Racism is the essential fuel of the hard right. Students of history may say it always has been but a particular type of politician – Nigel Farage stands out as an example – tries to deny it. Now the mask is slipping, and the desperate story of Henry Nowak has a lot to do with it.
Last week, on the steps of Southampton crown court, Nowak’s father said he did not want his son’s death “to create further division”. He then quoted the prosecution in the trial that had just ended: “This is not a case about Sikhism. This is not a case about racism. This is a case about murder.”
At the time all this was true. Vickrum Digwa, Nowak’s murderer, happened to be Sikh, but no one argued that was part of his motivation. He had accused Nowak of racism but there was no evidence for it. And yet this has become a case about racism – not the supposed anti-white racism of the Hampshire police who handcuffed Novak as he lay dying, but a more familiar sort: the nativist chest-beating which has greeted the case worldwide, betraying the family’s wishes and offering disturbing glimpses of a potential future Britain.
The chest-beaters, who now include the vice-president of the United States, say this country has defaulted to a two-tier policing system that favours non-whites over whites out of police forces’ fear of being seen as racist. This is a neat inversion of reality. Black people in Britain in 2026 are twice as likely to be arrested than white people, and four times as likely to be stopped and searched.
It is possible to argue that the wording of the police anti-racism commitment that emerged from the Police Race Action Plan of 2022 might need tweaking. This statement says police will respond “to communities and individuals according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences” – which sounds reasonable because it is, but might conceivably have contributed to the confusion when a ceremonial Sikh knife was used as a murder weapon and its owner falsely claimed to have been racially abused.
It is not possible to argue there is systemic police bias against white people in the UK because the reverse is true.
The murder of Henry Nowak was unusual; an edge case. Yet, online, it is everywhere. It has shown how the machinery of hard-right populism is seamlessly international, amplified by technology and ravenous for anything that looks like propellant, truth be damned.
Elon Musk, on X, misidentified the police officers who attended the scene of Nowak’s murder and called for their arrest. The State Department dived into the echo chamber with an official US complaint about two-tier policing in the UK. Farage returned the compliment with a bizarre “address to the nation” – as if he speaks for it – in which, like Musk and Vance, the US vice-president, he warned of “civilisational” threats to British cities from mass migration. Wes Streeting invites Vance today to his Ilford North constituency to see what reality looks like (See News, page 12).
Farage said British people should respond to the Nowak case with “pure, cold rage”. He used to have a clear sense of where the line was drawn between his brand of populism and the unvarnished white victimhood of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party. That line is getting blurred.
Strategically, Farage cannot afford to be outflanked by Restore. Tactically, he needs another way back into Britain’s living rooms without having to answer awkward questions about the £5m he accepted from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne but never declared.
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It has been said that immigration is a way for British people to talk about race. Flags and asylum hotels are others. The Nowak case is yet another. There will be more – public symbols and personal tragedies co-opted by extremists to hijack the national conversation whenever there is political ground to be made. The job of everyone else, but especially the prime minister, is not to pander to white racism but confront it, expose it and gradually consign it to irrelevance.
Illustration Chris Riddell for The Observer