2 big stories
The controversy over the death of George Floyd continues and the Chair of the Liberal Democrat Campaign for Race Equality, Roderick Lynch, notes;
Just as we have a moral obligation to speak out against the injustice we’re witnessing in the US, we also can’t ignore the failings here in the UK. In the UK 26% of instances of police using firearms are against black people, despite black people making up only 3.3% of the population. 51% of young men in custody in the UK are from black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds, despite these groups making up only 14% of the UK population. The 2017 Lammy Report concluded that “BAME individuals still face bias, including overt discrimination, in parts of the justice system”. More recently, we’ve seen that BAME people are 54% more likely than white people to be fined under the new coronavirus lockdown laws.
Meanwhile, Parliament is potentially paralysed due to the seemingly utter stupidity of the Leader of the House ending the virtuaL Commons whilst failing to ensure that the House could proceed
otherwise. And yes, the Government could ram through a vote on new procedures, including a mile-long “conga line” for voting, but it sends out yet another message of this Government’s contempt for Parliamentary democracy. And it was so important during the Brexit debates…
2 social media posts
There are ways of responding to current events, and Barack Obama has some suggestions…
1. The protests represent a genuine and legitimate frustration over a decades-long failure to reform police practices and the broader criminal justice system. We should condemn the few who resort to violence––not the overwhelming majority who deserve our respect and support.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) June 1, 2020
Meanwhile, the Government’s credibility takes another kicking, courtesy of Pippa Crerar…
https://twitter.com/pippacrerar/status/1267518320028332032?s=21
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One Comment
I shall always remember the first time I saw a US police officer ‘in the flesh’. It occurred in the Summer of 1971. My wife and I had been living in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada for a year and were undertaking our only trip across the border to the US as part of a 5000+mile ‘tour’ of the West Coast from Vancouver down the 101 as far as Tijuana, Mexico and ‘home’ via Las Vegas and Salt Lake City.
We had just crossed into Washington State at Bellingham and had stopped off in Seattle to have a look at the site of the recent World Fair. The first thing that struck us when we crossed over was how much busier the roads were south of the border. The second difference was meeting our first US policeman in Seattle, complete with reflective sun glasses, fingering his gun as he wondered amongst the crowd at the World Fair site. How different he was from the type of police officers, both RCMP and provincial, whom we had encountered in our time so far in Canada.
Looking at the pictures currently appearing in our newscasts, things don’t seem to have changed that much in nearly 50 years.