Monitor: The Sunday press digest the implications of the Macpherson report

IT HAS been a bad week for British institutions. The Home Office, the police and the judiciary have emerged with tarnished reputations.

The Macpherson inquiry has produced a heap of politically correct recommendations, some so simplistic in their approach to race relations that they would make the Rev Jesse Jackson blink. The only glimmer of hope is that the Government appears to have enough common sense to ignore most of the proposals published in the report.

The Sunday Times

NO ONE - not Sir William, not the Lawrences, not the Home Secretary, not even the most extreme black groups - is saying that every policeman is a racist. But the facts of the matter are clear and stark: the police as a whole failed the Lawrences. Worse still, they failed us all.

The Sunday Express

SOME PEOPLE may feel it is downright offensive to focus at all on whites in the aftermath

of the Lawrence inquiry. I can't see how things will ever improve unless we face the fact that, although life is worst in modern Britain for young blacks, it is pretty hellish for certain cut-off and economically abandoned white tribes too. Their self-pity may be smaller in scale than the grievance of black people, but it is, as it were, similarly shaped. (Andrew Marr)

The Observer

THE GREATEST lesson to come out of all this is that no one will tolerate another Stephen Lawrence case. Mr and Mrs Lawrence have been insulted at every stage. But they were entitled to believe that the man who instigated the judicial inquiry into their son's death was on their side. Jack's sojourn to the South of France is the final straw.

Sunday Mirror

TO TRY to expunge by means of the criminal law the expression of certain unacceptable or revolting ideas would be to attack the very basis of a free society. Unfortunately, this Government has shown signs of being susceptible to national hysteria.

The Independent on Sunday