A few thoughts on this..

1) It is great news but if anyone followed the trial it was obvious he was guilty. It says something to the state of the US that we were all worried he would get off.

2) This is the start not the end... the US has to address the racism in its institutions.. will they? not with help of the GOP and white evangelical Christians, who are absolutely fecking bonkers. So there is a long way to go.

3) The 'left' doesn't help the cause with statements like 'defund the police'.. because that is actually NOT what it means... it means investing in better and more appropriate services and more community ownership, e.g. more mental health workers addressing issues rather than sending unqualified and unskilled police officers to deal with problems. They need to get their messaging right, because the right wing will pick up on anything and label it as communism, and Americans are hysterically paranoid about communism and socialism without a clue of what they are, the difference between the two and that they have hugely benefitted from elements of socialism.

4) Thank God for mobile phones - there hasn't been an increase in racism in the US... but an increase of exposing it. This is exactly why Kaepernick took the knee - to expose this.

5) Taking the knee (in the UK)... I think in the UK I fear it has become 'tokenism' and achieving nothing. However, it has exposed a complete and utter denial that racism exists in the UK, look at the Government report that said there wasn't institutionalised racism - then finding out experts were misinterpreted and that 10 downing street rewrote parts of the report. Again, the increase in hate crimes against black and asian people is indicative of the underlying racism in Britain, stoked by farage and his 'clan'.

As an aside the Tories are in discussion with the Police to outlaw filming police. They Tories hid and change reports on race issues. The Tories are even hiding details of deaths of the windrush victims because they want to avoid scrutiny.

We have a long way to go in the UK.