Stabbing victim Henry Novak from Southampton, and a student at the local university, lies prostrate on the ground in the last moments of his life desperately pleading that he has been stabbed and on five occasions the listener can hear the horrifying iconic words “I cannot breathe.” Instead of administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or placing Henry in the recovery position in readiness for the arrival of an ambulance, the body cam footage of Hampshire police officers shows them putting handcuffs on the dying 18-year-old and dismissing his entreaties about his stab wounds with the words “I don’t believe you, mate”.
The reason why the last words that Henry Novak hears on this earth are him being read his rights is that his assailant, a 22-year-old Sikh male Vikram Digwa who had stabbed him with a ceremonial sword, had falsely accused him of a racial assault. Exactly why these Hampshire police officers decided to believe his lies and prioritise this phantom crime and relegate the obvious distress of his victim will be the subject of an IOPC (Independent Office for Police Complaints) inquiry. There are many, including the local Sikh community, who believe that it should also be the subject of a public inquiry.
Last week, Digwa was convicted of Henry’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 22 years. On the steps of the courthouse where the legal proceedings were played out, the Novak family made a dignified appeal for no retaliation for their son’s murder; a plea which was ignored and violated in the most despicable way by rioting in Southampton whipped up by the notorious far right thug figure Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson and by the call by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage for a response of “cold rage”. Not to be outdone, Rupert Lowe MP, leader of Restore UK a far-right breakaway from Reform, called for the execution of Digwa. Pouring flame on the fires from across the Atlantic was the attribution by Vice President JD Vance of the murder to Britain’s “civilisational decline” caused by mass immigration. The barrel of cess was reached (if that is possible) by US Defence Secretary Pete Hesgeth at the D-Day commemoration ceremonies at Normandy who sacrilegiously compared the “invasion” of Western Europe by migrants to that of the Nazis.
Since the allegation of the existence of two tier policing in Britain whereby ethnic minorities and Muslims are perceived to receive preferential treatment in the justice system than white people is at the centre of the rage around the murder of Henry Novak and of other epochs of civil disorder such as the wave of anti-migrant riots after the Southport killings in the summer of 2024, it is necessary to examine the institutional culture that has provided the rationale for the articulation of such grievances.
Since the allegation of the existence of two tier policing in Britain whereby ethnic minorities and Muslims are perceived to receive preferential treatment in the justice system than white people is at the centre of the rage around the murder of Henry Novak and of other epochs of civil disorder such as the wave of anti-migrant riots after the Southport killings in the summer of 2024, it is necessary to examine the institutional culture that has provided the rationale for the articulation of such grievances.
At the outset, I must state that while two-tier narratives are ultimately easily disprovable, there have undoubtedly been examples of where misplaced concerns about legitimising racism has had catastrophic consequences. One example concerns the homicides of three people including a student couple, Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley Kumar, and Ian Coates in Nottingham on 13 June 2023 by paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane. The public inquiry into the killings found that racial sensitivities about the overrepresentation of black males in institutionalised mental health care led to a reluctance to section Calocane who had consistently refused to comply with his medication and care supervision regime. Dr Jonathan Gibson – who saw Calocane four months before the killings – testified that he had been repeatedly told that psychiatry was “institutionally racist” … and stated that “I did not believe that it had no bearing on VC’s care.”[1] In the words of Emma Webber, Barnaby’s mother, the outcome was a “catastrophic collapse of responsibility” and an “undoubted miscarriage of justice”[2] The other is the continuing scar left by the legacy of the grooming gang scandals whereby local authority agencies and politicians displayed repeated unwillingness to call out and tackle the systematic (and racialised) sexual abuse of white working class girls and young women by gangs of South Asian predators in Northern towns and cities.
To return to the case of Henry Novak, possible explanations for the apparently disastrous decision making by the police on the night of his murder in December 2025 on his way back from a night out at his campus have been located in the hitherto little-known Police Anti-Racism Commitment which was produced as part of the police race action plan. It is a commitment document summarising what police chiefs will do to end racial bias. The part that has given rise to controversy states: “It does mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being colour blind’ (racial equality).” According to one person familiar with police thinking, the phrasing means that in their interactions with a member of the public, they should take into account the historical experience of their particular group with policing and the context. So, in the current climate of antisemitic attacks, a Jew may want reassurance that hate will be considered as a motive for a claim of criminal damage. Or a black person may need reassurance that a stop and search is not racially motivated but a legitimate action.
To return to the case of Henry Novak, possible explanations for the apparently disastrous decision making by the police on the night of his murder in December 2025 on his way back from a night out at his campus have been located in the hitherto little-known Police Anti-Racism Commitment which was produced as part of the police race action plan. It is a commitment document summarising what police chiefs will do to end racial bias. The part that has given rise to controversy states: “It does mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being colour blind’ (racial equality).” According to one person familiar with police thinking, the phrasing means that in their interactions with a member of the public, they should take into account the historical experience of their particular group with policing and the context. So, in the current climate of antisemitic attacks, a Jew may want reassurance that hate will be considered as a motive for a claim of criminal damage. Or a black person may need reassurance that a stop and search is not racially motivated but a legitimate action.
