Henry Nowak’s death shames Britain

With the murder of Henry Nowak, the British state, in its current debased form, claimed yet another victim. Like the victims of the deranged killers Valdo Calocane and Axel Rudakubana, who were not kept apart from the society they endangered  directly   because of their race , or of the clannish rape gangs effectively granted for decades the state’s licence to abuse, often with the  connivance  or  direct participation  of the police, Henry Nowak was failed by a state that has abandoned its most essential duty: of protecting those it claims to represent. The police’s defence, it seems, is that this most recent failure derives merely from the basic incompetence we have all come to assume in dealing with the British state. That the political fallout, however, centres on the belief it was a product of the racialised ideology that runs through our state at every level, has been long-brewing.

While the Home Secretary defers judgment to the results of yet another enquiry, the Right’s political narrative, convincingly supported by the released footage, is that the racialised obsessions of progressivism have claimed another innocent life: falsely accused of racism, the victim was treated as the suspect, and died for it. For all the shocked protestations made against Reform by those culpable for this state of affairs, this is not an argument limited to Farage. The Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp,  condemned in Parliament  “the dangerous ideology of so-called anti-racism”, which “enshrined” in  t he Police’s own strategic guidance differential treatment of suspects according to their race. As Philp states, in what is an expression of mainstream conservative opinion rather than dangerous rabble-rousing, “extreme activists have hijacked the policymaking process, and this is where it has led”.

Philp is correct, as is Farage. This is the true state religion that governs our society, with its own  Test Acts , ritual phrases, taboos and zealous enforcers. For its hold on public life to endure, for the faith of its adherents to not be shaken, it has turned the British people into its unwilling victims. To cleave to  the privileging of racial difference  over competence, fairness or the basic functioning of a society is now  the marker of career advancement  in  every limb of the British state . Nowak was murdered not just by the dagger the state allowed his killer to carry in the street, but by the chaotic jumble of powerpoint presentations, HR decisions and fears of offending the wrong people which informed the officers attending his miserable death.

Nowak’s murder was not, in itself, an event of historic national importance, in a country where the consequences of sudden, violent ends have become a regular feature of political turmoil. What made it historic is Nigel Farage’s  unexpectedly strong response , unimaginable only a few months ago. In his address this morning, backdropped by green Kentish downland and the chirp of morning birdsong, the Reform leader sought to capture a national mood, using this “moment to take a long hard look at ourselves as a country, and what we’ve become”. Nowak’s callous treatment by the police was “proof, if ever there was any, that we’re living in a two-tier culture in this country”, Farage claimed, “where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities”. In managing the unnecessary tensions caused by unwanted mass migration, he observed, “to stop any criticism of this, we’ve brought in hate speech laws, we’ve brought in a DEI agenda, we’ve brought in what is called ‘positive discrimination’ in favour of ethnic minorities, over those of white people whose families have lived in Britain, in many cases, for centuries. That is the mess we’ve got into.”

It must be noted that both the victim and the perpetrator of this crime, one of Polish descent and one of Punjabi, were the result of migration to this country. Yet for those who might query Farage’s invocation of Nowak’s race, it was the British state itself that made race the operative factor in his death. Once the magic charm of racism had been uttered by the murderer and his family members covering for him, Nowak became a white perpetrator, automatically suspect to the officers presiding over his final moments, reading his rights to him as he bled out, the British state’s perversion of the Last Rites. Praising the dignity of Nowak’s family, which like Calocane’s victim  Grace O’Malley-Kumar’s family  has chosen to  confront the state’s failings  rather than accept the loss of a child for a greater social good, Farage suggested that instead “the rest of us respond to this with pure, cold rage”.

This is a tone we have not heard in British politics before, though its arrival has been long expected.  It was not hard , even during the hysteria surrounding the death of the man who Farage pointedly called “the career criminal George Floyd”, to divine the beginnings of a popular reaction; a…