I feel slightly appalled at having to write the following sentence but I thought I’d better get it out of the way first. l disapprove of murder. All of it. Black, white, gay, straight, young, old. You name it, I’m against it.

Why should I have to start by pointing out a basic moral truism? Because the outrage we all feel at murder has been exploited in the aftermath of one particular killing, in a way that undermines the justice system which should exist to defend us all. Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of Stephen Lawrence. I feel for the parents of Stephen Lawrence. I hope that whoever murdered him is brought to justice.

The best way of remembering Stephen Lawrence is hoping that justice will be done. Which is why it is such a tragedy that the Macpherson inquiry, which tried to learn the lesson of his death and the botched investigation that followed, produced nothing but nonsense. Vacuous nonsense at best, dangerous nonsense at worst.

Why? Here’s an example, a piece of gibberish that ought to have made the judge a laughing-stock. Sir William Macpherson argued that a crime can be defined as racist if it is felt to be so in the view of the victim “or any other person”. Which means that racism can be defined any way you want it. If I think that Wayne Rooney spitting in front of Liverpool fans is a hate crime, then according to Sir William, our Wayne’s guilty.

If Sir William’s definition of a racist incident was vacuous, however, his attempt to label the entire Metropolitan Police as “institutionally racist” was positively dangerous. It gave a green light to leftists to denigrate any symbol of authority and crippled the police’s ability to act effectively.

After Sir William’s judgment that the Met was unconsciously in league with the Ku Klux Klan, there became a trend for every new boss of any old institution to rush in and denounce the place as institutionally racist. Or institutionally sexist. Or institutionally . . . anything. It was all just code for: “Hi. I’m new. I’m different. I’ve got a social conscience.”And it gave excuses to pen-pushers all over to justify their existence by bringing in race initiatives, training programmes and the like.

This orgy of self-hatred was bad enough. What was worse is that what Macpherson dismissed as “institutionalised racism” can sometimes be justified as plain old commonsense policing. If the police strongly suspect a murder has been committed by a Triad sect, there’s little point in them going along to a white lesbian separatist group to try to find the killer. Every statistic going indicates that a disproportionate amount of street crime is committed by young, male, black Britons, often against other black Britons. So it’s no good the force going mob-handed into Women’s Institute meetings in order to keep the streets safe.

The Lawrence inquiry failed because it was doomed to fail. How could it prove racism when it didn’t even prove, and nor has anyone else, who committed the murder? And would the murder have been any better or worse if the victim had been white, poor and female?

If the police who handled the murder of Stephen Lawrence bungled the case because they viewed it as a relatively low priority, they should have been fired for incompetence, not racism. But because the inquiry wasn’t a court case and could not find anyone guilty of any crime it went searching for some oblique and obscure term that could be thrown around in all manner of oblique and obscure ways. The victims of crime, whose numbers have risen remorselessly since Stephen’s death, deserve better.

The author writes the publicinterest.co.uk website.