Martyrs and Mothers

Who is England’s patron saint? If you think it’s St George, you’re behind the times. In fact, it’s the martyr St Stephen. But not the Stephen stoned to death in Palestine 2,000 years ago. No, the Stephen stabbed to death by Whites at a bus-stop in London in 1993. He was a young Black male, but that didn’t make his death unusual or worthy of special attention.

It wasn’t until 2012, after huge expense by the London Metropolitan police and the abolition of the centuries-old principle of double jeopardy, that two White men were found guilty of the murder and given long jail sentences. Cries of joy greeted the conviction in all sections of the media, particularly at The Guardian and BBC. But further suspects are still free and Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murder victim, wants to see more millions spent on pursuing and convicting them.

Doreen has become a familiar and highly respected figure in the UK. She has recently been elevated to the House of Lords, where she will sit as Baroness Lawrence and continue to promote the martyr cult. She was prominent at the twentieth-year commemoration of her son’s murder, which was attended by the leaders of all three main political parties. And you may have seen her helping to carry the flag at the 2012 London Olympics. It was a further honour in recognition of her long campaign for justice, equality and tolerance in the UK.

The image of an aspiring young Black architect slaughtered by thuggish White racists continues to be reinforced through every medium of news, art and commentary. Doreen has often appeared in the media to criticize Britain for failing to live up to the high standards she demands of it as a British Jamaican. And the government listens. Here she is in the closing days of 2012 with fellow activist Dr Richard Stone, who will be the main focus of this essay:

Coalition responds to Doreen Lawrence over race equality David Cameron and Nick Clegg have moved to head off an embarrassing row with race equality campaigners after the Guardian highlighted an uncompromising attack on the coalition [between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats] by the mother of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence. It has emerged that 24 hours after Doreen Lawrence castigated ministers, accusing them of backtracking on the government’s commitment to equalities, the prime minister and deputy prime minister penned a joint reply from Downing Street aiming to reassure her and to bolster the government’s credentials. The timing of the letter is significant, as Lawrence and Richard Stone, an adviser to the Macpherson inquiry into Stephen’s death, had written to Cameron and Clegg – and Ed Miliband [leader of the Labour Party] – a month earlier outlining concerns about government equality policies. Lawrence said her letter had been ignored, adding that improvements in equalities prompted by the Macpherson inquiry were being imperilled and race no longer appeared to be on the agenda. … In their reply to Lawrence, Cameron and Clegg write: “We recognise how important it is to ensure the legacy of Stephen’s murder and Lord Macpherson’s report will never be lost.” … Lawrence was not available for comment, but Stone, co-signatory to her letter, said he had hoped for a more positive response. “We sent our letter a month ago. It is good to have a reply from the prime minister and deputy prime minister. But it is written very carefully. There is nothing concrete here.” (Coalition responds to Doreen Lawrence over race equality, The Guardian, 23rd December 2012)

So who is Richard Stone, the man playing such a prominent role in calling the government to account? Thanks to the media’s untiring work, Stephen and Doreen Lawrence are now familiar to millions of ordinary Britons, but very few of them would recognize the name or features of Richard Stone. This is a pity, because he is an interesting man. Here is the biography at his personal website:

Dr Richard Stone is a medical doctor who also has extensive experience working against social exclusion, homelessness, and in the grant-making charitable sector. He is a leading expert in social cohesion, anti-racism, and Islamophopia, and is a regular speaker around Europe at conferences on these topics. Richard was a panel member of the 1997/99 Home Office inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. He served as a Cabinet Advisor to the Mayor of London, President of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality, and spent 5 years on the Runnymede “Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia”, from 2000 to 2004 as chair. He has also been a trustee and vice-Chair of the Runnymede Trust [an “anti-racist” organization founded by Jews] and a Council and Board member of Liberty [the British equivalent of the ACLU]. His work bringing together British Jews and Muslims includes being a founding trustee of the Maimonides Foundation in 1985, and of Alif-Aleph UK in 2003 [alif and aleph are the initial letters of the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets] … In 2010 he was awarded an OBE [Order of the British Empire] for “public and voluntary” service. (See Biography at Dr Stone’s website)

Identity on the Agenda

Despite his presidency of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality, Dr Stone claims to self-identify as a member of the White British majority:

Enough of this anger-creating suppression of the hopes and opportunities of people from black backgrounds. My message to white (mainly) men (like me), who have the power to discriminate is this: just stop doing it. (Where are the black police officers?, Dr Richard Stone, The Guardian, 4th January, 2012) In Britain, the vast majority of power is wielded by middle-aged, middle-class white men – like Dr Stone. (An Independent Commentary to Mark the 10th Anniversary of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (2009), Dr Richard Stone, pg. 17)

