The picture that the Black Lives Matter organisation portrays is of Black people being the victims of White violence in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the United Kingdom, black people are disproportionately both the perpetrators and the victims of gun and knife crime.

In the United States, it has been shown that 70% of Black victims of violent crime are likely to have been the victims of Black perpetrators . 62% of White victims of violent crime are likely to have been the victims of White perpetrators.

George Floyd is depicted by BLM as an innocent victim of a racially motivated murder by a White officer. In fact, no evidence has been produced of any racial motivation by the officer. The lethal neck-hold was indeed outrageous but there is no suggestion that the officer intended to cause George Floyd’s death. He would have realised the repercussions that would follow from the death, even if he lacked any altruistic or humane feelings towards the victim. He reveals himself as somebody whose training in restraint methods was woefully inadequate with tragic consequences.

The victim is depicted as almost a saint. In fact he had a conviction for an armed robbery from a female householder. That does not, of course, justify his fate but it should have prevented him from being paraded as a hero-figure for Black and White alike.

The appalling slave trade of buying and selling human beings and compelling them to work without pay has been part of human history for centuries. However, not all slaves have been Black and not all slave traders have been White.

The Africans who were transported to the New World were not usually captured by the slave traders but by their fellow Africans from a rival tribe. Victims of cruel inter-tribal conflict were no longer killed by their victorious enemies but were sold to European or Arab slave traders. That does not of course exculpate the slave traders but it does muddy the waters somewhat.

Most modern Britons and others of European descent, are not the descendants of slave traders or slave owners. They are the descendants of landless serfs and later wage slaves in workshops factories and mines. We are the victims of human exploitation and not the perpetrators.

BLM depicts itself as an anti-colonial organisation. However, the common mark of colonisation is that the culture of of the indigenous, colonised population is overridden and deleted. Institutions, place names and historical events are replaced and re-written. That is precisely what BLM is advocating and directly implementing. They are removing and advocating the removal of effigies of historical figures, many of whom enjoy almost universal approval from the indigenous population.

Others,like Edward Colston had a more chequered record. He was undoubtedly a slave trader in the 17th and 18th centuries and that practice must be condemned by us who were born in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, it was not routinely condemned in Colston’s lifetime. He was remembered as a philanthropist towards the needy among his own community, in his lifetime and later. Does that exculpate him for his slave trading? No, it does not. However, what it does demonstrate is that historical figures, unlike characters in badly-written fiction cannot be divided neatly into discrete categories of pure heroes and pure villains.Most real people are capable of being both, especially from the safe perspective of a different century and a different moral framework.

Edward Colston was a far from perfect human being but he is a perfect example of the way in which the same persons can be be made up of morally contradictory elements.

All lives matter and matter particularly to their near and dear. In that sense all lives matter equally. However, the indigenous peoples of Europe have contributed to the creation and sustaining of our civilisation to a disproportionate degree. The current attempt by the Political Class, in all advanced countries, to breed the indigenous peoples of Europe out of existence is a wicked attempt to destroy our civilisation to the cost of all peoples of the world.