When did we give up on the truth?

During that rather strange summer of 2020 I used the phrase ‘the gentle armed robber George Floyd’ in several articles for various publications, but the phrase was often taken out. I had thought it a mild corrective to the seeming beatification of a man who, while having been wrongly killed, was not, to my mind, quite worthy of the retrospective adoration being poured upon him. Nope, there would be no corrective – not about George. Indeed in that summer of lockdowns, hand sanitiser and existential angst it was pretty much impossible to challenge the programme of Black Lives Matter, full stop. Hence it was swallowed whole by the establishment and we saw coppers going down on one knee, TV pundits (and footballers) pressured to wear BLM badges or insignia, the police watching in admiration as statues were toppled and so on.

This all happened under the shroud of Covid, of course: the public did not get a say.