ity the poor culture warrior, their mental gymnastics burning far more calories than pre-corona gym sessions ever could. A statue was torn down, and they demanded people follow the proper channels. Statues were taken down via the “proper channels”, and they decried the panicked response. Reviews were announced to avoid a panicked response, and they raged against the reviews. When all else fails, they just conjure controversy out of thin air. Take the Telegraph. Last week it claimed that the future of a 22-year-old statue of the Roman emperor Constantine outside York Minster was being “looked at”, after church officials “received complaints that the Roman emperor supported slavery”. The story was then picked up by the Daily Mail. There was one problem. York Minster swiftly clarified it had not received a single complaint about the statue, and ruled out removing it. This is part of a pattern. Shortly after Edward Colston’s statue was torn down in Bristol, Boris Johnson played up the threat to the Westminster statue of Winston Churchill. Hardly anyone was calling for its removal, but Johnson made it the centre of his response to the Black Lives Matter protests, and the Telegraph duly plastered it across the front page. Write-ups of the Churchill statue also focused on the role of London mayor Sadiq Khan, a go-to hate figure on the nationalist right. This tactic was repeated recently, when newspapers roped Meghan Markle into their coverage of Prince Harry’s “support for a ban” (actually a review that almost certainly won’t lead to a ban) of the song Swing Low, Sweet Chariot by the Rugby Football Union. The drivers of this dynamic are not hard to identify. Black Lives Matter is a movement, larger and broader than the organisations that bear its name. It challenges the privileges of the majority who do not experience racism, and the image that majority has of Britain and its history. And some of that majority take at least some of the movement’s arguments on board - while others lash out against it. Those who lash out are less numerous than you might imagine. Polling conducted days after Colston’s statue was removed found most respondents agreed with the stated aims of the Black Lives Matter movement. Only 15% disagreed – around one in seven. Respondents were more evenly divided on the removal of slavery-related statues, and displayed outright hostility to removing Westminster’s Churchill statue. But the one in seven who oppose even Black Lives Matter’s broad aims are overrepresented in the rightwing press, on talk radio and the broader network of rage merchants on social media. The organisations they work for claim to represent the unheard British majority, but they do not. They are aghast at the concept of structural racism, which implicates people and institutions far beyond their comfort zone of condemning neo-Nazis and football thugs. Their interests are not served by tackling racialised economic inequality. The notion that unequal outcomes have structural causes affronts their smug certainty that it’s all about “personal responsibility”. And, of course, their bottom lines are not harmed by whipping up rage. The problem is that they cannot win fighting against the basic principles of this movement because the public are broadly in favour of them. So their answer is to focus on what people are against, find examples of that, no matter how tenuous, and use them to discredit an entire political project. The irony is that these critics of Black Lives Matter call it divisive. Given that the campaign challenges Britain’s self-image, its understanding of its history, and structural discrimination against a minority, what is notable is how little division it has provoked – contrast the support for BLM in both the US and the UK to the widespread antipathy towards Martin Luther King in the United States of the 1960s. It makes angry people very angry, but they are in the minority. Instead, it is supporters of the populist right who are desperate to stoke division by reducing issues of fundamental importance to ephemeral noise and fake news. Their careers, and their ideology, depend on it. • Chaminda Jayanetti is a journalist who covers politics and public services