Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Keir Starmer’s bizarre Black Lives Matter re-education

(Photo: Getty)

So now we know what happens if you criticise Black Lives Matter. You’ll be packed off for re-education. You will be sent to have your mind cleansed of foul, dissenting thoughts. You will be reminded of the First Commandment of the strange year of 2020: Thou Shalt Not Question BLM.

That’s the lesson of Keir Starmer’s bizarre confession this morning that he will submit himself for unconscious bias training after he dared, ever so mildly, to criticise a few aspects of the BLM worldview.

Last week Starmer referred to the BLM protests of the past few weeks as a ‘moment’. That was crime No. 1. In reducing this movement to a moment, Starmer, according to the warriors against anti-BLM blasphemy, was being dismissive of the incredibly important events that have taken place since the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

If criticism of BLM is ‘unconscious bias’, then we are seriously running the risk of pathologising perfectly legitimate political viewpoints

Worse, Starmer said the idea of defunding the police, which has become a rallying cry of BLM supporters, is ‘nonsense’.

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