Nigel Farage has weaponised the murder of Henry Nowak - David Behrens
Even in their darkest hour, Henry Nowak’s family conducted themselves with decency and dignity. What, though, of the mob that gathered outside Southampton police station to ‘avenge’ his murder?
Henry’s death was a tragedy of the police’s making. Not just because of the catastrophic error of judgement by officers who sided with his killer – but because they were following orders that were supposed to reverse decades of institutional racism by PCs who had gone before.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. They only make the wrong worse.
Henry was an 18 year-old finance student who died on a suburban street for no apparent reason. Every parent who ever waved their child off to university will have shivered in their bones at the sight of him in handcuffs as he bled to death, denied even a shred of dignity.
The sense of injustice was heightened because we now know what happened next. Henry’s killer, a young Sikh man with a ceremonial knife fetish, played the racism card and the officers believed him implicitly because he wasn’t white.
Had the roles been reversed – as they have been many times before, in every English city – there would have been righteous fury from the progressive Left. This time the fury was from the extreme Right and it was self-righteous.
At the heart of the disquiet was what was perceived to be a two-tier national policing policy of treating white people and ethnic minorities differently. It’s called the Police Anti-Racism Commitment.
It has been imposed by senior officers conscious of having discriminated for years against minorities, intentionally or not. But in seeking to redress the balance they have erred too far in the opposite direction.
They do not, of course, use the phrase ‘two-tier’ in their guidance, which is couched in officialese with repeated references to ‘outcome frameworks’ and ‘overarching ambition’. But it does contain the ambiguous statement that a “commitment to racial equity does not mean treating everyone the same or being colour blind (racial equality)”.
If it doesn’t mean racial equality it must mean positive discrimination. That is the only sensible interpretation. The Policing Minister Sarah Jones admitted as much when she said the wording was “clumsy” and might give the incorrect impression that not everyone was equal in the eyes of the law.
But the Union Jack-waving mob that gathered near the killer’s home on Tuesday evening was incapable of processing that level of nuance.
They were reacting viscerally to Nigel Farage’s rabble-rousing demand to demonstrate “pure cold rage”. Farage, in turn, was driven by those even further to the Right, who consider him a moderate. He and Rupert Lowe and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon weaponised the plebeians because they are the only weapons it is within their power to deploy.
Who exactly were their avenging white supremacists? Pictures from the scene show a ragtag band of mostly middle-aged people of the type you might expect to find smoking in a pub doorway. But an official survey, published coincidentally just the day before, offers a less pejorative, more scientific breakdown.
The latest British Social Attitudes report sets out to discover who supports Reform UK and why. The answers are revealing but not surprising. See if you can match the traits to anyone you know.
We learn that 40 per cent of the party’s followers never made it beyond GCSE level and only nine per cent are graduates. So poor Henry Nowak was unlikely to have identified with any of the herd on Tuesday night, their ‘Justice 4 Henry’ placards notwithstanding.
More than a quarter of Reform voters are 55 and above but fewer than one in five are below 34, the survey tells us. Most are male. Three-quarters believe migrants undermine British culture, while less than a third of the rest of us agree.
Most tellingly, 78 per cent think benefits are too high, compared with 60 per cent of voters generally. Yet a higher-than-average proportion of Reformers say they are ‘struggling’ on their current household income – an anomaly that suggests they wouldn’t be averse to higher benefits for themselves. Their anger is directed only at people ‘different’ to them.
That is an insult to the family whose tragedy they thought they were somehow avenging. Mark Nowak said after seeing his son’s killer jailed for life that “we do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension”.
But Reform has got where it is by doing precisely that. It is all it has done or ever will do. And those police officers in Southampton, and the policy they were enforcing, will help them go on doing it.