Prime Minister Boris Johnson has condemned Black Lives Matter activists for bullying police officers into ‘taking the knee’.
Referencing early Black Lives Matter protests in London, Prime Minister Johnson remarked: “If you think of what happened with those police officers standing at the Cenotaph where they were being insulted in really quite aggressive terms by some members of the crowd and told to take the knee.
“Some of them did. It was very difficult, then, for others who didn’t. I think it’s very important that you don’t do things that make life difficult or embarrassing.”
“I don’t want people to be bullied into doing things that they don’t necessarily want to do,” Mr Johnson told LBC on Friday.
When asked if he would personally kneel to Black Lives Matter, Mr Johnson told LBC’s Nick Ferrari: “I don’t believe in gestures, I believe in substance. I believe in doing things that make a practical difference.”
Police officers kneeling in solidarity with BLM while in uniform has been a contentious issue. Despite initial claims from one police force that prostrating can have a “very positive effect” on demonstrations, London police kneeling before far-leftists failed to prevent officers assaulting them the same day.
Hertfordshire Police had previously supported its officers in the act, but warned those who refused to kneel that they “may become the focus of the protestors’ attention”.
Violent BLM protesters have focused their assaults on British police officers, in some cases chasing them down the streets of London while yelling “run, piggy, run” and throwing projectiles at them. By June 10th, around a week after the first London BLM protests, 62 Scotland Yard officers had been injured.
In one widely-reported case, an officer was thrown from her horse after it became spooked when a far-leftist threw a bicycle at another police horse. She suffered a collapsed lung, broken ribs, and a broken collar bone, resulting in her being signed off work for four months.
Speaking on Thursday to the Evening Standard, the prime minister also defended the country’s past in qualified terms, saying it would be disingenuous to tear down statues that represent a part of British history.
When asked if he supported Oriel College’s decision to remove the statue of Cecile Rhodes, a former prime minister of a southern African colony, the Oxford alumnus said: “I’m pro-heritage. I’m pro-history, and I’m in favour of people understanding our past with all its imperfections.”
“I want to build people up, not tear people down. If we go around trying to Bowdlerise or edit our history in this way, it’s like some politician sneakily trying to change his Wikipedia entry,” Mr Johnson added.
The prime minister’s condemnations of BLM’s bullying tactics and iconoclasm comes after several British establishment organisations have u-turned on their support for the movement after recently claiming to realise it had a far-left political agenda.
After statements supporting “abolishing” the police, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who kneeled for BLM just a few weeks ago, on Monday claimed he did not support the political “movement” of BLM.
Other bodies distanced themselves from the “political” movement after Black Lives Matter’s British chapter, BLMUK, tweeted an anti-Israel post that employed the antisemitic trope that the Jewish state was ‘gagging’ political discourse over settlements and the Palestinian territories.
In response, England’s Premier League football association, which had replaced players’ names on shirts with the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’, claimed that it did not support any political organisation that “calls for violence or condones illegal activity”.
And after weeks of the BBC platforming BLMUK’s narrative that Britain is a racist country, the state’s major broadcaster has reportedly told its presenters and guests to not wear Black Lives Matter badges on screen for fear of appearing impartial.
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