A young Matthew man named Matthew Furlong would seem to the untrained eye to be a great candidate to become a policeman–physically fit, intelligent, of good character, and with relatives on the force, he'd aspired to be a cop from childhood. Oh, and he had a university degree in physics.

Furlong was turned down because he was white and male. He didn't represent the racial and social desires of those doing the hiring.  Furlong didn't take his rejection in stride. He sued and won.

We don't yet know how much money Furlong will be awarded. But guess who will end up paying?

As Theodore Dalrymple writes in City Journal:  

The compensation t.hat the police will have to pay him has not been announced, but it will be the taxpayers—not the cowards, careerists, and half-wits who discriminated against him—who will ultimately have to pay. Love may or may not mean never having to say you’re sorry, but being a bureaucrat surely means never having to pay for the consequences of your mistakes.

Have you ever heard the term "positive discrimination?" Well, as Dalrymple reveals, this is the term for the kind of discrimination that kept Furlong off the police force:

This case might be the reductio ad absurdum of a system of recruitment by demography, or at least by certain features of demography—“positive discrimination,” as it is called.

Yet even the most positive of positive discriminators would not want 9 percent of policemen with an IQ lower than 80, or 15 percent with a Body Mass Index of more than 35, just to reflect accurately the population of the country.

But in Britain, Furlong’s case is more likely to be dismissed by intellectuals and the political class as extreme, marginal, or anomalous, rather than an exposé of the intellectual dishonesty and damaging results of this method of recruitment.

Dalrymple says that most people would be appalled by what happened in the Furlong case.

Some politicians, too,  might be appalled.

So will they speak up?

Probably not as they would face the "outraged reaction of his peers and the intelligentsia."