The Banality of Evil

Some years ago, I heard a girl at a party say she was from Eltham - I immediately thought of the Stephen Lawrence case.

I had recently worked in an official capacity at Eltham police station when the Macpherson report was first published. But I thought, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it as the chances she had any connection were pretty slim. When I mentioned the murder, she said, “Actually, I went to school with Gary Dobson...I can’t imagine him getting involved in anything like that.”
“Well I bloody can, “ I replied angrily. “He didn’t come out of that surveillance video too well did he?”
The moment clouded the whole evening and I remember thinking the discomfort and awkwardness was all for the good. In the 80s such a line may have just passed because of the intractable embarrassed fear around British racism. To challenge a racist comment in a pub was as good as an open invitation to violence. But finally, years after the death of Stephen Lawrence, we have become able to confront it and so diminish it.
The Home Secretary at the time, Jack Straw, can take some credit for the transformation of dealing with race issues, particularly in institutions such as the Home Office and Met Police. It required leadership to tell the police their partiality on grounds of race amounted to being unprofessional and Straw had the political courage to do it.
I was recruited by his private office to work in a team of Government Liaison Officers at Eltham nick. There was not much to do but observe the coppers, drink tea and read the whole Macpherson report. I was pretty surprised the language of the officers was peppered with words I had only heard on the Sweeney, such as slags (criminals), Toms (prostitutes), nonce (sex offender) and blag (robbery). The canteen culture was clearly very strong, even the WPCs effected a pretty nauseating macho outlook.
But the other disturbing aspect was the area of Eltham itself. There was an overt, menacing atmosphere. The examples of hate mail sent to schools, shopkeepers and individuals was intrinsically violent in the extreme. It felt alien to me as part of London, like somewhere locked in the early 70s. It was shameful and despicable.
That won’t have changed a great deal and I am sure there are many households across the capital and the country where the convictions of Dobson and Norris will have been derided in the foulest terms. And with their kids listening.