“Someday a real rain will come...”

Last night I watched a documentary called The Boys Who Killed Stephen Lawrence. If you don't know who Stephen Lawrence was, please do click here.

I'd seen a news story the previous day about some of the new revelations that were to come to light in this documentary, and so I felt compelled to watch it. In fact, I probably would have anyway, because, like many people in the UK, I am astonished at how this case has gone unsolved for 13 years. Of course, I should rephrase that: not unsolved, because it surely is solved; rather, that the guilty have gone unpunished.

I haven't studied the case closely. I probably know no more about it than the average citizen. Arguably I may even know less, since I don't read newspapers. But hell, you know me: that won't stop me from having an opinion...

One of the things that struck me most was how these "boys" -- in reality, violent, dangerous thugs -- had got away with several non-fatal stabbings in the months and years prior to the attack on Stephen. Not only that, but that many people in the area knew full well that these idiots regularly carried knives of up to 2ft (60cm) in length out in the street. What I didn't know was that they had attacked white youths as well as black, which surely is going to make a "racist killing" verdict so much harder, should the case ever return to a courtroom. (This return is, though, at least a possibility now that we've scrapped the Double Jeopardy laws.) Of course, we all know they are racists: witness the conversations they had while under police supervision:

Suspect David Norris: "If I was going to kill myself ... I'd go and kill every black cunt in the country, every Paki, every copper ... I'd go down Catford and places like that with two sub-machine guns and I'd take every one of them, skin the black cunt alive, mate, torture him, set him alight. I'd blow their two legs and arms off and say go on, you can swim home now."
Suspect Neil Acourt: "I reckon that every nigger should be chopped up, mate, and they should be left with nothing but fucking stumps." (from Guardian Unlimited)

We, in Britain, all know that within days of news of the attack on Stephen, the police were inundated with calls from local people, almost all of them naming this same gang as the most likely culprits. Turns out now, though, that one of the senior policemen in the investigation was taking bribes from the father of one of the suspects. Ah, so now things all start falling into place...

I don't know...

We've entered a new and wholly unsavoury era in the UK. FourDinners's post of a couple of days ago highlights this too. Everyone (and I mean that in a general way) hates everyone. The blacks hate the whites; the whites hate the blacks; the Jews hate the Muslims; hell, the whites hate the Muslims; the Muslims hate the whites and the Jews; the police hate the Brazilians, seemingly, or at least can't tell them apart from the Asians; we all hate the people we work for; the people we work for all hate us. This is one miserable fucking country we've got going on here...

But after watching this documentary last night, I turned to Wife and said: "Y'know, there's some people that I really don't like. Sometimes I know I'll turn to you and say, 'I hate so-and-so for this reason or someone else for that reason', but I can't imagine going out and stabbing them. Really getting right up in their face and sinking a huge fucking blade into them. And yet there are people out there that do this just for fun or just as a random attack, not even knowing the victim, and the victim never having done anything to them."

I went and took a shower then, to wash away "the scum, the cunts, [...] the filth, the shit".

Stephen Lawrence, 1974-1993, RIP