11.06.2026
Explaining Henry Nowak
Far-right demagogues exploit the murder of a young man to attack migrants. But the left would be wrong to line up behind multicultural liberalism and the police, argues Paul Demarty
Last December, Henry Nowak - a first-year undergraduate at Southampton University - was murdered while walking home, by another young man, Vickrum Singh Digwa. Digwa has just been sentenced.
On the face of it, there is nothing terrifically shocking about this event. Murder obviously comes as a shock to the victim and those known to the victim; but it happens. Young men like Nowak and Digwa are vastly more likely to both perpetrate and suffer violence than any other demographic. So far as the events leading up to the killing can be discerned, Nowak was filming a social media clip and teasing Digwa, who had something of a sense-of-humour failure about the whole thing. In the ensuing altercation, Digwa stabbed Nowak with a Sikh ceremonial dagger. Not the most common murder weapon, but in a fight it is basically just a knife like any other. You could knock somebody on the head with a crucifix or menorah as easily as a hammer.
What fails to be explained about this crime, then, is above all the insistence with which it is being explained. A bang-average tragedy is being interpreted with the furious imagination brought by Talmudic rabbis to the process of construction of Noah’s Ark. Above all, this is a tragedy made to measure for the modern right - a young white man murdered by a non-white man, whose mother immigrated to this country.
The complicating factor that makes the rightwing narrative possible is, of course, the lamentable performance of the police in this case. Called out to the scene, they immediately believed Digwa’s (false) assertion that he had been racially abused, and disbelieved Nowak’s (true) pleas that he had been stabbed, handcuffing him without even bothering to check. In a morbid echo of the death of George Floyd, Nowak’s last words were “I can’t breathe”; all of this was caught on the cops’ bodycams.
The pathologist assured the trial that if the cops had been more alert to Nowak’s condition, the internal injuries he had suffered would have been impossible to treat under the circumstances, and he would have died anyway. Even if true, this is hardly much of an emollient. The cops were not to know that, after all; the next stabbing victim they fail to take seriously may be saveable.
When the verdict was delivered - and sub judice rules lifted enough to give a full picture of Nowak’s last hours - there was an immediate explosion of anger. A rowdy protest in Southampton threatened to turn into a riot, with demonstrators attempting to reach the Digwa home with no doubt malicious intent. The police were able to prevent it, but there was some property damage nevertheless. We were not treated, in the end, to a repeat of the lawless violence that followed on from the Southport murders two years ago.
Two-tier?
The rightwing interpretation of events is similar to that of the policing of the 2024 riots - that this was an example of “two-tier” policing, and the cops have been so indoctrinated with modern anti-racist training that they allow ethnic minorities to get away with acts for which white people will be aggressively prosecuted. This was plainly untrue of the 2024 riots, which resulted in a comparable numbers of arrests to the 2011 riots which followed the police killing of a black man in Tottenham.
But, this time around, the bodycam footage clearly showed the police taking the perpetrator’s account of things more seriously than the victim’s. Freely generalising from a single case to a general description of policing in this country is plainly illegitimate, but the Nowak murder is certainly not evidence against the ‘two-tier’ charge. So is it fair? I think Kenan Malik - often a level-headed writer on these matters - had it right in The Observer on June 7:
Two-tier policing existed long before rightwing commentators discovered it. Certain groups have always been singled out as particular threats to social order and subject to differential treatment. When the targets of excessive policing were almost exclusively black people, or Irish republicans or working-class militants, many on the right celebrated it as the necessary enforcement of law and order. What has changed in recent years is that the boundaries have shifted. The authorities have become more sensitive to issues of race and identity, while the policing of sections of the working class deemed to be racist has become more assertive.1
In other words, there is something ‘two-tier’ about professional policing as such. For Marxists, this is hardly surprising. We sometimes forget how new it is, in grand historical terms - the first contingents of ‘Peelers’ date to 1829, and the abolition of the standing police force was a bread-and-butter demand of the workers’ and democratic movements for close to a century after that (a popular militia even featured in the first Labour manifesto). The formation of the regular police force was an attempt to create a loyal and well-organised instrument of physical force under the control of the central state, and its objectives very much included the suppression of malevolent “agitators”, as Malik’s summary indicates.
As a weapon of arbitrary state power, and given that the state primarily defends class interests, it is entirely inevitable that some will be better protected by the boys and girls in blue than others. Their violence will usually be meted out to the lower orders; the petty neighbourhood dealer gets the book thrown at him, while the high-end provider of white powders for the HSBC Christmas party proceeds unimpeded. Migrant populations tend to be overrepresented in the lower orders, and feel the policeman’s truncheon more often. The fact that in recent decades (particularly since the 1999 MacPherson inquiry) multiculturalist anti-racism has largely been part of the official ideology opens the way to strange results like the cops’ failure to believe Nowak, coming upon what they no doubt supposed to be a routine fight between two young thugs.
