A lesson for whitey.

Well, just the PC mob. Read, digest, understand.

My opinion was once sought by Times executives on how to attract non-white writers. The paper planned to offer internships to ethnic minority candidates who had graduated in media studies.

It was well intentioned but misguided, I ventured, because I knew of no colleague whose passport to these venerable corridors had been secured by such questionable means. There were historians, linguists, lawyers, classicists, philosophers, biologists, physicists, even an Egyptologist — but no media studies graduates. My view was this: if a brown writer sails in on an easier ticket than a white wordsmith, The Times would be construed as patronising rather than progressive and the intern would struggle against whispers of lowered standards.

See? See? Talent is colourblind and will show itself regardless of colour. Petty bigotry and overt racism may push that talent away but that's their loss - in the meantime inverting the favouritism to make up for them just encourages ill feelings and more bigotry and racism. Thank fuck someone explained it to the Times and prevented them from... oh.

Such was my influence that The Times went ahead anyway, although the scheme didn’t last long.

So why the fuck did they even ask you in the first place? To be seen to have asked probably.

/facepalm

Such schemes rarely do, which is why, in the miserable tale of Ali Dizaei, the Scotland Yard commander convicted of corruption, the fact that sticks out most is the continued, seemingly pointless and possibly harmful existence of the National Black Police Association. Substitute “black” with “white” and an outdated collective becomes an illegal organisation that is morally impossible to defend.

Why partition members of the same profession along the lines of skin colour? I would not join an organisation for black journalists (or female ones) because its identity lies wholly in the exclusion of white hacks (or male ones).

I suspect some useful idiots genuinely believe that it makes everything fairer, but really it's divide and rule stuff. It's so much easier if there are so many million Welsh and so many million English and so many million Scots and so many million Asians, and gays, and disabled, and northerners, and Cornish, and Londoners, and Brums, and old people, and young people, and on and on and on. The thought of those disparate groups turning from the various thems into simply 60 million of us will open political sphincters wide enough to fit their expensed plasma screens in.

I’m not so naive as to think there isn’t racism in police ranks (or the media). I would not be here were it not for a bursary for ethnic minority students. Mine is not an argument against affirmative action. But once you’re in the profession, it’s time to do your job, not continually reference the colour of your skin.

I'd argue against affirmative action as well, but aside from that there's no argument from me. I wouldn't want to see the NBPA banned - freedom of association is there for coppers too - but this is all good sense and needs to be written on cricket bats and twatted into the heads of people who think something as divisive as a police associations on colour lines is a good idea. People have fought and died to put an end to that kind of thing on buses in America and beaches in South Africa. Why the fuck would anyone, especially those whose skin colour would have seen them victimised in another time and place, want such a thing in Britain today?

There is only one colour that's appropriate for a police officer: blue.