I don’t know whether Dr Stone also self-identifies as self-righteous, but that is a label some might be inclined to give him. They might even add that he is self-important and arrogant too. Dr Stone seems to enjoy issuing orders and demands on behalf of ethnic and religious minorities. For further examples, let’s examine his behaviour at the Macpherson Inquiry. This was the official inquiry set up by the New Labour government into the police failures surrounding the murder of Stephen Lawrence. What role did he have there? It’s described at the website of the organization ROTA (Race On The Agenda), where Dr Stone is a patron with the British-Nigerian Lord Victor Adebowale, CBE (Commander of the British Empire). Here is part of Dr Stone’s biography:

Dr Stone was a panel member of the “Stephen Lawrence Inquiry” into racism in policing (1997/99) as Adviser to the judge Sir William Macpherson. He was also on the panel of the 2003/04 NHS “David Bennett Inquiry” into the death of a Black [sic] patient during restraint in the white-staffed [sic] medium secure psychiatry unit in Norwich. (See the biography at ROTA’s website)

Despite their advisory capacity and lack of specialized legal training, Stone and the other panel members, like the dedicated self-publicist John Sentamu, a British-Ugandan bishop, would often take the role of prosecuting counsel during the inquiry:

In a criminal court the accused is not there so that he can be compelled to confess his crimes; still less so that he can confess his sins; much less again so that he can disclose the sins of his subordinates. English law expelled those abhorrent ideas long ago. But confession was the spirit of much of the Macpherson proceedings, partly due to the effect of the “truth and reconciliation” proceedings in post-apartheid South Africa. This was especially clear in the interruption by one of Sir William’s three advisers, Dr Richard Stone, of [the Metropolitan Police Commissioner] Sir Paul Condon’s evidence in Part II of the inquiry. ‘It seems to me, Sir Paul,’ he said, ‘that the door is open. It is like when Winnie Mandela was challenged in the Truth Commission in South Africa by Desmond Tutu to acknowledge that she had done wrong …’ Sir Paul might well have been taken aback by his being put in the same category as a convicted kidnapper, and his relationship to racist attitudes and conduct in the Metropolitan Police in the same category as Winnie Mandela’s relationship to the Mandela United Football Club and the murderers of Stompie Seipei. Dr Stone continued: ‘She just did it and suddenly a whole burden of weight, of sort of challenge and friction melted away … I say to you now, just say, “Yes, I acknowledge institutional racism in the police” … Could you do that today?’ (Please see here, pg. 15)

That quotation is taken from a very interesting study of the Macpherson Inquiry called Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics (2000) by Norman Dennis, George Erdos and Ahmed Al-Shahi, who are English, Hungarian and Kurdish, respectively. They all also appear to be left-wing or liberal in the traditional sense. I can recommend their study highly to anyone who wants an alternative perspective on the Macpherson Inquiry – “alternative,” that is, to the perspective offered by all respectable opinion in the UK. Recall that, in the Guardian extract above, the prime minister and his deputy referred respectfully to the “legacy” of “Lord Macpherson’s report,” as though it were some highly valuable contribution to British public life.

Uproar from the Gallery

In fact, the inquiry overseen by Lord Macpherson seems to have been a cross between a Stalinist show-trial and a hearing by the Spanish Inquisition, with a garnish of kangaroo-court and a sprinkling of lynch-mob. Here is Dr Stone again, sniffing hard for heresy:

‘You have heard me say …’, Sir Paul said in the course of being interrogated. But he was interrupted by Dr Richard Stone. ‘You have told us ten times you are not in denial … I say to you now, just say, “Yes, I acknowledge institutional racism in the police …”’ ‘It was an approach that pleased the public gallery’, writes Cathcart [former deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday and author of The Case of Stephen Lawrence (1999)], ‘and the pressure on the Commissioner was intense. Sir William chipped in: “You have been given the challenge, or the question, Sir Paul. What is your answer?”’ His answer was that it would be very easy to please the panel. It would be easy to please the people in the public gallery — ‘this audience’, as he called them. It would be easy, also, to gain the favour of ‘superficial media coverage’. But he would not do what would please any of them, because it would be ‘dishonest’. Over the uproar from the gallery, Sir William called for quiet and moved the discussion into other areas. Sir Paul’s stand attracted critical headlines. But whose judgement, freed from the enthusiasm of a righteous crowd, would conclude that Sir Paul’s opinion, reasoning, and sense of reality and responsibility were inferior to those expressed in the ‘uproar from the gallery’ or … to the semi-religious appeal of Dr Stone? (Op. cit., ch. 3, “The Crowd in Hannibal House,” pg. 28)

