What makes their use of Scarman especially politically dodgy is that Lord Scarman was a real person, whose enquiry into the relationship between the police and, especially, ethnic minority communities after the 1981 Brixton riots was a real watershed in British policing history. He was expected as an Establishment figure to produce a whitewash but instead he really laid into the corruption and racism of many police officers and the complete collapse of normal relations between the police and urban ethnic minorities, and it was the Scarman Enquiry that really meant that the Gene Hunt style of policing could no longer be openly tolerated.