This article was originally a post on my Facebook page, Sex & Censorship.

A few days ago, an illegal street rave was held in Harlesden, West London, attracting 500 people. The police turned up and were attacked. 11 officers were injured.

Following that rave, a Twitter war broke out between gangs from two neighbouring areas, Church End and Stonebridge (areas I know well – they were within the intake area for my school, and I have relatives living nearby).

Offended by a tweet, some Stonebridge people drove down the road and shot 4 people in Church End, apparently at random: two men, a woman, and her two year old child. One of the men who was shot is the relative of a friend of mine. The woman and toddler are seriously injured. The child was hit in the head, and is gravely ill. Black families in London are shattered, yet again.

Meanwhile, a movement calling itself Black Lives Matter is resurgent in London, following the killing of a black man, George Floyd, several thousand miles away. Although I know or follow many people who have posted endlessly about this killing, not one of them mentioned the Harlesden incident. Nor do they mention any of the other murders that regularly occur in black London communities.

The job of actually trying to save black lives is left to the Metropolitan Police. While the activists constantly show zero interest in the violent deaths of black Londoners, they’re ultra-quick to attack the people who are trying to find the killers, and put an end to this epidemic of violence.

And here you have the ultimate contradiction: the activists who claim to believe that black lives matter, and engage in constant virtue-signalling, yet show no discernable interest in the violence plaguing black communities; and the “institutionally racist” police, who have to face the reality of policing London’s most violent communities, and are accused of racism (by middle class left-wing activists from outside the area) whenever they try to take knives and guns off the streets.

The police have a Catch 22: ignore the violence in poor communities (and be accused of racist neglect when the murder rate rises) or monitor the gangs and their members (and be accused of racism for using stop and search against black youths).

When black lives really do begin to matter to the British middle classes, the student activists will talk as much about London gang violence as they do about policing. Until that happens, you can assume they neither understand the problems faced by London’s poorest communities, nor care.