The prime minister told LBC radio that he would rather focus on real action and things that changed policy rather than protests or symbols.

He said: “I don’t believe in gestures, I believe in substance.

“I believe in doing things that make a practical difference and if you look at what this government has done over the last few years, look at what I did when I was running this city (London) I massively increased, for instance, black representation, black and minority ethnic representation in the Metropolitan Police, we increased the proportion of recruits, we had an active program to accelerate promotion for black police officers and I want to see that happen across the country.”

The prime minister also said that he thought it was wrong for police officers who had taken the knee during Black Lives Matter protests to have done so, saying he felt they might have been pressured into it. He said he didn’t want people to be “bullied into doing things they don’t necessarily want to do.”

It comes after Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said he would not take the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement because he thought it was a “symbol of subjugation and subordination rather than one of liberation and emancipation”.

Raab was also criticized for saying that taking the knee seemed to him to have been taking from the Game of Thrones series.

He hit back at critics and said he had been a life-long anti-racism campaigner.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer had taken the knee to show his support of the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in the U.S.

The prime minister was also asked about the lack of diversity in his cabinet and his failure to appoint any black people.

Johnson said it was something he “put his hands up” to and promised to do more to form a representative government in the future.

The prime minister was also criticized for his claim that he doesn’t believe in gestures, with some commentators pointing out how the decision to paint Johnson’s RAF voyager, which is used by the ministers and royal family for trips abroad, cost taxpayers £900,000.

Novelist James Harris wrote: “He doesn’t like cheap gestures. He prefers his gestures to cost £900,000.”