by Paul Embery
As with the Southport massacre, the murder of Henry Nowak will have ramifications far beyond the immediate events
IT WAS ONE of the most troubling images I’d seen. Two Metropolitan police officers were manning the barriers at a protest in central London organised by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the wake of the George Floyd killing. Only these officers were not focused on their duties. Instead, both had dropped to one knee – a deliberate gesture designed to show they were on the side of the protestors. The officers had become part of the demonstration they were there to police.
Anyone who believed that the thin blue line existed to uphold the law impartially – and particularly when policing high-profile political demonstrations – might, at that moment, have been disabused of such a notion.
Or perhaps that happened a few days later when police officers in Bristol purposely refused to intervene while BLM protestors vandalised a statue of Edward Colston and tossed it into a river.
Or maybe on the numerous occasions that officers had been filmed, in uniform, dancing and prancing at Pride parades. Or when a deputy chief constable released a video to mark ‘International Pronouns Day’. Or when any number of citizens were arrested for saying and doing things – reading from the Bible in public, for example – which were deemed to have offended against modern progressive ideology.
Such spectacles provided confirmation that, as well as being occasional defenders of law and order, police officers were now also political activists – and specifically for the most modish causes. Nowhere was this more evident than in the arena of racial politics, where the stance of the police was often scarcely different to that of some of Britain’s most radical race activist groups.
As it was for the police, so it was for most of the public sector, where a new ‘lanyard class’ of middle-class white liberal managers, armed with university degrees and guilt complexes, now ruled the roost, peddling hardline progressive dogma and professing to bring harmony and unity while increasingly doing the very opposite.