Blair Peach (and Rastafarians)

I followed a couple of links from Bob, to Francis Sedgemore and History is made at Night, about the murder of Blair Peach. This is one of those issues that divides bloggers; the right have been, so far as I have seen, entirely silent on this. Equally, there are some things the left ignores. As one associated with the right (although I’m really a true leftist), I thought I’d rectify this in a small way.

Blair Peach was killed by a blow from a truncheon, or similar, to the head. It was always likely that a policeman was responsible. Francis is generally rather rude about me, but I’ll be civil. He said:

The Special Patrol Group was the late 20th century police equivalent of the “Black and Tans”

That’s an exaggeration, but the SPG and their successors, the TSG, were “proactive” in their approach to policing. Someone I knew, a dope dealer in Deptford, had his door kicked down by them three times in the space of a week*. There’s a case for that, one that in a country with far fewer laws I might even make myself. I’d prefer it if the predators, rather than the prey, were living in fear. Unfortunately, in the last few decades (I include the 60s and 70s in this), the police have too often been the predators.

There’s no case for clubbing a protester to death.

I remember chatting about Bloody Sunday with a chap I know, an ex-Guards officer and former Diary journalist. You wouldn’t find a truer Tory than this man. He lent forward, and said with passion, “This is not a country in which soldiers shoot civilians”. Bloody Sunday was a “bloody disgrace”.

Clubbing a protester to death was a bloody disgrace, and the people responsible should be brought to justice. It doesn’t matter whether he was a libertarian or a Maoist. This is not a country in which the police club protesters to death.

I have absolutely no idea why right-bloggers have ignored this case.

History in the Making also discusses the 1970s scare about Rastafarians, and I was sidetracked by a memory when I read it. There’s a ludicrous quote from a newspaper, confusing Rastas with Yardies. Yardies are terribly violent. Rastas, on the other hand, are terribly boring. I mean dull, dull, dull. Imagine a black Jehovah’s Witness. Now imagine a vegetarian, black Jehovah’s Witness.

Ah, I’m being unkind. I got to know a bunch of Rastas from the Africa Centre in Brixton, years ago, maybe in about 1990. There was one clear leader among them, a small, kindly, stoned man whose Bible seemed to be welded into the palm of his hand. Rastafarianism is a religion, very much centred on the Old Testament and the parallels between the exile of Israelites in Egypt and Babylon, and the “exile” of black descendants of slaves from Africa. It’s silly, but less so than, say, modern Druidism.

White people are goats, he told me, and black people are sheep. That’s why one has hair and one wool. I suspect we all have hair, of differing types.

I met the Rastas because they’d been arrested for possession of cannabis. This should not be a country in which people whose greatest sin is being very boring indeed about their religion should be banged up for smoking grass.

* He put an “I met the Met” sticker on his door, and an iron gate across the balcony, and had a hidden CCTV camera in a plant pot outside, supplied and fitted by me. But the distress of the SPG break-ins was nothing compared to his pain when he was burgled, and his father’s medals were stolen. If only the SPG had aimed themselves at burglars rather than people providing a valuable service, like selling fine hash.