Why was there uproar from the public gallery? Because it was full of anti-racism activists from groups like the Nation of Islam, who applauded witnesses whom they liked, such as Doreen Lawrence, and jeered witnesses whom they did not like, such as the police:

During the police evidence, and particularly when [the radical barrister Michael] Mansfield was in action, laughter and groans would greet answers from police officers. This would not normally be allowed in a court of law. In order to protect Inspector Groves from the gallery crowd (and, though he perhaps did not think of it in this way, from the crowd influences that could be affecting the performances of all the witnesses, all the barristers and the judgement of all the assessors) counsel for the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service], Jeremy Gompertz QC [Queen’s Counsel], rose to complain about ‘constant interruption and background noise’ from the gallery. Though he said that his warning was ‘crystal clear’, Sir William’s intervention could scarcely be described as full-hearted. If the laughing did not stop, he said, he would clear the gallery. He reminded Mansfield that he was not addressing a jury. Inspector Groves did not need to be ‘pilloried’ — (slight pause) — ‘unnecessarily’. The pillory in its literal sense is essentially an instrument of control by a crowd. What had being figuratively ‘pilloried’, necessarily or not, to do with ascertaining the facts of the case? (Ibid., pg. 25)

Reality Shmeality

But there was no need to ascertain the facts of the case, because they were known well in advance: both the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the failure to jail the murder-gang were the result of “an endemic and universal English racism which has severe consequences generally in the lives of members of ethnic minorities” (ch. 2, “The Methods of Inquiry used by Macpherson,” pg. 12). The role of Doreen Lawrence at the inquiry was to describe the racism of British society; the role of the police was to admit their complicity in it. The role of Judge Macpherson, Dr Richard Stone, Bishop Sentamu et al was to assist the former against the latter. The methods they employed might, in another context, be taken as deliberately satirical or absurdist: “To question whether the murder of Stephen Lawrence was a purely racist crime was, in itself, adduced as evidence of racism” (Summary, pg. xix).

Distance was no obstacle to the inquiry’s hunt for the evil and injustice perpetrated by Whites: inter alia, the inquiry drew on the Rodney King case in Los Angeles, thousands of miles away, though the relevance there might seem “indirect,” at best (ch. 4, “Mr and Mrs Lawrence’s Treatment at the Hospital as Evidence of Police Racism,” pg. 34). Any negative interpretation of police behaviour by a Minority Ethnic had to be accepted; any attempt to deny police racism was further proof of police racism.

But the sceptical authors of Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics conclude that:

The Macpherson report has had a detrimental impact on policing and crime, particularly in London. Police morale has been undermined. Certain procedures which impact disproportionately on ethnic groups, like stop and search, have been scaled down. The crime rate has risen. Nevertheless, the Macpherson report has been received with almost uncritical approval by pundits, politicians and academics. It is still routinely described as having ‘proved’ that the police and British society are racist. (Summary, pg. xx)

Elsewhere, the authors point out that the rise in the crime rate, “the first in six years, was largely due to increases in two police areas, London and the West Midlands, the areas with the highest concentrations of ethnic minorities. In London the increase was nine per cent, in the West Midlands 16 per cent” (ch. 3, “The Crowd in Hannibal House,” pg. 29). In other words, there have been more murders of young Black males as a result of the Macpherson Inquiry, not fewer. There have also been more murders of individuals from other, less important groups. And more rapes and other crimes of violence. Nor has the report helped the cause of equality: the police now devote more resources and attention to cases in which they can prove their devotion to fighting White racism.

Unpunished Murder

Compare the racist murder of Richard Everitt in London in 1994, a year after the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. This was not a highly unusual crime, because it involved violence by a gang of Minority Ethnics against a White. Only one member of the fifteen-strong Bengali-British gang was jailed and he is now free again. In the Stephen Lawrence case, the Metropolitan Police have promised “to go on looking ‘forever’ for evidence that would convict the murderers” (Preface, pg. xv). They have made no such promise about Richard Everitt. Nor have “resources in money and specialist support” been made “available on a scale more often seen in anti-terrorist investigations than a civil murder,” as they were for Stephen Lawrence (Ibid., pg xiv).

Many other non-Whites are still at liberty after the brutal murders of British Whites: Charlene Downes and Gavin Hopley are merely two examples. But those murders have not received the prolonged attention of the media, nor provoked harsh criticism of the police and served as damning indictments of British society. The murder of Stephen Lawrence is quite different in all respects. Of the many people responsible for elevating Stephen Lawrence to his role as England’s new patron saint, no-one has worked harder or more effectively than Doreen Lawrence and her good friend Dr Richard Stone. I don’t question Doreen Lawrence’s motives, though I do question her intelligence, common sense and ability to see the harmful effects of her campaign on the Black community, among others.

