Fiat justitia: F.W. Pomeroy’s statue of Justice at the Old Bailey (Rafesmar CC BY-SA 3.0)


Injustice, when it occurs, is overwhelmingly a product of racial, sexual and class prejudices. That notion, formulated in the abuse scandals of England’s northern towns, and developed by the willingness of the German and Swedish police to ignore migrant rapists, feels like the worst sort of right-wing propaganda.

It’s just “a good excuse to bash migrants and Muslims and tell feminists they don’t know what’s good for them,” said a writer on the New Statesman as she justified her silence. “If your interest in misogynist violence starts and ends with Cologne, you don’t really care about women at all,” said another, as she explained why she too had found pressing reasons to write about something else.

However cowardly and unprincipled their arguments were, a half-truth half-supported them. If you cheer on conservative journalists and populist politicians as they damn the politically correct for becoming the enemies of the very people they claim to defend, if you read the right-wing press, and have been persuaded that whites are discriminated against, or that new prejudices have replaced old corruptions, I’d ask you to calm yourself for a moment and look around.

In the 1970s, the courts convicted innocent Irishmen and women of the most atrocious terrorist offences. Judges and juries appeared to believe that one Irish suspect was as bad as another. If they weren’t guilty as charged, they were surely guilty of some other crime. Modern DNA evidence has revealed that at the same time black men in the United States went to their deaths because they were arrested by cops looking for an easy conviction and represented by lawyers too lazy, indifferent or drunk to defend them.

The most overpraised novel of the 1980s was Tom Wolfe’s inane, if well-written, Bonfire of the Vanities. It appealed to the ever-present paranoia and self-pity of the wealthy. Setting the scene for the police’s framing of an innocent Wall Street financier to appease the demagogues who whip up New York’s black mobs, a character cries:

You don’t even know, do you? Do you really think this is your city any longer? Open your eyes! The greatest city of the twentieth century! Do you think money will keep it yours? Come down from your swell co-ops, you general partners and merger lawyers! It’s the Third World down there!