Henry Nowak’s Death Shames a Country

Britain can no longer afford a governing class that runs its own nation like a colony.

“I don’t think you have, mate”.

But he had been stabbed. Henry Nowak, 18, lay handcuffed on a Southampton pavement last December, telling the police what had happened, saying nine times that he couldn’t breathe. Meanwhile, the man who’d knifed him, Vickrum Digwa, stood by, uttering the magic words that would make him the victim, not the dying man with four stab wounds. The spell worked. Nowak died at the scene; the last words he heard were the police reading him his rights. Hampshire Police released the footage months later, in the early hours of a Tuesday morning, the sort of time an institution chooses when it would rather the country was asleep. But the country is not asleep. Indeed, it is more awake than ever to something it has long suspected: that Britain is a failing state now failing in its most essential duty – to protect those it claims to represent. Henry Nowak’s terrible end is what that failure looks like on a police bodycam.

A young man is bleeding in front of you, lying on the ground, all but motionless, saying with what little life he has left that he can’t breathe. It’s an unambiguous distress signal; a dog would understand it. Consider what it takes, then, to respond first with mockery, then with handcuffs. Short of being sociopaths, the police officers must have been subject to enormous psychological engineering to override the simple human reflex to help a person telling them repeatedly he had been stabbed. We may never know just how many training days they attended over the years, but it’s clear what the overriding mission was: to teach recruits that the evidence of their own eyes is a trap and that the colour of a man’s skin is what counts in the moment.

The police officers on that pavement were not sociopaths, but simply the finished product of a system years in the making, accelerated and intensified following the death of a man 5,000 miles away whose killing was swiftly converted into a parable of racial guilt in a state religion we know today as progressivism. It’s that apparatus I’m interested in here, rather than the officers at the scene. And it’s the state, or more specifically, those who govern it, that is the real cause of my rage and perhaps yours. Rather than dwell on the awful details of that day, allow me to put the governing class in the dock.

I’m not the first to notice that a particular kind of person runs Britain today (although there are similarities across the Anglosphere), as if it were a colony whose natives he’s been put in charge of. The English used to ship him to colonial India (it would have been a man in those days), and I picture him sitting on a verandah in Simla, the former summer capital of British India. Twiddling his finely manicured moustache, he’s high enough above the plain to keep the “smell of the natives” at bay. Not especially bright, he wears a linen suit and drinks gin at the club. He doesn’t hate the people he rules over; hatred implies some notion of equality, some claim to a similar status. He manages them, or rather, he waves a languid hand at the local police to deal with them because they’re being a nuisance about the famine again.

It’s an anachronism now, embarrassing – the stuff that used to get dramatisations by Merchant Ivory but is now fodder for a good two-minute hate session at the university seminar. And yet there’s something familiar about it because that governor, the one we now condemn as racist and appalling (and he often was those things), is the same person leading that same condemnation today. He never left. Ever the opportunist (his only real talent), he simply changed postings and ideological positioning. The only real difference now is that he was actually born in the country he administers from above. His old power is gone – he can’t flog a man or fire on a crowd – but the posture remains intact. It’s the same contempt and superiority, but now supported by the state religion to which he is a devoted believer. He’s swapped the whip for the compliance objective, but he still sees groups or factions that need managing. There are the minorities – the “exotic” castes treated like children and punished the same way (leniently) for misdemeanours. And there are the other natives, the majority – thick and menacing, to be watched carefully rather than served. He holds both in contempt, but only the former earns him status points in the religious hierarchy.

British Members of Parliament take the knee for George Floyd.

Five years ago, Keir Starmer, now Prime Minister, took the knee like a suitor. The creed he was pledging himself to had been imported wholesale from across the Atlantic and written, in due course, into Hampshire Police's own Race Action Plan. The plan called Floyd’s death “a pivotal moment for policing in the UK”, as if Minneapolis were a district in Greater London. Then Starmer stood up again, brushed off his linen suit, and went back to managing the natives. When the next man couldn’t breathe – this time closer to home but the wrong sort – he counselled restraint and patience, implicitly suggesting that anyone upset about the whole thing was somehow lacking in decorum. The best the Prime Minister could manage on seeing the footage was “harrowing”. There hasn’t been any kneeling yet.

Digwa understood the operating system better than the people running it. He reached for race because he knew the system would credit his accusation and distrust Nowak. The race card was being played down the phone before help arrived. It was Digwa’s brother who called the police rather than an ambulance, telling them, “We’ve just got attacked racially by some white person... we’re Sikhs, we wear a turban, and he’s just attacked my brother... took my brother’s turban off.” None of it was true, but all of it was believed. Of course it was – the police were primed to see the white native as latently guilty.

For the governor’s staff – in this instance, the police, but it could just as easily be a social worker or civil servant – a scene like this is frightening for all the wrong reasons. It’s a “community-relations” disaster waiting to happen. We know this because they tell us as much. Rick Prior, who chaired the Metropolitan Police Federation until he was sacked for going off script, said: “The worst thing in the world that can happen to a police officer now is to have an allegation of racism against you... So if they are turning up to an incident where there is an allegation of racism, that will be their primary focus. Rather than being objective they will be thinking ‘for God’s sake don’t mess this up.’”

The governing class is always asking which version of events would be most professionally dangerous to get wrong. They have an offence code that needs to be interpreted correctly: a stab wound counts for less than a slur, for example. So the man saying “I have been stabbed” is weighed against the man saying “I have been offended”, and loses. The stabbing was real, and the accusation was not; yet one of these things mattered more than the other. And it was not the boy lying motionless on the ground beside a man crying racism.

Britain, in truth, is today one island of two peoples. The governors watch that harrowing footage and see a procedural lapse, a failure of compliance objectives rather than a failure of conscience. Everyone else sees a young man who bled to death in handcuffs for being the wrong sort of native in his own country.

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