Henry Nowak and the politics of deflection

Rather than confront the failures of the police, much of the media has chosen to focus on those expressing outrage over the case.

While the country is still reeling from the horrific murder of eighteen-year-old student Henry Nowak, an astonishing article has appeared in El País, Spain’s largest national newspaper. Rather than focus on the failures of the police officers, or the institutional bias within the force, the headline steers its readers away from the case and towards the outlet’s own obsessions. The headline translates as ‘Farage’s far right stirs up hatred in the UK after a young man is stabbed to death by a Sikh man’.

As Alejo Schapire (an Argentine journalist based in France) has pointed out, this is the first and only article produced by El País on the subject of the Nowak killing. Instead of an image of the victim, the newspaper has opted for a photograph of Nigel Farage. The Guardian was similarly histrionic and detached from reality in its coverage: ‘As ethnonationalist far right drives racist agenda, Reform UK leader felt need to weigh in on murder of Henry Nowak’.

The headline in El País.

It is one thing to take issue with those who seek to weaponise human tragedies for their own political gain, and quite another to dismiss legitimate criticism of a failed system. Reform UK is by no means a ‘far right’ party, but of course the term has been so promiscuously misused in the press that at this point it might be best to dispense with it altogether. But of course, this is not really about Farage or his response to the murder at all. It is a cynical means of deflecting from the fate of Nowak and what it reveals about the state of policing in the UK.

So what exactly did Farage say to have the Guardian fulminate about his ‘racist agenda’ and for El País to make him the focus of the story rather than the victim? During a live broadcast, Farage praised the Nowak family for their ‘extraordinarily dignified’ response following the conviction of their son’s killer, and went on to say: ‘I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage’.

And why not indeed? Let’s not forget the shocking details of what happened in this case. Nowak was stabbed multiple times by Vickrum Digwa using a Sikh ceremonial dagger. His mother hid the murder weapon, and his brother called 999 claiming that Nowak had been racially abusive. When police arrived, Digwa repeated this lie. And when Nowak repeatedly told the officers he had been stabbed, one replied ‘I don’t think you have, mate’ and handcuffed him as he lay dying.

Labour MP Jonathan Hinder, a former police inspector, was asked on BBC’s Newsnight whether he could understand the behaviour of the officers that night.

‘To me it’s unfathomable… If you are presented with a situation like that as a police officer, we have emergency life support training which should be deployed immediately in those circumstances. You should be treating it as a medical emergency if someone is telling you those things repeatedly. And crucially, they are not a threat. So the use of the handcuffs is just impossible to explain.’

Sadly, it is possible. The police have been trained to automatically believe all accusations of racism, which inevitably has led to the term being misused as a means to settle scores or, in this case, to prevent a victim from receiving life-saving treatment. The College of Policing has long been captured by an activist mentality that insists that group identity should be the ultimate concern of law enforcement. The chief of Hampshire Constabulary – the force that handcuffed Henry Nowak as he died – proclaimed in 2022 that ‘being anti-racist, ethical and inclusive is top of our agenda’. One would have hoped that tackling crime without fear or favour might take priority.

Moreover, the Police Race Action Plan, published in 2022 by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) repeatedly refers to the need for ‘equitable’ rather than ‘equal’ treatment. In other words, the public are to be treated unequally according to ethnicity in order to drive equal statistical outcomes. This is an activist agenda, and it involves a total undermining of the principle of equality before the law.

So when Farage argues that the Nowak case exposes the police’s ‘anti-white prejudice’, he is not wrong. Such prejudice is built into the system, and is there for all to read in the policy documents. While Farage’s point was expressed bluntly, it was certainly not ‘ethnonationalist’ by any serious definition of the term. You may not approve of Farage’s choice of words, but it will take more than infantile cries of ‘bigot!’ to disprove them.

The evidence of two-tier policing is by now so overwhelming that it is astonishing that members of the press have the gall to deny it. The grooming gangs scandal is the most egregious example of how identity politics has taken precedence over justice, but there are many others. As one senior police officer told journalist Allison Pearson: ‘What you have to understand is most chief constables would rather mess up a major murder inquiry than be accused of being racist’.

We should not be surprised to see ideologues at the Guardian and El País attempt to reframe Farage and the ‘far right’ as the real issue here. After all, such news outlets are partly responsible for cultivating the very climate in which accusations of racism are so inaccurately applied and have so much power to destroy lives. Rather than reflecting on their errors, they are seemingly intent on compounding them.

There are grave problems with law enforcement in this country. While police officers are being trained by activists, we are unlikely to see any rectification. It is intolerable that the principle of equality before the law has been rebranded as ‘far right’, and that the misleadingly branded ‘anti-racist’ movement has been allowed to stoke so much racial division.

The activist media will continue to deflect and claim that those who are outraged by the murder are more concerning than the murder itself. But the public can see through these tactics and patience is wearing thin. Any ideology that encourages the state to view citizens primarily through the prism of race is regressive in the extreme. As the tragedy of Henry Nowak demonstrates, it can also be dangerous.

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