With grim inevitability, Elon Musk’s mission to stoke racial division has been playing out in scenes of riots on British streets. The spark for recent unrest in Southampton, a port city in southern England, was the murder of a young white teenager who died in police handcuffs after his Sikh killer falsely accused him of racism.
Body-worn camera footage of 18-year-old Henry Nowak’s last moments has been released by police. It is harrowing viewing. As he lay dying, Henry told police four times that he had been stabbed and said repeatedly that he could not breathe. Officers, who ignored his pleas for help and arrested him, seemingly because they believed his killer Vickrum Digwa’s accusations, are now under investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct.
After Digwa was sentenced this week to a minimum of 21 years in jail, Nowak’s father gave a powerful statement outside the court in which he made clear no one was responsible for his son’s murder other than Digwa, while deploring police for denying him dignity in death and calling for action against knife crime. The judge had already made clear that one of Nowak’s injuries, a stab wound to the heart, was so devastating nothing could have saved him.
In his statement, Mark Nowak described his son as “kind, ambitious, loved and full of promise.”
He then added that “we do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension… This is not a case about Sikhism. This is not a case about racism. This is a case about murder.”
They are words of extraordinary generosity. To speak with such grace when your child has died in such terrible circumstances is remarkable, as is rousing yourself from your grief to warn off those who would seek to exploit his murder for their own ugly political purposes.
The least anyone could do for the Nowak family would be to respect their wishes. So UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is right when he says it is “unforgivable” that social media activists and certain politicians have done the opposite, trying instead to sow division.
The morning after Mark Nowak’s statement, Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage crassly issued what he described as an “emergency address” to the nation. Claiming “the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities,” he said, “We should respond to this with pure cold rage.” Farage followed up with a spate of social media posts, an article in a national newspaper, a letter to the Attorney General protesting the length of Digwa’s sentence and a question in the House of Commons at Prime Minister’s question time.
It is no coincidence that Farage’s hyperactive response to Nowak’s death follows similar bursts of outrage from Musk and his English vassal, Rupert Lowe, leader of the Restore Britain party. As I wrote earlier this week, the hard-right Reform is under electoral pressure from the even more extreme Restore. Farage fears losing votes to the challenger party at the forthcoming Makerfield by-election and is alarmed about a splintering of far-right support.
To avoid being outflanked by Lowe’s outfit, Reform is engaging in a race to the bottom on culture-war topics such as immigration and — distastefully in the Nowak case — perceptions of anti-white bias in policing and other state institutions.
Musk, too, sees an opening to use the murder to further his white-rights mission. Since Digwa’s sentencing, he has posted or reposted about the case more than 40 times on his social media site X, known previously as Twitter. Lowe has been noisily weighing in as well. The result has been depressingly predictable. Among the rabble who took part in protests that descended into riots in Southampton was Tommy Robinson, the far-right nuisance who is always ready to lead an angry mob. Musk retweeted his post encouraging supporters to congregate.
What happened to Nowak was horrendous. At best the arresting officers were incompetent; at worst they were too quick to trust the word of a man claiming to be a victim of racism. Color-blind policing means treating everyone the same way, and the investigation into what happened that night will want to explore the officers’ training to ensure this principle was upheld.
It is also right that questions are being asked about whether Sikhs should have a blanket exemption from restrictions on carrying knives in public. Digwa used an eight-inch blade to murder Nowak, far bigger than the usual kirpan ceremonial knife most Sikhs carry.
However, it is far-fetched to suggest that initiatives to raise awareness of diversity have tipped into reverse racism. Making such accusations ahead of any official probe is deeply cynical.
As others have pointed out, Digwa’s brother made the 999 emergency call to the police, which might have skewed their judgement when arriving on the scene without race being the deciding factor.
After everything they have been through, Nowak’s family deserves to have their pleas for unity respected.
Rosa Prince is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering UK politics and policy. She was formerly an editor and writer at Politico and the Daily Telegraph, and is the author of Comrade Corbyn and Theresa May: The Enigmatic Prime Minister. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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