Rees-Mogg: Anti-racism-focused policing means ‘a limit on how many bad people you can arrest’

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has said the police’s anti-racism commitment is a “perversion of policing” which has created anger in the country.

Speaking on GB News, he said: “There’s been an extraordinary difference in the reaction to the murder of Henry Nowak against the killing of Mr Floyd in the United States. That people like Keir Starmer, who took the knee, English footballers took the knee; everyone made a great song and dance about it.

“Now Keir Starmer says that even mentioning it is stirring things up, accuses Nigel Farage of causing trouble. But that’s not the trouble.

“The trouble is what officialdom has been doing. I’ve got here the police anti-racism commitment, put together by the National Police Chiefs’ Council. And what it says is deeply shocking, extraordinary that this has been policy, and no wonder that we have found that the police have behaved in the way that they have.

“Because it says you should produce equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups. But what equality of outcomes means is that you can have a limit on how many bad people you can arrest, however many are committing crimes.

“So you saw this with the Calocane case in Nottingham, when somebody who was known to be dangerous was not treated because too many people of his racial profile had already been sectioned.

“You saw it with what happened to Henry Nowak when the police were more concerned with an allegation of racism than they were with a man who was dying in the street before them.

“It has utterly misfocused what policing ought to be about and makes people feel that there is not equality under the law, which is the one equality that there should be and this perversion of policing is creating anger in this country.

“Now that’s not an excuse for rioting, and people should never riot, and most people in Britain have been very restrained in how they have reacted.

“But that doesn’t mean that voters don’t feel this is simply wrong, and undermines a basic principle of British justice, a principle that you can, if you like, trace back to Magna Carta: we are equal under the law.

“That has been deliberately abrogated. The policing council again says it’s not enough for us not to be racist: that’s so dangerous, that means you have to have positive discrimination.

“But the thing about positive discrimination is the second word – discrimination. It is still discriminatory, and people feel the British state has been set up to discriminate against them.

“That’s why they’re angry. That’s why they expect their politicians to understand why they’re cross, but I’m afraid Sir Keir Starmer utterly fails in this.”