There is always something, however, some axis on which arbitrary power turns: and even the modern anti-racist influence should not be overstated. Malik reminds us, as many Guardian types also have recently, that the police still disproportionately arrest and harass black and Asian people. Political surveys of serving officers reliably find an overwhelming bias towards the right. Their day-to-day lives, dealing with petty criminals, drug addicts and wife-beaters, engender a deeply cynical attitude to humanity: a kind of Calvinism without the elect.
The failure of the left in relation to the police is not, as the right thinks, in its success in ‘woke indoctrination’, but in its adoption of popular-frontist identity politics that drag us into zero‑sum competition over the favour of the state apparatus. A left that maintained a consistent revolutionary distrust of the state would have much more to say about Nowak’s death, and perhaps the right would have to fight us over its meaning. That is plainly not the case today, and instead it is battle stations for more essentially defensive actions against the far right, inevitably in tacit alliance with the police.
America
That is about all that can be said about the event itself, but the political controversy is its own story. The Tories, Reform UK and Rupert Lowe’s especially fruity Restore Britain are all competing to express the most outrage. It was Kemi Badenoch’s turn, this time, to go ‘full Enoch Powell’ and portentously warn of “civil war” if things were not mended. It is a strange look; after all, anyone who took that ‘warning’ seriously would not vote for you, Kemi, and you and I both know why … Yet she must find some purchase in a political situation still extremely hostile to the Conservative Party.
Indeed, there are rumours of a kind of non-aggression pact between the Tories and Restore. Improved results for Rupert’s merry men, after all, will benefit the Tories in the short term, since they can surely only steal votes from Reform, who are currently destroying the Tory vote. A major division on the far right will be demoralising for its voters, leaving Kemi and co as the only ‘serious’ option for red-blooded British patriots (or so the thinking goes …)2. The notably turbulent patterns of vote-switching on the right (and, for that matter, on the left, between Labour and the Greens) testify to the institutional shallowness of modern political feeling, broadly in line with the diagnosis of Anton Jäger’s interesting recent book, Hyperpolitics.
Yet even this is too small a canvas, since the Nowak controversy has become a site of intervention by the American government in British politics. Lowe’s outfit is plainly a creation of the American right, specifically Elon Musk, who encouraged the split from Reform after falling out with Nigel Farage. JD Vance took a break from muttering about demons flying UFOs to warn that this event was a consequence of mass migration, as if there were no murders in British cities until the arrival of the Windrush generation ... and Sikhs
The murder has attracted major attention in US rightwing media too. This must be placed in the context of the recent publication of a new ‘national security’ strategy, which - along with promising more muscular action in America’s backyard - denounced European powers for “open borders” and the risk of civilisational extinction, along with attacks on “free speech” (meaning only attacks on the free speech of the far right, as with various police actions against the likes of the French National Rally and Alternative for Germany). This can only be interpreted as a formal shift in American influence in Europe: where before it ruled by controlling the parties of centre-right and centre‑left, it now proposes to do so by propping up the far right.
A Europe hostage to rival squads of bickering chauvinists, of course, will be much easier for a declining USA to keep down, and some level of ‘Somalification’ may ultimately result. If there is a danger of ‘civil war’, then it surely stems from this, just as (for example) the Syrian civil war was prolonged largely by US backing for sundry sectarian Sunni militias and Kurdish separatists. Squabble though they might, Farage, Lowe and Badenoch have one thing in common: grovelling servility towards the United States government.
This does not pose any particularly new challenges for the left per se. We already oppose British participation in the criminal enterprise of US imperialism (or ought to; the proxy war in Ukraine has regrettably caused a lot of backsliding here). We already oppose the march of far‑right national chauvinism. It is easy enough to oppose both at the same time.
Yet a purely negative attitude is not enough. After all, when rightwing ideologues complain about our low-trust society, they are not wholly wrong to do so. Half a century of relentless defeats for the workers’ movement, deindustrialisation and neoliberal attacks on state capacity have, in fact, produced that outcome. The right is wrong to blame this on immigration; and, indeed, the attempt to place the blame there is itself a further attack on the social fabric and ‘trust’.
Which brings us back to the spontaneous ideology of the beat cop, who inhabits the lowest-trust parts of society as a matter of course. The pro-social solution here is what it has always been: the end of the police force as a power over the general population - recruited from it often with naive ideals of protecting ordinary people, but rapidly inculturated into the ineliminable nihilism of the force - and its replacement by mandatory, well‑drilled, democratic militia service for all. Only the militia could truly use legitimate force, reliably viewed as such by wider society, and only the militia could keep in mind the good as well as the bad in that society, as it does so.