What do you think of Lammy's comments on taking the knee?

This.

Is everyone weeping over people killed by Russian police, or Chinese police, or police Cuba or Mexico?

Why not?

I thought this at the time.

From what I read, it described the type of injury he had, but not the effect on that type of injury jury by driving him, forcing his arms back, putting pressure on his back with a knee.

Im glad there will be an inquest, as this needs to be judged, there are doctors who say they don’t necessarily agree the injury was unsurvivable 😔

I would be more concerned with 250,000 Black Americans being murdered over the last 25 years (mostly by other Black Americans) than your figure of 3,000 killed by the Police over the last 25 years.

As a parent the trauma is the same regardless of how your child is killed, what is important is the probability and risk factor.

And the idea of “taking the knee” as a means of publicly displaying your political correctness is both comical and sinister

Im in the UK. I don’t want to see British politicians taking the knee because of problems in the US . It’s ludicrous.

I completely agree with you and I find the posts rushing to say he wouldn’t have been saved anyway distasteful

I agree. Why are posters so desperate to prove he couldn’t have been saved?

The politicians who took the knee are the exact same ones who were happy to sell women's rights out if they thought it would virtue signal to the right people. Lammy called women dinosaurs hoarding their rights and as i recall he thought men could grow a cervix. In sum, he is an idiot and a hypocrite.

Of course there are multiple reasons for this other than ‘just’ racism. A PP has mentioned some; I’ll add complications related to FGM, complications related to multiple births, heavily-pregnant, possibly non-English speaking women coming to UK to give birth under the NHS without sharing medical history.

He is an utter twat.

I completely agree with you and I find the posts rushing to say he wouldn’t have been saved anyway distasteful.

However from below it may not be correct, it looks like further investigation will happen. Which is good.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cyv2ddgpn8qo#:~:text=The%20coroner%20said%3A%20%22The%20issue,of%2021%20years%20on%20Monday.

An inquest jury will consider whether "any act or omission by police officers" or delay in treatment caused or contributed to the death of Henry Nowak.
Resuming a hearing, Hampshire coroner Jason Pegg said the full circumstances surrounding the death on 3 December had not been fully scrutinised.

Isn’t the point that racism is different in the US and the UK though and has different historical contexts. Trying to equate the two and find common solutions won’t work

And neither have Black people in the UK.

I suspect Baroness Lawrence might disagree with you.

I think you're mistaken if you believe there has been no institutional racism or lasting impact from historical discrimination in the UK.

Just look at Windrush, stop and search, Black maternal mortality rates, the strip-searching of underage Black girls, disparities in healthcare outcomes and treatment, bias in schools and so on. These are not isolated incidents. We can debate the causes, but it's difficult to argue these issues don't exist.

I suspect Black people are in a better position to talk about racism in the UK than you or I.

As for Lammy, he is just like every other career politician. IMO his comments are hardly a surprise. No substance.

While it is correct to say that the police could not save Henry, they at least could have allowed him a dignified death instead of him having to plead for an ambulance and hearing his rights being read as the last thing he heard. It’s incomprehensible. It’s obvious to anyone (even the untrained) that he was having a medical emergency.

And I wouldn’t even want our police force to treat a criminal like that, never mind a child. It’s disgraceful and I hope Henry’s death can be the beginning of the end of the madness we are seeing all around us.

I can honestly say that, even at the height of the madness, I never took the knee and I never will. I didn’t bang saucepans during Covid, either. It’s all virtue-signalling nonsense.

Lammy is obviously embarrassed now by being reminded that he took the knee. His hypocrisy is pathetic but Labour politicians are trapped between activists on their own side who demand public gestures & the wider public who think they are performative nonsense. We might respect him more if he just admitted that.

I go to a lot of big sporting events and it became a pre-game ritual at one point. Until the crowds got fed up with it & started booing it. Then it stopped, unsurprisingly. 🙄

It's largely virtue signalling. I doubt more than 5% of people who have taken the knee for any cause have actually done anything practical to address societal injustice.

This is factually incorrect.

Black women are more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth - yes. But there are many reasons for this.

Factors include systemic and implicit bias, socioeconomic and cultural barriers, stress from racism and perhaps the major one, pre-existing health conditions. Black women have higher rates of pre-existing underlying health issues such as high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes. Black women are at much higher risk of developing pregnancy related conditions like gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia which places them at much higher risk of maternal morbidity and mortality.

Over 3,000 unarmed black Americans have been killed by police in the last 25 years. That's why people took the knee. Failure to understand scale is the problem here.

I think this it’s really important that police etc are challenged on this

as an example, black mothers are more likely to die in labour and there is nothing to explain this other than difference in treatment due to their race. This has not changed despite the NHS spending a shed load of money on DEI.

if society wants to reduce negative outcomes due to prejudice then another way has to be found because the current DEI industry is not achieving that goal and, given this case, is potentially making things worse

I think it’s good that ( as far as I’m aware?) there hasn't been any racist backlash against the Sikh community as a result of one horrible individual.
All the backlash has been against the police for their treatment of Henry. And I think that backlash is justified.

So, I am not sure, at all, that they, and all if us, should noy be taking the knee.
So, originally it was an individual' gesture. Then became a symbol of fight against racial injustice.
If, at the present moment, in the present location, in UK, it means that the demonstrators wish the police and government to address the misuse of race injustice that the murderer's family used to attempt covering their backs in this case, then why not?
We have to address what the meaning of the gesture may have evolved into. It is clear to me that is not abour BLM. But about addressing the police failure in this case, and other cases where someone shouting, oh he has been racist to me, instead of a ptoper prioritising. Stabbing versus racial verbal abuse and a possible swelling eyebrow/ eyelid. What should we address first? The possible stabbing, right. But that is not what happened.
If this gesture is going to pacify the crowd, show that behaviours and policies (including the right to carry blades based on religion/ ethnicity) WILL be revised and corrected to ensure equality of treatment, fully independant of race, ethnicity and exclusively based on evidence in front of them. Instead of this bullshit of equality of outcomes.

I think they are only asking for the police and Starmer to show as much concern for Harry and the facts around his dead as they showed for George Lloyd, back in the day.

This is, yet again, another massively mishandled injustice on Starmer's watch.

Taking the knee was performative silliness, with BLM. It’s still that. No knees needing to be taken.

People of colour have faced plenty of discrimination in the UK. And still do.
It was overt in the and widespread in the 1960s .
Laws against racism habe helped to tackle the problem. But not wipe it out.

I thought the whole taking the knee thing in the UK was ludicrous. Performative, virtue-signalling idiocy.

I think it’d be the same if it were done for any other violent death too, but do understand people putting Lammy and others on the spot by asking them to explain why exactly they did it in the past but won’t now.

I take the knee for God and God alone.

Lammy saying about the pandemic doesn't making his actions make sense. I suspect I know the real reason though.

Absolutely