A Brit who’s not dead! Is’t possible?

Here’s a British columnist, Iain Martin in the Telegraph, who doesn’t just wring his hands about Muslim protesters’ abusive behavior toward the homecoming British troops in Luton (discussed here), but actually suggests doing something about it, namely repealing the existing anti-discrimination laws that prevent the police and other institutions from enforcing society’s common standards. (Unfortunately, the piece is marred by a vulgar swipe at the BNP at the very end., with language that would never appear in a U.S. paper.)

… [T]he demonstration in Luton against our troops returning home from a war zone is profoundly shocking. But what it says about policing in this country is equally troubling. We now have police “services” (not forces, that’s far too tough sounding) which are so hemmed in by human rights legislation and warped ideas flowing from political correctness that they cannot exercise a simple common sense judgement about matters such as these.

A senior policeman, spotting the demonstrators should have told them not to be so stupid and to move along immediately or risk instant arrest for breach of the peace. These were British soldiers returning home and the crowd of squaddies families and patriotic locals would not take kindly to them being showered with vile abuse. And so it proved.

But the police have been trained to be so obsessively paranoid about trampling on the rights of protesters—particularly Islamists—that no officer keen to stay in a job would dare talk to them in such blunt terms.

This is what happens when rights are obsessively codified. The human rights legislation is so prescriptive that it crowds out and denies any room for individual common sense on the part of a police officer or other public figure. As long as they can prove they acted in accordance with the ruling orthodoxy, and ticked the correct boxes, they can think they are doing their job….

Britain will not break this cycle until a government is bold enough to scrap a raft of legislation and introduces reforms which make the police responsive to public demands rather than abstract concepts. [Emphasis added.]

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 11, 2009 08:06 PM | Send