Leading Article: This report places a responsibility on the whole nation

MRS DOREEN Lawrence secretly feared that her son's killers would not be caught and punished because he was black, "but I still hoped for justice". Sir William Macpherson's inquiry has proved that her fears were justified and her hope was forlorn. His report is long and contains a number of recommendations for the Metropolitan Police, but at its heart an ugly truth is implied: in Britain today there is one law for white people and another for black.

A society can be best judged not by how it deals with its successes, but by what it does about its failures. The Independent has reported the inquiry into the police handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in depth since it started, because the inquiry is an important test of Britain's collective ability to learn from a deeply distressing event and the bungling that followed in its wake.

There can be no doubt that the Metropolitan Police has failed and continues to fail far too many of the black and Asian people of London - they are five times more likely to be stopped by the police than are white people. While black and Asian people make up 25 per cent of the population of London, they comprise only 4 per cent of the police force. Even under Jack Straw's proposals for a more racially representative police force, that figure will be raised to only 7 per cent. This is still grossly inadequate.

The dangers of Sir William's report, however, are that it may encourage interest to focus obsessively on a number of narrow issues that are irrelevant to the task of tackling the real problems.

First, it may encourage the calls for the head of Sir Paul Condon, the Met's Commissioner. Sir Paul has tried to change the Met's culture, although he has clearly not done enough. But for him to resign - especially since he is in any case due to retire next January - would not help to speed up that process of change. If Sir Paul were hounded from office it might engender a defensive, bunker mentality in police canteens. The Home Secretary is right to keep him.

Second, the report has been caught up in the issue of "institutional racism", an unhelpful piece of semantics. As defined by Sir William, the phrase is an accurate description of the Met. It could equally be applied to the judiciary and various other institutions from which people from ethnic minorities get a rough deal. But paradoxically it also allows those "unwitting" racists among the police to avoid taking personal responsibility for their actions by attaching a value judgement to the force as a whole. It remains a grave injustice that the police officers whose incompetence - whatever its causes - let the murderers go free will escape discipline by retiring early.

The report also took an unexpected route in its call to ditch our ancient right not to be tried twice for the same offence. But this is a case where a new look at an old civil libertarian assumption finds it wanting. It has always been held that the rule is a safeguard against unpopular but innocent people being tried repeatedly until convicted. But that could be prevented by restricting re-trials to the Court of Appeal, in what it adjudges to be exceptional cases. With that protection, it cannot be right to allow someone acquitted of an offence such as murder to remain unpunished if overwhelming new evidence later comes to light.

However, this is of little relevance to the Lawrence case, because no significant new evidence has emerged since the collapse of the family's private prosecution against the five suspects. Despite the general obsession with finding a way to punish Mr Lawrence's murderers, on the assumption that we know who they are, police incompetence has meant that conclusive evidence linking the suspects to the victim, if it existed, has been lost for ever.

The challenge now for the Met is to ensure that the report's proposals for reform are not allowed to run into the sand. The police should finally become subject to the Race Relations Act - indeed, the inquiry performed a service by drawing attention to the surprising fact that they were not. And there are grounds for hoping that this Government will pursue the other recommendations in the report, weak though they seem, in a way that the Conservatives failed to do after the Scarman report into the Brixton riots in 1981. Mr Straw has already, for example, moved to prevent police officers evading disciplinary action by going on sick leave or retiring.

But the important lesson to be learnt from the Macpherson report goes much wider than the police. Black and Asian people are treated unfairly in education, in the labour market and by the institutions of the welfare state. Repeated experiments have shown that, when black and white students swap class papers or when "black" and "white" names are submitted on identical CVs, white people gain an advantage.

At its extreme, the question is how to solve the problem of places such as Eltham, where the self-esteem of some of the white population is so low that stabbing black people is a way of "proving their worth". These problems need to be put in their proper perspective. Eltham must be compared to places such as Jasper, Texas. For all its cowardice and horror, the murder of Mr Lawrence was not planned and was not part of a white supremacist campaign. Britain also has a healthy and growing number of mixed marriages, which indicates that our future may more closely resemble the melting- pot of Brazil than the ghettos of the US or South Africa.

But the tragedy of the death of a young man and the injustice suffered by his parents exposes the complacency of those who believed that racial equality was well on the way to being achieved in this country. As Mr Straw said yesterday: "This report does not place a responsibility on someone else, it places a responsibility on each one of us." For the sake of the memory of all the victims of racial violence, we must rise to that challenge.