Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has called for the country to “learn” from the death of Henry Nowak, saying the behaviour of the police was “a case of double standards”.
Speaking on GB News, Sir Jacob said: “How terrible is that? That the perpetrator of the crime says that he is injured, the murderer. And the victim, who says he’s been stabbed in a relatively frail voice, gets the response from the policeman, ‘I don’t think you have, mate’, after he has been pulled about.
“He is then handcuffed with his hands behind his back, treated as a criminal when he is an innocent victim.
“This country has a long tradition of policing by consent, that we are the police and the police are us. The police have to act proportionately. They have always to assume that people are innocent until proved guilty.
“They are not there to take sides in a dispute, and they are certainly not there to handcuff people who are not in any way resisting arrest. The use of force by the police is controlled, as it is for other citizens.
“We’re not allowed to push people about and handcuff and hurt them, unless we’re protecting ourselves. None of this was going on in the video that you have seen, and a dying man was treated appallingly.
“And why was he treated appallingly? Because he was white. This is a crime that has its origins, I’m afraid, in racism, and in a view that people who have protected characteristics must be believed, whilst those who don’t mustn’t.
“It comes from a whole culture of DEI, of assuming that people who are white have automatic critical race theory prejudices and are therefore likely to be guilty of racism, whether they have been or not.
“It’s been inculcated in the police by things like the Macpherson Report, which say that the institutions are racist, when institutions cannot be racist, institutions do not have emotions.
“Individuals can be racist and individuals make up institutions, but an institution cannot, in and of itself, be racist.
“And so we see what I think is one of the worst examples of a police failure in this country in modern times. It’s akin to what happened to Mr Floyd in the United States of America.
“But instead of finding that people are taking the knee, that the England football team is taking the knee, we find that instead there has been a great deal of silence.
“Finally, the Prime Minister spoke today, but yesterday all he could manage was a tweet. The last time round when it was Mr Floyd, he took the knee with Angela Rayner.
“It is a case of double standards and the problem is that it undermines all race relations. Our great country has a proud record of good race relations, of calm race relations.
“But what happens when race relations are abused, and when innocent people are murdered, and when the police behave in the way that they have, race relations are damaged and undermined.
“We have had, historically, a pretty cohesive society. We have not been the United States of America. We have been able to say boldly and loudly and clearly that all lives matter and that all are equal under the law.
“What happened last December showed that to be more of a pious hope than a reality. We must learn from this and it must change and we must go back to our historic way of approaching race and approaching equality of all His Majesty’s subjects under the law.”