Keir Starmer taking the knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter has divided the internet

The Labour leader Keir Starmer the party's deputy leader, Angela Rayner have released a photo of the pair taking a knee to show support from the Black Lives Matter movement.

The tweet read: "We kneel with all those opposing anti-Black racism."

This mark of solidarity with the anti-racism movement was also observed by Starmer's fellow Labour MP Dawn Butler, who took the stance outside of parliament with a group of female MPs.

In the US, Democrats including Nancy Pelosi took the knee in congress for almost nine minutes, the amount of time that officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the back of George Floyd's neck, and wore traditional African kente cloth scarves.

The Democrats did receive a heavy dose of backlash for taking the knee, with many feeling that it was nothing more than a token gesture that did nothing to repair the decades of systematic racism in the US.

Starmer and Labour received a similar reaction to their photo, especially as the party is yet to take any action after a leaked report in April found that a minority of it's members had been deemed to be racist and antisemitic and after worked to prevent Jeremy Corbyn from winning the 2017 general election.

The former barrister had also drawn criticism after he said that protesters in Bristol were wrong to have torn down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston.

However, others applauded the act of solidarity, no matter how problematic it might have been.

Although Boris Johnson is yet to repeat the same kind of gesture he has said 'Black Lives Matter' but did couple it with an unfounded belief that Britain was not a racist country. 

The act of taking the knee began as a form of protest against police brutality and was started by NFL player Colin Kaepernick in 2016.