UK Politics: Black Lives Matter Here Too

[mormont]

Picking up on some comments at the end of the last thread:

I think it's a misunderstanding to suggest that protests outside the US in support of BLM are somehow protests about US policing. They're not. They're an expression of solidarity, from people who understand that their own countries have issues with racism too - which is every country, and certainly every Western country.

UK society is deeply systemically racist, and UK policing certainly is. We don't see shootings of black men like we do in the US. But the death of Sheku Bayoh, which happened just down the road from where I live, has a lot of the same hallmarks as the death of George Floyd. The family in this case don't want people to attend physical protests, but to participate in an online protest, which is sensible. But I can't criticise anyone who goes to an in-person protest, I'm afraid. It should be perfectly possible to do that safely in a socially distanced way, and even if it is not, this is a matter of conscience, of taking a rare opportunity to use the momentum of these protests to address a problem that has been killing people for years - and still is. With ethnic minorities having poorer outcomes from COVID-19, a situation arguably attributable at least in part to social factors related to institutional racism, these protests are actually pretty timely.

[ljkeane]

24 minutes ago, mormont said:

 It should be perfectly possible to do that safely in a socially distanced way

It might be possible but it clearly isn't happening. You might argue it's an acceptable cost to pay but these protests are almost certainly increasing the spread of covid 19.

[Heartofice]

I am very supportive of the collective outcry against police brutality and racism, and its heartwarming to see so many people taking a stand. 

But I'm not sure that anyone who was last week wailing with anger over a man going to Durham in car to protect his family because it supposedly broke lockdown, can now turn around the next week and say that thousands of people tightly gathered in the centre of London is somehow totally fine. 

It might be fine, they are all wearing masks.. of some sort, it might end up leading to nothing and we won't see a massive spike due to it. However the contrast between those two positions is... well I'm absolutely not surprised by it.
 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Nope. I decided against. Not taking the bait. Not gonna bite. I am just moving away real slowly.

[ljkeane]

I don't know how I feel about it to be honest. It's obviously an important issue and as a white man I'm not really one to judge how significant this is to people but, lets not avoid it, at the moment these kind of mass gatherings are likely to result in people dying, and not just the people who have made the choice to attend.

[mormont]

11 minutes ago, ljkeane said:

It might be possible but it clearly isn't happening. You might argue it's an acceptable cost to pay but these protests are almost certainly increasing the spread of covid 19.

For individuals, it absolutely should be and I know many people who've done just that.

As for whether it's an acceptable cost to pay, clearly opinion on that is divided. As I noted above, Sheku Bayoh's sister (a nurse) for one agrees that it is not, and so does the STUC, hence the online event they're organising. But clearly a lot of other people feel differently.

I dunno. Maybe it would have been possible for the government to credibly ask people to stay home if, for example, they hadn't decided to throw away all their credibility on the subject by defending Cummings' breaches of the rules, relaxing lockdown rules against scientific advice, and initially refusing to release and then censoring the report on minorities and COVID-19. As it stands, though, you can hardly complain if people feel that demonstrating against police brutality is at least as important as a day trip to Barnard Castle.

[Derfel Cadarn]

My main concern about attending the protests in the UK is that it risks increasing the spread of Covid, which in turn risks the lives of Black and some other ethnic minority group health workers, who for some reason have borne the brunt of NHS worker deaths

[Raja]

I read this Gary Yonge piece this morning, and I'm going to quote some sections but you can find more in it, as Mormont says above, the UK is also institutionally & systemically racist, and the protest is certainly about that.

Quote

For example, the ONS’s analysis of English Housing Survey data from between 2014 and 2017 found that Bangladeshi families were 15 times more likely to experience overcrowding than white British households, while Pakistanis were eight times more likely and black people six times more. All three groups were more likely to live in deprived neighbourhoods and to experience higher unemployment, higher poverty and lower incomes than white people.

More than two decades after the 1999 Macpherson report into the Stephen Lawrence case – which found the police to be “institutionally racist” – minorities remain more likely to fall foul both of the law of the land and the law of probabilities. Wherever there is a pile of deprivation BAME people are over-represented at the bottom of it.

Material deprivation may not be the whole story. The ONS concludes that even when adjusting for deprivation, age and other factors, black people, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are almost twice as likely to die as white people.

