Exploitation of Stephen Lawrence's murder has made our streets less safe for eveyone

I expect most of you will be Stephen-Lawrence-trialled out by now, but I think I’ve figured out what’s really been troubling me about the case. Let’s get the obvious contenders out of the way first. A seemingly decent and utterly blameless young man was butchered by a pack of vicious, evil Calibans – but then that’s not so uncommon these days. Second, the police seem to have played the opposite of a blinder – but again, what’s new?

Third, as Rod Liddle pointed out, the recent trial had all the hallmarks of a politico-media witch-hunt – the outcome was assured from the start. But, given the people who walk free from court these days, that’s no big surprise – and, in this case, it seems unlikely that the defendants were innocent.

No, what has genuinely troubled me about the whole affair from the start was that all the wrong lessons seem to have been learned from it, largely because of the near-universal obsession with the colour of Stephen Lawrence’s skin. His colour evidently made him a tempting target, mainly because it would have allowed those responsible to claim some social or political meaning for their actions – but I doubt it actually had much relevance to his murder. It’s evident that the repulsive sub-humans who killed him were in the habit of dishing out violence to practically anyone who crossed their path, black or white. Given the bestial nature of their crime, this might appear to be a quibble, but the subsequent viewing of the murder purely through the prism of race has had a whole series of baneful consequences.

For a start, it deflected attention from the fact that one of the areas of national life which went to hell in a handcart during seventeen years of Tory rule was crime: there really is no point in blaming Labour for where we are now – it took an awful lot of governments to turn Britain from a low to a high-crime country. The real scandal of the Lawrence case was that these thugs – guilty, we now learn, of a whole series of assaults - were still out on the street. But because of the ensuing hoo-hah over race, one basic truth was obscured: if you don’t punish adolescents for doing bad things, they’ll do more bad things, and the things they do will become worse over time. That is human nature. And, of course, the unconstrained adolescent will never become a responsible adult, and will be a burden to the rest of us in a variety of ways for the whole of their miserable lives, in or out of prison.

The tarring of the police as “institutionally racist” seems to have subsequently paralysed them when it comes to dealing with black youth crime. As that’s mostly targeted at other black youths, many more young black men – some as blameless as Stephen Lawrence, many not – have died as a result of the race awareness industry and the liberal-left establishment’s hijacking of the Lawrence case for the purpose of furthering their own social engineering agenda, and, of course, their careers.

The lefties who swarmed all over the media in deranged attack mode after the trial verdict, pretending that it was the ingrained racism of white British society  killed Stephen Lawrence, and that NOT ENOUGH HAS BEEN DONE, should all be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Of course, we all know why these professional gabblers did it: they’ve been proved wrong about absolutely everything and the relief of being able to triumphally ride one of their favourite hobby-horses to the supposed rescue of their favourite mascot victim groups simply proved too great a temptation to resist. Thank God for Diane Abbott (not a phrase one hears very often) for inadvertently puncturing the enormous bubble of self-righteousness that engulfed the liberal media last week. Thanks, Diane – mission accomplished. Cheque’s in the post.

I’ll admit a personal interest in all this. My teenage son is around Stephen Lawrence’s age, is  out and about late in London at least once a week, and uses public transport. If the right lessons had been learned from what happened in 1993, tens of thousands of parents, including us, might not spend the evenings when our children are out fretting in case they find himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. Stephen Lawrence’s death could have resulted in far fewer parents receiving the worst phone call in the world – but ruthless left-liberal explopitation of one young man's death for their own ends has achieved the opposite result.