Inhumane and degrading
The case for an anti-racism inquiry grows stronger
It was notable, watching the much fêted drama Adolescence last year, how sympathetically it portrayed officers of the state. It’s a strangely conservative approach to storytelling, and a contrast to the great campaigning television dramas of the 1960s and 70s which recalled the injustices of the system, whether it was single mothers trying to find housing or wrongly convicted men taking on the law. But in the fictional world so praised by government ministers, every agent of the regime is doing their best, showing compassion and patience towards the public they serve.
This sits at odds with the recurrent theme of many recent real-life tragedies, which repeatedly show how callous the state acts towards ordinary people who have the misfortune to interact with the system. It was especially true of the Nottingham murders, in which the victims and their families were failed by the police, mental health services and the university and had added indignities inflicted on them by the NHS. Not only did the state fail to protect their loved ones, but it often treated them with a baffling cold inhumanity.
That same treatment is what makes the heart breaking case of Henry Nowak so poignant. An 18-year-old student was handcuffed by police as he bled to death, because his murderer had falsely accused him of racism. Pleading with police officers that he had been stabbed, he was told ‘I don’t think you have, mate.’ One couldn’t script a better tale illustrating how the system treats the law-abiding citizen, and how it treats bad actors who push its ideological buttons.
The police were not responsible for Henry’s death – he would have died in any case – but his final moments were made so much crueller. He departed this earth, as Aris Roussinos put it, with the police ‘reading his rights to him as he bled out, the British state’s perversion of the Last Rites’.
On Monday Henry’s father Mark spoke outside court after Vikrum Digwa was sentenced to 25 years in jail for his son’s murder, recalling how: ‘Henry told officers that he could not breathe nine times. He told them he had been stabbed four times.’ His son ‘should not have died on the streets of Southampton in police custody,’ his father said: ‘The way he was treated was inhumane and degrading.’ In his victim impact statement made at the court, Mark Nowak said he was ‘tormented by thoughts of how Henry was feeling lying there bleeding in the road’.
The actions and tone of the police officers certainly reinforces the idea of a state which is both unsympathetic and incompetent; while it is true that the effects of stab wounds are not always obvious, police are still trained to check for them. Once officers realised Henry’s condition, one began desperately applying CPR. It would have been harrowing; it’s a job most of us couldn’t and wouldn’t do.
Comparisons are inevitably to be made with Stephen Lawrence, stabbed to death in 1993, when the initial response of officers was criticised in the subsequent inquiry. This time around, at least, police caught and prosecuted the killer, whereas Stephen’s family endured years before receiving justice.
Digwa’s murder conviction, and subsequent release of the bodycam footage late on Monday, turned the case into national and international news, picked up by media in Germany, the United States and Poland, where Henry’s father is from. The horrific footage of his handcuffed pale, almost lifeless hands has been transmitted around the world; its symbolism hardly needs spelling out.
Nigel Farage gave a press conference on Tuesday in which he declared that Henry’s family had been ‘extraordinarily dignified’ but ‘I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage.’ His Reform colleague Zia Yusuf attacked the record of Tory rivals by distorting what Kemi Badenoch had said about ‘white lives’. A distortion, but perhaps good politics, since Badenoch, like most of her party, is implicated in the old ways of thinking. What a different world it was before 2024, and how much has political language shifted that we now have Labour MPs declaring that ‘all lives matter’.
Many of those condemning this ‘politicisation’ were keen to politicise the killing of Chris Kaba, despite being fully aware of his criminal past. Many were keen to politicise the death of George Floyd, 5,000 miles away in another country. The murder of Stephen Lawrence was likewise politicised, and with much better reason. Murder is a political act, because under English law it is a crime against us all.
In responding to this crime, however, it’s worth noting that it is atypical, and atypical crimes have less meaning for policy-makers, except for the (in my view common sense) suggestion that violent people are locked up for longer. This was not the tip of a cultural iceberg, as with grooming gangs among some Pakistani communities or knife violence among some young men of Caribbean descent in London. Indeed British-Indians commit crime at roughly half the national average, and Sikh are somewhat underrepresented in British prisons, this slight contradiction explained by the fact that British Hindus have extraordinary low crime rates. Many people, in such circumstances, might have found the killer’s claims more plausible than if made by members of other groups.
Unlike the repeated horrors committed by illegal immigrants, who seem to be both negatively selected and from countries with notably higher rates of sexual violence, this murder does not say much about the Sikh community in Britain, any more than the recent rape of a Sikh woman by a white man says anything about the rest of us. It goes without saying that British Sikhs bear no responsibility for the murder, and indeed members of the community had previously reported the killer to the police – but nothing came of it.
The murder has nonetheless led to calls to ban the kirpan, the ceremonial knife which Sikhs are by law allowed to carry. This strikes me as the sort of displacement activity typical of British politics, although on this occasion coming from the Right. It generally isn’t wise to legislate based on isolated or improbable incidents, and it’s very rare for a Sikh religious knife to be used in a crime.
It’s also worth noting that Digwa didn’t use a kirpan to kill Henry, but a longer blade which some sources identify as a shastar, which is not required for religious reasons nor exempt under British law, but which is popular with militant Sikhs. One expert witness quoted by the judge in the trial remarked that there was an increasing tendency among young Sikh men to carry larger knives, part of a niche ultra-masculine subculture that exists on the fringes of the broader British underclass. If this does start to resemble a trend, then it will be worth looking at.
The knife issue is only notable in that it highlights the extent to which the law treats people differently. Some British citizens can carry weapons because of their religion, and some can’t. They can also reasonably expect to escape punishment if stopped by the police, because of their racial background; the rest of us can’t.
I personally tend to favour religious exceptions so long as they don’t make demands on the rest of us, whether it’s circumcision or halal slaughter, although in a country as strictly regulated as ours the right to carry a knife does seem oddly jarring. As a point of principle, it also starts to become harder to justify in a more fractured multicultural society that can only function with further restrictions on freedom.
There is a dark undercurrent in the public response to this crime, and the only comfort from a community relations point of view is that the killer wasn’t Muslim. There is also legitimate rage at a system which has long treated people differently based on race, and one in which there is no doubt which group sits at the bottom of the hierarchy.
