This is how it ends. This is how it always ends. Badly. What did they think was going to happen?
By the time the ‘largely peaceful’ Black Lives Matter protest had called it a day, 49 coppers had been injured and one female officer was lying in hospital with cracked ribs, a broken collarbone and a collapsed lung.
It was yet another humiliation for the forces of law and order, a spectacular own goal. Pity the poor policemen and women who were filmed running away from a masked mob along Whitehall, after they had the audacity to arrest a single violent demonstrator.
In the view of a watching BBC reporter, the arrest was clearly a mistake since it was ‘bound to raise the temperature’.
Far better, surely, to have stood back and allowed the crowd to carry on baying for blood and lobbing missiles.
Images of the Great British Bobby in full retreat were soon being bounced around the world on social media. Still, the brass at Scotland Yard will have calculated, rather Plod On The Run than an embarrassing video of riot police clobbering a Black Lives Matter demonstrator.
From the moment I saw pictures of those coppers ‘taking the knee’ in solidarity with the protesters, I knew it would end in tears.
From the moment I saw pictures of those coppers ‘taking the knee’ (pictured) in solidarity with the protesters, I knew it would end in tears
The mob can smell weakness, fear and moral cowardice. Once the more violent elements worked out that the police were frightened to confront them, there was never any doubt about the outcome.
I don’t blame the young officers on the front line. They were only doing what has been drummed into their heads since their first day at Hendon.
Playing politics is far more important than proper policing. The tone for the latest fiasco was set by an official statement most of you may have missed.
It was issued last Thursday by all Britain’s Chief Constables, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the chief executive of the College of Policing and the President of the Police Superintendents’ Association. The statement read:
‘We stand alongside all those across the globe who are appalled and horrified by the way George Floyd lost his life. Justice and accountability should follow.
‘Officers are trained to use force proportionately, lawfully and only when absolutely necessary. We strive to continuously learn and improve. We will tackle bias, racism or discrimination wherever we find it . . .’
What was all that about? Why did the most senior police officers in Britain feel it necessary to pass comment on an incident which happened 4,000 miles away? What the hell has it got to do with them?
I can’t remember a similar statement condemning police brutality in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or anywhere else for that matter. Where is the official British police reaction to Chinese repression in Hong Kong?
So why now?
You know why. They never miss an opportunity to burnish their ‘anti-racist’ credentials. Sniffing the wind, they thought they’d get their virtue-signalling in first. The ‘woke’ Left were always going to hijack the death of George Floyd for their own purposes, even though most of them couldn’t point to Minnesota on a map.
Look, for the record, I don’t dispute the genuine motives of the majority of those who felt they had to demonstrate their disgust at the killing.
I share their revulsion, as would any sentient human being. Back in March 1991, I presented my first phone-in on LBC radio, as a guest host, and remember it well.
It was the day of the Rodney King beating by cops in Los Angeles. I was horrified and didn’t hold back. My views on the overt racism and casual aggression of some U.S. police forces haven’t wavered to this day.
I was intrigued to see the actor John Boyega speaking at one of the London demos last week.
He was brilliant in the movie Detroit, which centred on the police brutality which sparked race riots in 1967. The following year, parts of the city went up in flames again after the death of Martin Luther King.
When I first visited Detroit, as a 15-year-old schoolboy in 1969, the embers of those riots were still smouldering. Over the past 50 years, I’ve been back frequently. My parents and my younger sister moved to the States in 1976.
Mum and my sister still live outside Detroit.
So I’m well aware that some of the racial prejudice which led to the riots in the late Sixties lingers to this day among elements of the ‘law enforcement community’.
Not just among cops, either. The unguarded racist language you occasionally overhear in bars would horrify most people here.
But to equate the American experience with modern Britain is disingenuous, at best, and, at worst, downright dangerous.
Yet that is what the Black Lives Matter fanatics would have us believe, that this country is imbued with the kind of racist bigotry which would shame the renegade cops portrayed in the Boyega movie.
It is a deliberate lie, designed to stir division, not heal it.
As I said, most of those who attended the weekend’s protests were sincere. But there is a time and place for everything, and this wasn’t it. We are currently in the middle of the greatest civil emergency since World War II.
As part of the efforts to combat Covid-19, gatherings of more than six people have been banned. We can argue about the wisdom of that decision — and many of the Government’s other restrictions — but most people are happy to comply, for now.
Black Lives Matter shattered that sense of national unity. Thousands flooded into London, Cardiff, Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh in open defiance of social distancing rules.
Thousands flooded into London (pictured), Cardiff, Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh in open defiance of social distancing rules
Members of black, Asian and ethnic minorities (BAME) face a greater risk of dying from the virus. But here were black (and white) citizens rubbing shoulders with complete strangers, regardless of the risk of transmission. Were they not worried that they could take the killer virus back to their own families and communities?
Yes, the majority were peaceful. But their very presence enabled the minority intent on violence.
And despite the fact that the demonstrators were breaking the law, they were cheered on by the usual suspects on the Left.
Kneeling among the crowd, like an embarrassing disco-dancing uncle at a gay wedding, was the ridiculous Corbynite MP Barry Gardiner — last seen leading the lynch mob against Dominic Cummings, the PM’s adviser who drove his family to Durham for the duration.
For a week, the self-righteous Left railed against Desperate Dom — and all those Brexity plebs taking their families to the seaside during the hot spell.
But none of them has uttered a word of criticism about those breaking the lockdown en masse to join Black Lives Matter.
The police have threatened to fine anyone caught entertaining more than six people in their back garden. So why haven’t they felt Gardiner’s collar?
More to the point, why did they allow the protests to go ahead?
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I refer you to my earlier answer. We are not all equal before the law, certainly not in the eyes of the police. If these were football fans, protesting about not being let back into grounds when the Premier League resumes, the Yard would have sent in the heavy mob.
If you or I decided to turn up at Downing Street, let off flares and throw a Boris bike at a police horse, our feet wouldn’t touch.
If you or I decided to turn up at Downing Street, let off flares and throw a Boris bike at a police horse, our feet wouldn’t touch. Pictured: A demonstrator is seen infront of a flare during a Black Lives Matter protest near Downing street in London
But if you’ve got a ‘cause’ — be it anti-racism, or climate change — the Old Bill are happy to let you get on with it.
We’ve been here before, most recently with Extinction Rebellion being allowed to bring London to a standstill for a week. Remember the skateboarding Plod and the pink yacht in Oxford Circus?
Was anyone surprised that Bristol police stood back and watched a gang of thugs demolish Colston’s statue? This is the force — sorry ‘service’ — which gave that preposterous Greta child a police escort, in an electric car, to address thousands of schoolchildren playing truant, just as we were becoming aware of the Covid threat.
During the XR demos in Bristol last summer, a man was unable to visit his father in hospital before he died because protesters blocked the motorway — which Black Lives Matter did on the M6 at the weekend.
Meanwhile, back in Whitehall, it was only a matter of time before ‘peaceful protest’ turned into a riot — just as it did during the student fees protests, the anti-globalisation protests, the anti-capitalist protests . . .
Churchill’s statue defaced, the Cenotaph violated, frontline coppers attacked, yadda, yadda, yadda. Some things just don’t change.
Only this time the craven posturing of Scotland Yard’s self-serving, careerist top brass — in thrall to all things diverse and fashionable — ended up with 49 coppers injured and a young woman officer hospitalised with cracked ribs, a broken collarbone and a collapsed lung.
This is how it always ends. Badly.