Ali Dizaei – why so long at the Met?
The conviction of Police Commander Ali Dizaei on corruption charges on February 8th 2010 will doubtless be greated with relief by many of his former colleagues in the Metropolitan Police. Dizaei is the founder and former chairman of something called the National Black Police Association (NBPA). When the then Chief Superintendent Dizaei was charged and subsequently acquitted of corruption in 2003, the Independent Police Complaints Commission was left with nine disciplinary charges, four of which should in its opinion have been put before a misconduct tribunal. These were apparently not pursued because of a campaign mounted by Dizaei and the NBPA which ended, incredibly we might think, with a deal brokered by ACAS – set up to settle trades union employer disputes. The then Metropolitan Police Commissioner promised as part of the “deal” that his force would work to achieve Dizaei’s “successful reintegration in the service” saying also that Dizaei was “returning to the Met with his integrity demonstrably intact”.
These grovelling words will doubtless have convinced Dizaei, and the people that crossed him, that he was untouchable. Certainly he claimed race discrimination during his 2003 trial at the Old Bailey and subsequently.
When the Scottish law lord Macpherson’s report declared the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist, it became open season (as it still is) on any native Briton or organisation applying the rules of promotion to a member of the ethnic minorities. Needless to say, the racism that Macpherson claimed to see was all about how white officers behaved: it didn’t mention the racism proclaimed by the very name “National Black Police Association”.
How would the present Met Commissioner respond to the formation of a “National White Police Association”?
It is clear that the time has come to clear the words race, ethnic, diversity, out of our employment legislation altogether, starting with a total repeal of the Race Relations Amendment Act 2003, which puts the onus on private businesses, the private sector (including schools), to positively promote sensitivity to race differences and encourages thereby a national culture of complaint and grievance.
