Red Lines, Blue Lines

And so Keir Starmer agrees to whip a vote against legislation to criminalise pretty much all protest. With enough effort, he may even be able to build the alliances necessary to have had that clause removed in time for Third Reading. His mind has been changed by the roughing up of middle-class white people, whose own eyes had been opened by the death of a middle-class white person. Lines have been been crossed. 

Since 1990, 1433 people have died following Police contact. You are eight times more likely to be killed by a Police Officer than by a terrorist. Yet no Police Officer has been found to have been criminally responsible for a death since 1969, and never in British history has a Police Officer been convicted of murder.

Starmer has done his bit to keep those statistics intact. He refused to press charges in relation to the deaths of Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson, in the former case thereby clearing the way for a grateful Metropolis to enjoy Commissioner Cressida Dick. It is also pertinent to the current debate that he refused to press further charges against John Worboys. One hopes that he really does now care about violence against women. But he never used to.

Indeed, he did not do so extremely recently, when he whipped abstentions on the decriminalisation of rape and murder by British Armed Forces personnel abroad, and on the wholesale legalisation of rape and murder by State agents in Britain, specifically including the Police. That latter Bill effectively admitted the existence of such activity, with or without a single conviction in the last 52 years.