Henry Nowak’s murder was a horrific crime. His family deserve justice, truth and full accountability for the police treatment of him as he lay dying.
But the far right has tried to turn this tragedy into a racist mobilisation based on the myth of ‘anti-white’ or ‘two-tier’ policing. We reject that completely.
Henry was stabbed to death by Vickrum Digwa, who has been convicted of murder. The court rejected Digwa’s claim that Henry had attacked or racially abused him. The judge was clear that Henry had said nothing racist. Digwa lied to police, and Henry was handcuffed while fatally wounded.
That police response demands investigation and accountability. Hampshire police have issued a worthless apology, and the toothless IOPC is investigating. Henry’s family, and the wider public, should not have to rely on discredited institutions to conduct investigations. The body-worn footage and all relevant evidence should be published. There should be an independent worker-community inquiry, involving the family, local trade unions, anti-racist organisations and civil liberties lawyers.
Justice for Henry does not look like the racist pogrom we saw in Southampton. No community is collectively responsible for the act of one murderer. Sikhs, migrants and black and Asian people must not be made targets for far-right intimidation.
The scenes in Southampton show how the far right operates. Tommy Robinson, Britain First and fringe neo-Nazi groups tried to turn a tragedy into a race-war narrative. Contrast Nigel Farage’s inflammatory call for ‘cold rage’ in the aftermath of the verdict, with his appeal for restraint after a serving Met police officer kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard. His role is to give political cover to this far-right operation. Their concern is completely fake. They do not oppose police violence, corruption or cover-ups. They support stronger police powers, harsher repression, and a state turned more aggressively against migrants, Muslims, black people, protesters, strikers and the left.
The myth of so-called ‘two-tier policing’ is far right propaganda that was first deployed as whataboutery to excuse the appalling far-right riots and pogroms that followed the Southport murders. The facts speak for themselves: black people are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, subjected to force and to die after police contact.
Badenoch’s comparison with Stephen Lawrence shows how far the Tories are prepared to trail behind Farage. Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack. The scandal was not that police were ‘anti-white’, but that they delayed, failed the family, protected their own reputation, and were later exposed for spying on the Lawrence campaign for justice. To use that history now as a stick with which to beat anti-racism is grotesque: it turns one of the clearest indictments of institutional racism in British policing into ammunition for a racist backlash.
Deaths in and around police custody are not common, but nor are they isolated accidents. They are a recurring feature of a system in which officers are trained to dominate, restrain and control. Since 1990, nearly two thousand people have died during and following police contact in England and Wales, while only one on-duty officer has been convicted of manslaughter and none for murder. That is the scandal at the centre of this case: reckless indifference, casual violence and the culture of routine brutality and impunity which produced it. The far right’s role is to exploit that scandal, bury the facts, and redirect anger away from the police and the institutions they protect.
Britain’s state exists to defend the class system, and its violence falls on working-class communities as a whole, but it falls unevenly. White workers suffer police neglect, contempt and abuse too – from Asbos and dispersal powers to heavy-handed raids and the everyday failure to deal with antisocial crime. Black and Asian workers face the same state power sharpened by racism.
Nor are more police powers the answer. The police already have extensive powers, and they do not use them to protect working-class people from rape, domestic violence, antisocial crime or racist attacks. They use them to harass black communities, intimidate young people and protect their own impunity.
Workers Power calls for truth and accountability for Henry Nowak’s family; defence of communities targeted by racist reprisals; trade-union-backed, stewarded anti-fascist mobilisations wherever the far right tries to march; and no new police powers.
Justice for Henry means truth, accountability and working-class unity against both racist violence and the police state.
