Henry Nowak's death: The British Right's potential 'Black Lives Matter' moment

People protest outside the police station in Southampton, England, on Tuesday, June 2, 2026, one holding a photo of December 2025 stabbing victim Henry Nowak, 18. (Gareth Fuller/PA via AP)

Albert Einstein proved that time is relative and can be bent by the force of gravity or by moving at extremely high speeds approaching light. The same goes for truth, which is often bent by numerous variables. Not the material truth, but the larger Hegelian picture of truth that filters out to the world, what Jug Suraiya once labelled the “real nature of the perceived universe”. A truth that has to compete with the old maxim about a lie travelling across the world before the truth can put on its shoes. There’s a popular quote on social media that is held up as the first commandment of journalism: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the window and find out which is true.” Like most memes that go viral on social media, it’s derivative and reductive, like a Yuval Harari offering. Whether it’s raining, how one reports said rain, and how one explains why it’s raining depends upon one’s availability heuristic, political leanings, scientific understanding, and even theological beliefs, or lack thereof. Unfortunately, the decision about what gets the oxygen of publicity, what news will be sliced and diced ad nauseam, and what will be ignored often focuses on a variety of things, like the case of two deaths involving police officers on separate sides of the Pond.

“I can’t breathe”

On May 25, 2020, a 46-year-old black man named George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, the same place where ICE agents have been tussling with suburban soccer mums, when a police officer knelt on his neck during an arrest and didn’t let up despite Floyd saying he “couldn’t breathe”. On December 3, 2025, in Southampton, an 18-year-old white man named Henry Nowak was stabbed by a Sikh man named Vickrum Singh Digwa, who then called the police and claimed he had been racially abused. The police came and handcuffed Nowak, and as he lay dying and pleaded that he couldn’t breathe and that he had been stabbed, an officer replied: “Don’t think you have, mate.” While court proceedings found that Nowak’s condition was critical after the first fatal stabbing and no amount of CPR could have saved him, it certainly wasn’t cricket to handcuff a victim who was bleeding to death. The former act of police brutality made the Black Lives Matter protests a worldwide phenomenon, which even saw the Indian cricket team take a knee, and made the progenitors of the BLM movement extremely rich. George Floyd, a career criminal, was beatified and elevated to the pantheon of black leaders alongside the likes of Martin Luther King Jr, Thurgood Marshall and Barack Obama. Meanwhile, the Nowak case hardly found the same level of coverage in the mainstream British media, certainly not to the same extent as Black Lives Matter, and when it did, it was framed as a cautionary tale rather than a bigger picture, the way it was done for Floyd. The cause, on the other hand, was largely amplified on X by Elon and his Musketeers and has become manna from heaven for Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, who have found, after the Pakistani grooming gang cover-up, another case they can extrapolate to shove a crude epithet on modern-day Britain.

Two-tier policing?

In the George Floyd case, a longstanding complaint in America was that the forces of law and order disproportionately target black men. The British Right, on the other hand, claims that in the UK there’s a different set of rules: two-tier policing. The idea behind “two-tier policing” is the notion that minorities are treated more cautiously than whites, that racism allegations are prioritised over other evidence, that police guidance discourages colour-blind treatment, that DEI and race action plans distort policing, that right-wing protests are treated more harshly than left/liberal protests, and that Orwellian “hate speech” is prioritised over street crime. The origin story goes back to what is known as the Macpherson Report, which was first published in 1999 after the murder of a black young man in 1993 and concluded that British policing suffered from “institutional racism”. The Macpherson Report also recommended that a racist incident be defined as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. The point was to stop police ignoring racism when victims or witnesses were telling them it was there. But critics argue that the logic later hardened into something else: an institutional reflex where the perception of racism acquired immediate official force. This, Robinson and his ilk argue, led to the sequence of events that saw the police handcuff Nowak, the white teenager, instead of his accuser. This is what has come to be called “two-tier policing”, the claim that police do not enforce the law equally but filter it through identity, race, religion, politics and the fear of being called racist. Nigel Farage called for people to respond with “pure cold rage” and said that this incident proved that the “rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities”. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer rejected the claim, saying there were “serious questions” but that there was “no such thing as two-tier policing”. He slammed Farage for not respecting the wishes of Nowak’s family to not politicise the matter and also slammed Elon Musk for “whipping up division” and “interfering in UK politics”. However, conservative author Peter Hitchens dismissed the “two-tier” label in a piece in the Daily Mail, and argued that this was part of a “slow-motion British revolution” where the police behaved like paramilitary social workers servicing a liberal elite rather than an impartial police force that enforces the law of the land. He wrote: “The tricky catch-all term (institutional racism), significantly, was invented in 1967 by the American black power activist Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael was a nasty anti-Semite who told the TV interviewer David Frost in 1970 that he thought Hitler was a genius. Should the sweeping reinvention of Britain’s police have been based on a charge invented by such a person? It was that sweeping reinvention that led inexorably to the lonely death and insulting handcuffing of Henry Nowak. Political conservatism has been amazingly feeble on this subject since Macpherson. Day by day, evidence has poured in that the police have stopped serving the public, ignoring burglaries, marijuana possession and vandalism but pursuing thought-crime with amazing vigour. And they angrily brush off criticism.” Many of these arguments are posited by Robinson and Co as well.

