The killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis five years ago sparked a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. That summer, millions took to the streets in the name of racial justice as BLM protests spread from the US to Western Europe.

In Britain, the BLM movement promised to confront Britain’s colonial legacy, expose deep-rooted structural racism and address everyday racial injustices, from microaggressions to unconscious bias. It was described by its advocates as a necessary and long overdue ‘racial reckoning’. Five years on, it is time to ask what it actually achieved.

The evidence is not encouraging. All the slogans, protests and agitation did little more than spread grievance and distort the truth. The damage left behind by the BLM movement in the UK will take years to overcome.

Part of the problem is that the BLM narrative was imported wholesale from the US and imposed on Britain. Despite the profound differences between the UK and US in policing, demographics and history, British BLM supporters assumed that the social and political forces that created the conditions in which George Floyd was killed are alive and well in the UK. Britain, we were told, is a society that was built on systemic racism, with violence, discrimination and bias woven into the very fabric of daily life.