CHRIS GREEN - Police should not ‘take the knee’

For the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic really started in England, a daily figure for deaths has fallen below 100. This both shows how much progress has been made since the peak but also just how challenging the situation still is. Nearly half of intensive care beds were occupied during the peak but the occupancy rate is now running at 11 per cent.

As there is typically about a two week wait from contracting the virus to displaying symptoms and we can see a good direction of travel over recent weeks, we should be confident that the plan to deal with Covid-19 is working.

The single most important achievement from all our sacrifice over the last few weeks and months is that we have ensured that the NHS has coped and has maintained its ability to treat and care for us.

The world was rightly appalled to see images of a Minneapolis police officer killing George Floyd, an unarmed black man in America. I support everyone demanding that action is taken to stop anything like this happening again. What I do not support is large scale protests breaching social distancing and risking another Covid-19 outbreak. As a nation, we have already been through too much to risk it and it could make all your months of sacrifice worthless.

What is worse is that leading Labour and SNP politicians have been promoting people’s attendance of the protests and broadcasting that they do not care about risking their own health or anyone else’s. What compounds how terrible their judgement is, is that the London protests quickly degenerated into riots.

The first riot saw the police attacked at the entrance to Downing Street and running fights all the way to Parliament. Images of an Australian camera crew being attacked and another journalist having his head cut open with a glass bottle have been broadcast around the world.

Some of the police “took the knee” shortly before the riot started which is to say that they knelt down to the protestors just before the riot happened. It is wrong for the police to kneel before protestors, it is a political act and it hardly prevented the protest turning into a riot and perhaps even encouraged it.

The second London riot saw 27 police officers injured including one whose collar bone and ribs were smashed, and she suffered a collapsed lung. If you see the video footage of the incident you would think her lucky to have not been killed.

Leading Labour politicians were still supporting and encouraging protestors in the run up to the third protest and riot on Sunday. They knew that it was inevitable that the police would be attacked and there is now extensive video footage of this happening. Whilst the media has only now started to give an impression of the actual level of violence being directed at the police, they are still behaving as if they are supporting a cause rather than reporting the facts.

You can only imagine what the media would be saying if these riots happened after a football match.

There is a fear that left-wing activists are hijacking the legitimate protest for their own wider political cause. This is more clear in the USA where extremists are demanding that the police are “defunded”. That is to say, the police should be abolished. The police clearly need better leadership and improved standards in certain parts of America but this is at the State rather than Federal level. Minneapolis is run by the left-wing Democrat Party therefore the leadership of the police is Democrat. The only higher authority is the President and, without realising it, the protestors are almost calling for President Trump to step in and fix the problem.

I had hoped to be writing more about Britain’s leadership in Gavi, the global vaccine alliance. We are a leading country in delivering vaccinations for many of the poorest people in the world and there probably is no better way to show that all lives matter.