David Lammy accuses Boris Johnson of inaction over racial injustice
David Lammy has accused Boris Johnson of inaction over the injustices highlighted by Black Lives Matter protests, saying the prime minister’s focus on the vandalism of statues was a deflection from a lack of real progress.
As ministers confirmed they were discussing plans for a new law on damaging war memorials, punishable with jail terms of up to 10 years, Lammy, the shadow justice minister, accused the government of not taking proper action.
Johnson sent a stream of eight tweets on Friday in response to the statue of Winston Churchill near parliament being damaged during last weekend’s BLM protests, and the toppling by a crowd in Bristol of a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston.
Responding to the boarding-up of Churchill’s statue before further protests on Saturday, in which far-right protesters clashed with police, Johnson said removing statues was “to lie about our history” and that protests over the death of George Floyd in the US had been hijacked by extremists.
Asked about the issue on BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show, Lammy condemned the protesters who daubed the
Churchill statue with paint as idiots who deflected from the BLM message, and praised Churchill’s pivotal role in the second world war.
This did not, however, detract from Churchill’s attitudes to race or his role in the 1943 Bengal famine, Lammy said: “Many great figures in history are also flawed, and we ought to be able to have that debate as well.”
He was highly critical of Johnson’s response to the debate: “He’s never tweeted eight times in a day on coronavirus. He’s never tweeted eight times in a day on the Windrush review, and what he’s going to do about it, on the review David Cameron asked me to do on disproportionality in the criminal justice system, and what he’s going to do about it.
“So this feels to me like a bit of a deflection. Let’s get to the action. Let’s have some substance. Let’s do something about these historic injustices which still exist in our country. Let’s respond to Black Lives Matter properly. Call in the protesters, pass the legislation if it’s needed. Act now.”
Lammy also accused the government of having buried recommendations from a Public Health England report into the disproportionate impact of coronavirus on people from a black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) background. “It’s horrifying that at the moment across this country it’s hard to be black or Asian and not know someone, or someone who knows someone, who has died,” he said.
“The point is it’s a scandal if one week Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock say ‘black lives matter’ and then we find out … that they buried part of the review that had the recommendations in it to do something about it.”
Speaking on Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday show, Rishi Sunak confirmed the government was considering a new law on damaging war memorials, with a maximum 10-year jail term. The chancellor said the justice secretary, Robert Buckland, would meet Tory MPs who were calling for a new law next week.
The shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, said Labour would back the move. “I would support the government in creating a specific offence for protecting war memorials, and I would be willing to work with the government on that,” he told the same show.
Lammy was more cautious. He told Marr: “It’s already the case that you can get up to 10 years for criminal damage under the existing legislation. Whether we need a specific piece of legislation for memorials, of course we’ll look at.”
Lammy also expressed doubt at mooted plans to rapidly convict people involved in violence at protests: “Of course we want speedy justice, but I would say, we have a massive backlog currently in our justice system because of coronavirus and, of course, the virus is in prisons. So how the government is going to do that we’ll certainly scrutinise.”
Both Lammy and Sunak condemned events in London on Saturday, when protests ostensibly called to protect statues from BLM activists degenerated into clashes between far-right protesters and the police.
It was “ugly and very, very threatening”, Lammy said. Sunak said: “I think the scenes that we saw yesterday were both shocking and disgusting. This has always been an open and tolerant country, and what we saw yesterday was not that.”