The policy came out of the 1999 Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence and was supposed to guide the recording and investigation of hate crimes. Whether it was meant to be operational policy looks highly doubtful, with Neil Basu, Britain’s former head of counterterrorism and formerly Britain’s most senior minority ethnic officer, asserting that while police are supposed to treat claims of a racial motivation seriously that does not mean that any claim of alleged hate crime has to be accepted unconditionally. He has said:
When a victim says something you take it seriously, but that is different to believing it. The policy is supposed to stop police officers ignoring victims without investigating.[3]
The National Police Chiefs’ Council has clarified that the document is not formal policy or training for officers. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has said that she believes the phrasing is “clumsy.” The policing minister Sarah Jones has said:
I don’t think it forms the basis of any training or any police activity. We think the language is wrong, it gives the wrong impression. But I don’t think it affects how our training is done.[4].
For many on the right, the murder of Henry Nowak was the outcome of the breakdown of the basis of policing caused by the influence of wokeness, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies and, most totemic of all, the Black Lives Movement post-the murder of George Floyd in the USA in 2020. While rejecting such lines of argument, Kenan Malik does trace out the history and the outworkings of imported Americanised diversity training in policing which has led to the “two tier” narratives. He explains how in the 1980s, in response to the inner-city riots of the time and the widespread anger at racist policing, the state co-opted antiracist activists into the system by providing funding and resources. Goals for equality (a word that became anachronistic at the high-water mark of Thatcherism and beyond) became redefined as a drive for (the rather more anodyne goal) diversity. “Racism awareness training” became established corporate lingo; something which as long ago as 1985, the radical antiracist Ambalavaner Sivanadan described as “catharsis for guilt-stricken whites” and a “degradation” of the antiracist struggle.[5] Such epithets would be equally applicable today to concepts such as “white fragility”.
With the decline of independent, grass roots antiracist movements, “antiracism” became associated with bureaucratised, Americanised forms of diversity training of which for Malik “The Police Anti-Racism Commitment” document is the Gold Standard with its showcasing of performative, corporate guilt-tripping phrases such as “it is not enough for us to not be racist.” and the transformation of the meaning of equality from signifying the right to be treated the same to denoting the right to be treated differently. The decay of antiracism into virtue signalling, box ticking bureaucracy warped the struggle for equality and instilled a reluctance to act over such derelictions of public duty by authorities such as the grooming gangs scandal, the Nottingham and Southport tragedies because of misplaced racial and cultural sensitivities.[6]
But the most toxic legacy of bureaucratised “anti-racism has been to reinforce identitarian politics on both left and right and to allow racism to be rebranded in the language of white identity[7] or ethnonationalist English identity. Or in the victim narrative of alt-Right politicians like Nigel Farage that “the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities."[8] No matter that on every available metric on law enforcement, black people are systematically disadvantaged... even adjusting the use of force to account for disparities in the number of arrests, black people were still 1.7 times more likely to have force used against them last year; a figure which probably understates the true disparity, since only 70% of use-of-force reports led to an arrest.. Black people remained more likely than any other ethnic group to be subjected to almost any form of force, from handcuffing to bites from police dogs, from firearms to Tasers, when compared with population or arrest figures. Police officers were also 3.8 times more likely to stop and search a black person than a white person in the year up to March 2025.[9] In the Hampshire Constabulary area, black people were four times as likely as white people to be stop and searched.
But as has been seen repeatedly in Western democracies in the last decade from Brexit and first election of Trump in 2016 through the electoral successes of far right parties and the second election of Trump in 2024; it has been the rocket fuel of almost primordial emotion propelled by the algorithms of social media and the shadow world of plutocrats with very deep pockets that has been the greatest resource of the identitarian right. Migration and the second-tier narratives will remain mobilising forces for it powered as they are by tsunamis of misinformation with the concomitant menace of social disorder and identity-based hatred. To counteract such pernicious narratives, a democratic left that is not suffused with identity pathologies needs to rework a universalist politics of solidarity for our divided and anatomised times. But it is a politics that must not sacrifice public trust in democratic institutions on the altar of corporate guilt.
References
[1] Gaby Hinsliff, Now is the time for hard truths, not culture -war posturing. The Guardian: Opinion 5 June 2026 p.3
[2] BBC East Midlands News 8 June 2026
[3] The Guardian 4 June 2026 p.6
[4] Ibid
[5] Kenan Malik, In weaponising Henry Nowak’s death, the right has come full circle on identity politics. The Observer 7 June 2026 p.28
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[1] Gaby Hinsliff, Now is the time for hard truths, not culture -war posturing. The Guardian: Opinion 5 June 2026 p.3
[2] BBC East Midlands News 8 June 2026
[3] The Guardian 4 June 2026 p.6
[4] Ibid
[5] Kenan Malik, In weaponising Henry Nowak’s death, the right has come full circle on identity politics. The Observer 7 June 2026 p.28
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] The Guardian 6 June 2026, p13
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
A thinking piece, Barry.
ReplyDeleteTo my mind, you get the balance right and avoid making any concession to Woke nonsense while remaining unremittingly hostile to the racist hate mongering.