Other surveys show black and Asian doctors are often treated as “outsiders” by their bosses and peers. They are significantly more likely than their white colleagues to be referred to the General Medical Council by their NHS employers for an investigation that could damage or end their careers. They are twice as likely not to raise concerns because of fears of recrimination, and complain of often feeling bullied and harassed. Health workers who are migrants may have no recourse to public funds if they are fired, and a disproportionate number are on zero-hours contracts. Add all this together and it becomes clear why they might be more compliant when put on certain shifts and less insistent in demanding personal protective equipment (PPE).

This is what systemic discrimination looks like. Not isolated incidents but a range of processes built on presumption, assumption, confidence, ignorance and exclusory institutional, personal and professional networks all buttressed by the dead weight of privilege.

It has been disappointing, yet predictable, to read some of the comments in the previous thread wondering why black & brown people are protesting because of a shooting in the US, it exhibits an ignorance of everything that black & brown people experience in this country for decades.

I get people that are concerned about the public health consequences, that is a legitimate worry, but as said above, the govt have proceeded to pursue relaxations, undermined their own message by the Cummings stuff and have basically lost an credibility they had.

But none of us are black - I'm brown & Indian and as a minority have it better than people that are Black, Pakistani & Bangladeshi ( collectively calling all our experiences as 'BAME' isn't great tbh, we have a shared experience to an extent but racism & institutional racism manifests in a different ways for all of us  - there is also significant anti-black sentiment within south asian communities that has largely gone unaddressed), but this stuff has been going on for generations in lots of countries and perhaps people see that the protests in the US have compelled change locally ( Minneapolis have banned chokeholds as an example) and are therefore hoping protests like this one might compel change here.

The health professional in me hopes that the peaceful protest from here on in is socially distant  and share concerns on the impact it has on the spread of the virus - however, there is clearly a movement building and black & brown people using that movement to try and enact change that is long overdue to prevent deaths for them, their children, and their grandchildren is something that I can understand.

( And if you can't differentiate between trying to change society for the systematically & historically oppressed versus other breaches of lock-down then I can't help you)

[BigFatCoward]

A slavers statue getting pulled down would be a very difficult thing for me to police proactively. Fuck them. 

[Pebble thats Stubby]

45 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

A slavers statue getting pulled down would be a very difficult thing for me to police proactively. Fuck them. 

Priti Patel was just on the news saying how disgraceful it was and how it distracts from what people are actually protecting about.

 

and I'm sitting here thinking its disgraceful we still had a statue of a slaver, I hope its the last one and is exactly what people are protesting about.

[Heartofice]

We shouldn’t have statues of slavers and we shouldn’t have mobs running around  tearing down statues either. Both those things can be true

[Conflicting Thought]

30 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

We shouldn’t have statues of slavers and we shouldn’t have mobs running around  tearing down statues either. Both those things can be true

But if you do have statues of slavers (and apparently you do), you have to take it down, and if the goverment doesnt take it down, the people will take it down. Soo, i guess people SHOULD take statues of slavers down. 

[Raja]

Big fan of it being dumped in the river after being pulled down.

[dog-days]

Personally, I tend to fall more on the side of things that wants to put a plaque with information on statues of slavers and similar rather than tearing them down. Most people have no idea who old chaps from the past that feature on pedestals around the country once were anyway. ETA: Think history, the good and bad - and in particular, the uncomfortable, ambiguous parts - should be remembered, not dumped in a river. 

[Heartofice]

6 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

But if you do have statues of slavers (and apparently you do), you have to take it down, and if the goverment doesnt take it down, the people will take it down. Soo, i guess people SHOULD take statues of slavers down. 

Who are the people you are talking about? Was there a vote to take it down which everyone agreed on? 
 

Calling a mob of kids ‘the people’ says a lot.
 

 

[Conflicting Thought]

2 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Who are the people you are talking about? Was there a vote to take it down which everyone agreed on? 
 

Calling a mob of kids ‘the people’ says a lot.
 

 

Was there a vote to put it there? 

Calling "kids" protesting a mob, says some things as well. 

[Heartofice]

2 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

Was there a vote to put it there? 

Calling "kids" protesting a mob, says some things as well. 

Was there a mob  violently putting the statue up? 

I mean this could go on forever..

[Week]

7 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Was there a mob  violently putting the statue up? 

I mean this could go on forever..

Bunch of folks lionizing a slaver. Sounds like a violent mob to me.

[Conflicting Thought]

17 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Was there a mob  violently putting the statue up? 

I mean this could go on forever..

Yes?, for some reason, i don't think there where many non white people putting the statue up. 

[Heartofice]

1 minute ago, Conflicting Thought said:

Yes?, for some reason, i don't think there where many non white people putting the statue up. 

If you can find reports of a violent mob putting up statues against people of Bristols will id like to see it.