Consider what a nation chooses to see. Attention is not a neutral faculty, a camera that simply records whatever passes before it. A society has only so much moral attention to spend, and the way it spends that attention, what it magnifies and what it lets slide past, is among the most honest confessions it ever makes about its real beliefs. We learn what a people values not from its official creeds but from the deaths it cannot stop talking about, set beside the deaths it manages to forget within a week.
Begin, then, with the deaths a nation could not stop talking about. When George Floyd died under a Minneapolis officer's knee in May 2020, Britain responded as though the killing had happened in Bristol rather than 4,000 miles away. The Guardian's own survey of that summer found demonstrations in more than 260 British towns and cities, from Shetland to south Wales, with crowds of 15,000 in Manchester and well over 210,000 marchers nationwide by mid June. The future Prime Minister knelt for the cameras. This is worth dwelling on, because it proves something the British establishment now seems eager to deny about itself. It is fully capable of treating a police death on another continent as a domestic moral emergency. The machinery exists. The will exists. The question is only when it switches on.
Comment: Pratt's campaign team deserves every award:
They've been so inspiring, others are making content for him: