Britannia Radio

BY BRENDAN O'NEILL

FIRST POSTED MARCH 2, 2009

We all sympathise with Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murdered black teenager Stephen. But does that mean we should kowtow to her views on everything from policing to politics to race relations?

In the 10 years since the publication of the Macpherson report on the botched police investigation of Stephen's murder, Doreen has cast an extraordinary spell over British politics.

The liberal elite has promoted her to the position of a modern-day aristocrat, who sits above the political realm, passing judgement on how the police are performing or on who is fit to stand for public office.

Doreen has become an unelected spokeswoman for the black community

It's not going too far to say there is a Cult of Doreen Lawrence. The media treat her every utterance as wise and sacrosanct, while London-based politicians rush to be photographed alongside her.

Doreen has been transformed from tragic mother of a murdered black man into unelected spokesperson for the whole black community.

Last week she spoke alongside Justice Secretary Jack Straw and Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson at a conference on race relations; it was her speech, in which she said the police "rank and file are still racist", that dominated the headlines.

She's been encouraged to intervene in politics too. In the run-up to the London mayoral election of 2008, the Guardian devoted a front page splash to Lawrence's insistence that Boris Johnson, given his earlier criticisms of the Macpherson report, is "not an appropriate person to run a multicultural city like London".

"[T]here's no way he is going to get the support of any people in the black community," she declared, and of course no one questioned her Mystic Meg-style insight into what black voters intended to do.

She remains the unassailable judge-and-jury of British public life

The Guardian failed to point out that Lawrence's organisation, the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, had received at least £1.9m in funding from then Mayor Ken Livingstone's London Development Agency. If anyone else who had received money from one mayoral candidate launched an attacked against another mayoral candidate, it would be branded a "conflict of interests". Not in Doreen's case. She remains the unassailable judge-and-jury of British public life.

Lawrence has also made pronouncements on schooling, knife crime and media representations