witnessing here was the preservation of an ancient American monument; but then, as the septuagenarian Hampstead folk rose up out of their deckchairs and began to wiggle their sturdy hips, I realised that the gig was a sort of senior citizens' dancercise class and therefore very much to do with conserving English heritage.
I worship Anglican word play
It seems that under the impetus of those troublesome African bishops - who really are the Mugabes of the communion - a new Anglican movement has come into being that cleaves to the original 1662 Book of Common Prayer and recognises only the "historic role" of Albus Dumbledore (sorry, I mean "Dr Rowan Williams") as the head of the Anglican Church. I don't know which is a sorrier sight: these misogynists and homophobes masquerading as "men of God", or the likes of Dr Williams, who hang on to an institution that was only ever a political creation as if it were crucial for their - and our - salvation.
However, if you suspect that the sole reason I'm writing about this is not because I oppose Dr Williams's antidisestablishmentarianism but because it gives me an opportunity to slide the word into a column, then I concede - in a rather Anglican fashion - that you're right.
• Let's raise two cheers for the moves to have TV Centre in White City listed. The BBC, pressured on all sides to cut costs, is primed to flog it off to developers, who will undoubtedly rip its guts out and turn it into yet another monolithic block of "luxury" flats.
But it is a notable building - the first purpose-built television studios in Europe - and anyone who has got hopelessly lost in its querying floor plan (from the air it looks like a question mark) will know just how unique it is, having more in common with an Egyptian pyramid than a modern office building. Personally, I'd rather we taxpayers coughed up the £80 million needed for the corporation to carry on using it than see yet another piece of our recent past swallowed by the mirrored glass of postmodernity.