Thorny Issues

I do, however, question the motives of Dr Richard Stone. It may be cynical of me, but I have detected little benevolence or philanthropy in Dr Stone when I have seen or heard him appear in the media. He strikes me, in fact, as cold, manipulative and even sinister. He also strikes me as lacking in honesty. In his self-aggrandizing Independent Commentary to Mark the 10th Anniversary of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (2009), he lamented the way in which:

[during] the past decade, the issue of ‘institutional racism’ seemed to slip down the agenda. Maybe some of those in leadership positions sighed with relief that this thorny issue did not have to be dealt with. It could perhaps be left for the next Commissioner, the next Chief Constable, or the next government Minister. But every year, with damaging regularity, racism seems to explode back on to the police agenda. This causes damage to police and community relations, but also to the reputation of the very leaders who had hoped the issue had gone away. (Op. cit., pg. 7)

But who has worked harder than Dr Stone to make racism a “thorny” issue? Who has been more eager to help racism “explode” regularly on the police agenda? And who has been more willing to issue self-righteous pronunciamentos on the topic? Here is another extract from his Independent Commentary:

Racism is not in the heads of BME [Black and Minority Ethnic] people, just as Islamophobia and anti-semitism are not in the heads of Muslims or Jews. There is not much that BME people can do to change the racism exhibited by white people, any more than Muslims can do much to change the Islamophobia of non-Muslims, or Jews the anti-antisemitism [sic] of non-Jews. The people who have to change are those outside who hold prejudices and stereotypes in their heads which lead them “unwittingly” or to be frank, ‘wittingly’ to disadvantage people from these communities. (Op. cit., pg. 17 – all anomalies of punctuation are in the original)

To be frank, such an important topic deserved better proof-reading. It is also ludicrous to claim that all beliefs held by “BME people” about the motives and behaviour of Whites must automatically be correct. In making this claim, Dr Stone is not assisting the cause of objective analysis and impartial justice. He is, however, assisting the cause of BME grievance, paranoia and self-pity.

Saints and Demons

But why is he doing this? What are his motives for encouraging antagonism between BME people and White society? Why does he wish to demonize ordinary Whites and elevate BME people to infallible sainthood? I would suggest that he is, unwittingly or otherwise, following an ethnocentric agenda and seeking to advance the interests of his own ethno/religious group. When Dr Stone self-identifies as a “middle-aged, middle-class White man,” I think he is being dishonest or disingenuous. In reality, he belongs to the Jewish elite, not to the White middle-class. He is the son of the Labour peer Lord Stone and a nephew of the Conservative peer Lord Ashdown.

I don’t believe that Dr Richard Stone truly regrets the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Given the chance to travel back in time, would he try to prevent it? I don’t think he would. The Lawrence murder has been far too useful as an ideological weapon against ordinary Whites. Dr Richard Stone, son of a Labour peer, nephew of a Conservative peer, has been working on behalf not of Minority Ethnics but of the hostile elite – the Ruling Stones of the UK who want to dispossess the historic majority and secure their own power and profit in perpetuity. Lord Glasman broke ranks from that elite and pointed out its treachery and lies on immigration. He was heavily criticized and forced into silence.

By contrast, Dr Stone continues to spout his self-righteous, self-serving gas about “an endemic and universal English racism which has severe consequences generally in the lives of members of ethnic minorities.” He is, in fact, one of Britain’s most dedicated and hard-working hate-mongers:

One of the easiest ways to unite people is to mobilise their hatred for others. It is infinitely more difficult to unite them on the basis of constructive proposals. This unity of having an enemy in common gives rise to various kinds of sociological formation. In the short term there is the specialised and transitory hatred of ‘the lynch mob’. There is the longer-term unity of hating communists, or hating capitalists, or hating Protestants, or hating Catholics, or hating blacks, or ‘hating whitey’. (Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics, 2000, pg. 21)

“Hating whitey” is what Dr Stone specializes in. He is a card-carrying member of the UK’s hostile elite, bent on completely gutting the people and culture of traditional of the UK. His tireless work on behalf of Stephen Lawrence has not benefited Blacks or other minorities, but then it has never been intended to. Instead, it has been intended to incite hatred, grievance and discord. Why can’t Minority Ethnics get no satisfaction? Because the Ruling Stones don’t want them to. Using mass immigration and multi-racialism as weapons of mass destruction, they want to destroy the historic nation of Britain and enjoy power and profit here in perpetuity.

Britain’s message for the United States and all other Western nations is simple: Nomine mutato, de te fabula narratur – “With a change of name, the tale is told of you.” The same hostile, hate-filled elite are at work everywhere in the West, lying, cheating, betraying and using mass immigration to divide and destroy those who stand in their way.