Less than a month ago, Mr Straw was still resisting the idea that the race relations bill now before parliament should ban indirect discrimination in national public services. He was quite happy for it to be applied to private and local services such as schools and housing, but shamelessly opposed its extension to police, prisons, probation, health, inland revenue and social security. The Lawrence inquiry found no evidence of direct discrimination but profoundly disturbing signs of indirect discrimination. Belatedly Mr Straw conceded and went one welcome step further, by placing a legal duty on the entire public sector, from nursery schools to maximum security prisons, to promote racial equality.
There have been other disappointments. Last month a special inspectorate report into the Met, which rightly paid tribute to its racial and violent crime taskforce and the community safety units operating at borough level, included a long catalogue of failures: not enough consultation with minority ethnic staff; confusion over where responsibility for race relations training lies; only one out of nine boroughs inspected having minority ethnic officers. Sir William Macpherson in his Guardian interview last week added another fault: too much talk by the Met of its "grieving process". The inquiry's chairman was robust: "The Lawrences grieve and they will never stop grieving because they have lost their son. A police force doesn't grieve. The police have taken a blow, and they've got to to get over it."
Yet, one year on, there are good grounds for optimism. Police reform in Britain has been scandal-driven: it was the Devlin report which led to tighter controls over eye witness evidence, and the Maxwell Confait case which brought stricter regulation of police interrogation through tape and video recordings. The Lawrence inquiry was shaming for the Met. No one should have been surprised by its conclusions. Researchers have been pointing to the racism in the Met for two decades, but evidence-based policy-making in the UK remains rare. This latest defining disaster did put policymakers into overdrive: almost all Macpherson's 70 recommendations were accepted. New targets for ethnic officers have been set; pilot schemes are testing new stop and search procedures; a powerful taskforce is monitoring progress.
There has been a Macpherson ripple as other professionals, or their specialist press, have looked at the institutional racism in medicine, teaching, and housing administration. Most heartening of all is the evidence of our front page poll today. The British public has become remarkably more liberal - much more ready, for instance, to accept mixed race marriages or a black or Asian boss. There is even good news in the poll for the police itself: 75% believe they are learning from their mistakes. But that has yet to be proved.
