The PM should be proud of his record
The political subtext to the Black Lives Matter campaign is that Boris Johnson and the Tories are racist. This grotesque calumny has been aimed at the Prime Minister for years, and particularly since he wrote in this newspaper about the burka. He was not arguing for its prohibition but for freedom of expression as a central tenet of British liberalism.
The Prime Minister’s article in this newspaper today is very much in this tradition. He denounces thuggery and disorder on the streets, upholds the right to peaceful protest, but recognises that the issues around race and inequality still need to be addressed. What more can a Prime Minister say or do? Two of the great offices of state are occupied by people from ethnic minority backgrounds. This Government is the most diverse in history. Yet Mr Johnson is given no credit for this because the aim of some protesters is less to gain better treatment for ethnic minorities than to find another stick with which to beat the Tories.
The Prime Minister has no reason to apologise for his record in this regard, having spent eight years as mayor of the world’s most multicultural city. Moreover, Mr Johnson’s bafflement as to why Churchill should be the target of protests, given his pivotal role in the defeat of the most racist ideology in history, will be widely shared.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest irony in the few weeks of protest in London and other cities was the spectacle of far-right demonstrators giving the Nazi salute as they claimed the right to defend Churchill from his detractors. The “football lads” turned up in Whitehall on Saturday spoiling for a fight which, in the absence of other demonstrators, they proceeded to have with the police. As Mr Johnson says, nothing can excuse this behaviour.
But, as he implies, there is a political motivation behind those targeting the Churchill statue. The Left see it as a totemic emblem of Conservatism, even though the wartime leader was a Liberal during his early years in politics and was never trusted by the Tories before the war and not even for a while after it began.
The campaigners pressing for the eradication of our past are a minority not supported by most of the country. They seek a Maoist disavowal of British history or, as Mr Johnson puts it, they want to “photoshop the entire cultural landscape”.
They certainly need to be resisted – but by way of debate and argument, not thuggish violence.