Eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak was stabbed, arrested, and denied medical attention after his killer falsely accused him of racism. If this doesn’t sound real, I implore you to watch the bodycam footage yourself. Britain is currently melting down over it.
Nowak was walking home from a night out in Southampton when he crossed paths with Vickrum Digwa. The video recovered from Nowak’s phone, which Digwa tried to hide, contains none of the racial abuse he would later allege. Nowak made a passing remark, and Digwa responded by stabbing him repeatedly before summoning his brother to help taunt, restrain, and film the boy as he bled out.
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A neighbor called the police, but so did Digwa’s brother, who told the operator, “We’ve just got attacked, racially, by some white person,” omitting, of course, that Nowak was rapidly dying and that no such “attack” had taken place. It is incredible that they assumed this could work, that officers would find Nowak lying face down in his own blood and arrest him rather than the Digwa brothers.
But modern Britain is an incredible place. Nowak said nine times that he couldn’t breathe, while Digwa shouted that he was “pretending” and “racist.” The police agreed. When Nowak said, for the fourth time, that he had been stabbed, an officer replied: “Don’t think you have, mate!” Nowak died after he was forced into cuffs, minutes from the city’s largest hospital, while multiple officers listened dutifully to Digwa’s fabrications.
Brits are reeling and asking once again, “Does Britain run a two-tier system of justice, one in which an accusation of racism outranks everything else, up to and including murder?” The Left refuses to acknowledge any bias, let alone lift a finger to stop it, while the Right doesn’t seem to have any idea how to lift a finger, even if it wanted to.
On the Left, despite the resemblance to 2020, Nowak’s dying words being “I can’t breathe,” the outlets that couldn’t look away then seem far less interested now. Instead, they are busy wisely disproving any accusation of double standards by exclusively covering the ensuing protests and devoting relatively little attention to Nowak himself.
The Labour government, meanwhile, unable to be seen, doing nothing, has set out responding to Nowak’s death with the bare minimum. Specifically, it is considering wording changes to its Police Race Action Plan, but only “where needed.” Not only is Labour not taking this seriously, but it stands prepared to admonish anyone who is. In Parliament, the Labour Party condemned “inflammatory commentary” and all those “cunningly politicizing” this affair.
Interestingly, when George Floyd was killed four thousand miles away, the same party knelt in Parliament and declared that his “death must be a catalyst for change.” In fact, Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary, the force that arrested Nowak, opened its own Race Action Plan by calling Floyd’s murder “a pivotal moment for policing in the UK.” Apparently, British policing must be dramatically reorganized in response to an incident that occurred in another country, but a case in their own society with obvious echoes of Floyd requires everyone to refrain from so much as a political thought. Not only that, but as Prime Minister Keir Starmer has explained, policing is running smoothly: “There is no two-tier policing. There is policing without fear or favour, exactly as it should be, exactly what I would expect and require.”
It should be clear to anyone familiar with the details of the Nowak case that British policing is not “exactly as it should be.” Hampshire police, in addition to their bizarre opening sermon about Floyd, put its entire workforce through mandatory diversity training at a cost of nearly a million pounds. The result is a set of new priorities, which the force candidly admits: “We will pursue offenders and deal with offences that cause the most harm to our ethnic minority communities.” It appears that the people who deny that British policing is biased spent years setting that bias in writing, funding it from the public purse, and drilling it into every officer. And we are to believe this was not political.
This continued even after Nowak died, at which point the police still did not bother to handcuff Digwa and then casually offered him a meal. As Nowak’s father put it, “the contrast is unbearable.”
Ultimately, it appears that since 2020, Britain has built a system of justice modeled on the worst of the U.S.’s racial fads, down to specific American tragedies that have absolutely nothing to do with it. David Spencer, head of crime and justice at Policy Exchange and a former Met officer, explains how this has played out: “Many officers are now so petrified of being called a racist that it’s the number one thing in their minds.” In 2020, the BBC reported that a security guard at the Manchester Arena, where a bomber went on to kill 22, did not approach him for fear of being called racist: “I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist.” Even if an officer is not afraid, although arguably he should be, the Police and Crime commissioner has told officers that not engaging with their race training could hurt their promotion prospects.
There is a kernel of good news here: Pressure that comes from the top can be removed from the top. Multiple polls suggest that the majority of Brits, and the officers among them, are far from zealots. Their leaders and administrators are, and the incentives they set reflect this. Both can be voted out and rewritten.
But is the Right capable of this? So far, its impractical and tasteless reaction gives me little confidence. Farage urged his supporters to respond with “pure cold rage.” Riots broke out in Southampton. It is absurd to imagine the government reversing course because a small, and mind you, disarmed, minority is heckling officers. And it is actively self-defeating to claim that there is violent two-tier policing in your country and then attempt to stage an unarmed riot against said police. This was tried in 2024, after the Southport killings, and the government responded by simply jailing rioters and prosecuting people for social media posts. At the time, Musk tweeted, “Civil war is inevitable.” Does he seriously think these rioters stand a chance?
More likely, they will make superb PR for the Left. The Guardian and BBC are brimming with images of disheveled, usually intoxicated, and often tattooed Brits hurling beer cans at police. Looking at these images, it is hard to believe that these people once conquered a quarter of the world’s landmass. Look for yourself and ask: Is this revolutionary, or is it mostly just unpopular and mildly embarrassing?
When they aren’t behaving like hooligans, the Right still butchers the Nowak case by changing the subject from the policing on the tape to migration and hand-wringing about British identity, none of which is productive. We Americans are no help: Vance, who rightly pointed out the race-obsessed policing, couldn’t resist piling on and blaming this on the “mass invasion of migrants.” Yes, of course immigration is a problem, but this emphasis misses the point. Digwa is British-born and therefore not deportable, and the sweeping crackdown the Right wants will have to wait for the next election, due in 2029. What this footage actually shows, and what is most alarming about it, is the officers’ behavior, which is also what happens to be most politically fixable. But for some reason, now that they have been handed a fight they can actually win — with the government as vulnerable as ever — the Right, rather than invoking anything remotely actionable, is tripping over itself to tell sob stories about the “invasion” of its civilization. You start to wonder whether they are simply in love with losing.
This is taken to farcical extremes by a favorite right-wing figure of Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, who, leading the crowds in Southampton, went on a tirade about “Pakistani Muslims.” Digwa is a British Sikh, neither Pakistani nor Muslim.
If Britain wants to avenge Nowak, it has to get serious. And so far, it seems the British Right prefers this bizarre self-victimization. This must change, not least because many of the things that went wrong here can be corrected, including through channels outside elections. This will take quieter, more sustained work than they are used to: the unglamorous job of reclaiming the country’s institutions. It will be a matter of occupying the right places — no, not the streets — and taking hold of the dull administrative levers the Right has neglected to date.
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The British Right shares the same pathology, a strand of ADHD, as nearly every Western right-wing movement. It indulges quick, convulsive releases of anger: a march, then a riot, and perhaps some alienating racial commentary along the way. They rarely, if ever, plan beyond this initial adrenaline spike.
Sensible Westerners should not mourn Henry Nowak as another martyr to the cause of the week. They should move to dismantle, piece by piece, the machinery that produced this disturbing footage — in Britain, and everywhere else it has taken root.