The media coverage

The argument was further bolstered by the media coverage of the two lives that ended with the dying words of “I can’t breathe”. Floyd’s killing was proof of the entire system being corrupt and police brutality against black people being the biggest issue facing America, with many no-go zones and “Defund the Police” even becoming a national liberal slogan.

SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND - JUNE 2: People protest about the Police's handling of the arrest of victim Henry Nowak, outside Southampton Central Police Station on June 2, 2026 in Southampton, England. Far-right and nationalist groups have actively organised demonstrations and vigils following revelations from the ongoing murder trial of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak. The case involves the fatal stabbing of Nowak in Southampton in December 2025 by Vickrum Digwa. Court details revealed that Digwa falsely claimed to arriving officers that he was the victim of a racist attack, leading responding police to temporarily handcuff the fatally wounded teenager before discovering his injuries. (Photo by Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images)

Online, academic researchers later described the attention around Floyd as unprecedented, with one study noting that his name became one of the ten most frequently used phrases on Twitter in a single day, an extraordinary feat for a person who was not publicly known earlier that week. The media also broke the tricycle rule. The phrase “I can’t breathe” became an approved slogan. Taking the knee became an approved ritual. The Premier League did it. International cricketers did it. Corporate brands did it. Universities and newsrooms issued statements. Streaming platforms curated anti-racism lists. The old distinction between reporting an event and joining its moral atmosphere collapsed. Floyd’s death became a global template through which every institution could prove it had understood the moment. Henry Nowak’s case has travelled through a different pipeline. The mainstream media did not absorb Nowak’s death as a national moral reckoning in the same way. Instead, it focused more on those speaking up about it, as if Nigel Farage’s criticism of the incident was more newsworthy than the death of Henry Nowak or the circumstances that led to his death.

British Right’s BLM?

And in some ways, Henry Nowak’s death is the British Right’s George Floyd moment. Not because the cases are similar. In Floyd’s case, one can draw almost direct causality to his death being the result of police brutality. Digwa, on the other hand, was the one who killed Nowak, but the police scandal lies in the false racism allegation, the handcuffing of a dying victim, and the failure to immediately recognise a bleeding teenager. But much like Floyd became a totem for the liberal movement, Nowak is fast becoming one for MAGA and the British far Right. While the political establishment might make the right noises, the anger across Britain is palpable, more so against a Prime Minister who appears hapless against every challenge: the American president, his Labour peers, Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Elon Musk, and even Larry the Cat. Many years ago, Peter Hitchens’s late brother Christopher Hitchens, one of the Four Horsemen of Neo-Atheism, gave an epistemological dictum that came to be known as Hitchens’s Razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, centre, gestures as he visits the York Central construction site in York, England, Thursday June 4, 2026. (James Glossop/The Times via AP, Pool)

Thanks to the way British authorities, including the Fourth Estate, reacted to Nowak’s killing, it has become extremely hard for everyone to dismiss the assertions made by Messrs Musk, Robinson and Farage without evidence, particularly when they say Britain is not safe for white people. This is where Hitchens’s Razor cuts both ways. “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” works only when the assertion floats in the air like a pub bore’s monologue. The problem for Starmer, the police and the media is that the Nowak case gives the British Right something more potent than argument: a sequence of facts that appears to rhyme with its worldview. That does not mean every claim made by the British Right is true. Much of it is crude, opportunistic and designed to turn grief into political fuel. That is how movements are born. Not from perfect evidence, but from images that feel like proof. George Floyd gave the progressive Left its most powerful visual indictment of American policing. Henry Nowak may now give the British Right its own counter-myth: that modern Britain sees race before it sees reality, that it fears the wrong accusation more than the obvious crime, and that some victims become inconvenient because the wrong people are angry on their behalf. Which brings us back to the rain. The old journalism quote says the job is to look out of the window and say whether it is raining. But in Minneapolis, the rain was declared a flood. In Southampton, the first instinct was to check who was holding the umbrella. And that, perhaps, is why Henry Nowak may become the British Right’s Black Lives Matter moment. Not because the two deaths are the same, but because both gave an ideological movement what it always waits for: a dead man whose final words seemed to prove everything it had already been saying.

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