The speed with which many of the narratives of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ organisation have been accepted among the mainstream is quite staggering. Almost every major news channel, paper, broadcaster, politician, public figure and corporate brand have not only accepted their claims without any rigorous checking of the facts but also willingly propagated them.
Of course, the copy-paste from the US to the UK BLM group causes some conflation and I don’t think the resulting confusion is accidental. At the very least, the BLM organisers in the UK don’t seem to mind the cover it allows when they are caught over-reaching with their demands. For example see the recent BLM UK “explanation” of what they really meant be “defund the police”.
The absurdity of making a statement like “defund the police” and then being affronted that someone would have the audacity to assume you meant “defund the police” is obvious to most. The discombobulation it induces in any rational mind is not accidental. I believe all of these mental contortions, that make most rational people feel like laughing and then crying, are intentional.
What the BLM organisation’s intention towards the police is isn’t even something we necessarily need speculate on. We just have to look at what the BLM US groups have pushed for and achieved in places like Minneapolis or even the BLM UK’s gofundme page which actually calls for the abolition of the police (it is still up at the time of writing).
The idea behind making explicit and controversial demands like “defund the police” and then running behind an indignant explanation that it really means “spend money on youth clubs” is to test what they can get away with pushing into the narrative. It is a game and we should pay attention to how they are playing it. The BLM UK organisation has been calling to “defund the police” since its bigger US brother started the same line, with practically no push-back from UK politicians until now. It was only recently when Keir Starmer went on TV and denounced this patently absurd idea that the “clarification” from BLM UK was issued. I doubt that if Starmer had taken the knee (again) and pledged full allegiance to BLM while calling for the police to be defunded they would have issued the same statement.
It is similar to the childhood game of ‘what’s the time Mr Wolf?’; if we do not pay attention to these ideas being slowly edged towards public consciousness and fail to regularly confront them and call them out, we will turn round to find they have advanced, unchallenged, far into society without any discussion or public consultation having taken place.
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