Henry Nowak’s death shames Britain Progressive obsessions have warped the state

With the murder of Henry Nowak, the British state, in its current debased form, claimed yet another victim. Like the victims of the deranged killers Valdo Calocane and Axel Rudakubana, who were not kept apart from the society they endangered directly because of their race, or of the clannish rape gangs effectively granted for decades the state’s licence to abuse, often with the connivance or direct participation of the police, Henry Nowak was failed by a state that has abandoned its most essential duty: of protecting those it claims to represent. The police’s defence, it seems, is that this most recent failure derives merely from the basic incompetence we have all come to assume in dealing with the British state. That the political fallout, however, centres on the belief it was a product of the racialised ideology that runs through our state at every level, has been long-brewing.

While the Home Secretary defers judgment to the results of yet another enquiry, the Right’s political narrative, convincingly supported by the released footage, is that the racialised obsessions of progressivism have claimed another innocent life: falsely accused of racism, the victim was treated as the suspect, and died for it. For all the shocked protestations made against Reform by those culpable for this state of affairs, this is not an argument limited to Farage. The Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, condemned in Parliament “the dangerous ideology of so-called anti-racism”, which “enshrined” in the Police’s own strategic guidance differential treatment of suspects according to their race. As Philp states, in what is an expression of mainstream conservative opinion rather than dangerous rabble-rousing, “extreme activists have hijacked the policymaking process, and this is where it has led”.

Philp is correct, as is Farage. This is the true state religion that governs our society, with its own Test Acts, ritual phrases, taboos and zealous enforcers. For its hold on public life to endure, for the faith of its adherents to not be shaken, it has turned the British people into its unwilling victims. To cleave to the privileging of racial difference over competence, fairness or the basic functioning of a society is now the marker of career advancement in every limb of the British state. Nowak was murdered not just by the dagger the state allowed his killer to carry in the street, but by the chaotic jumble of powerpoint presentations, HR decisions and fears of offending the wrong people which informed the officers attending his miserable death.

Nowak’s murder was not, in itself, an event of historic national importance, in a country where the consequences of sudden, violent ends have become a regular feature of political turmoil. What made it historic is Nigel Farage’s unexpectedly strong response, unimaginable only a few months ago. In his address this morning, backdropped by green Kentish downland and the chirp of morning birdsong, the Reform leader sought to capture a national mood, using this “moment to take a long hard at ourselves as a country, and what we’ve become”. Nowak’s callous treatment by the police was “proof, if ever there was any, that we’re living in a two-tier culture in this country”, Farage claimed, “where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities”. In managing the unnecessary tensions caused by unwanted mass migration, he observed, “to stop any criticism of this, we’ve brought in hate speech laws, we’ve brought in a DEI agenda, we’ve brought in what is called ‘positive discrimination’ in favour of ethnic minorities, over those of white people whose families have lived in Britain, in many cases, for centuries. That is the mess we’ve got into.”

It must be noted that both the victim and the perpetrator of this crime, one of Polish descent and one of Punjabi, were the result of migration to this country. Yet for those who might query Farage’s invocation of Nowak’s race, it was the British state itself that made race the operative factor in his death. Once the magic charm of racism had been uttered by the murderer and his family members covering for him, Nowak became a white perpetrator, automatically suspect to the officers presiding over his final moments, reading his rights to him as he bled out, the British state’s perversion of the Last Rites. Praising the dignity of Nowak’s family, which like Calocane’s victim Grace O’Malley-Kumar’s family has chosen to confront the state’s failings rather than accept the loss of a child for a greater social good, Farage suggested that instead “the rest of us respond to this with pure, cold rage”.

This is a tone we have not heard in British politics before, though its arrival has been long expected. It was not hard, even during the hysteria surrounding the death of the man who Farage pointedly called “the career criminal George Floyd”, to divine the beginnings of a popular reaction; a time coming when the politics of racial self-interest and group grievance would be turned against a political and cultural establishment wielding such a dangerous weapon with such recklessness. Farage declared that, for the police, “the fear of being called racist was greater than dealing with Henry Nowak’s murder”: but it is also apparent that the fear of being called racist is now less of a concern for Farage himself than channeling public anger towards Reform’s capture and overhaul of the state. Perhaps it is Restore’s threat, to his Right, that has brought about this startling language; more likely, it is the shift in public attitudes both Restore and Reform compete to represent.

Yet if Farage’s striking language, declaring “Enough of anti-white prejudice” and “a promotion of the idea that white lives matter just as much as black lives” marks a new waypoint in Britain’s political settlement, what is perhaps most remarkable is that the ends to which it is being put are objectively liberal ones, of “a country that treats everybody equally and fairly before the law”, rhetoric language echoed, indeed, by Shabana Mahmood. Who could argue, in good faith, against such an obviously desirable outcome? Only those who, for their own private advantage, or their witless attempts to do good or merely to be seen to do good have brought us to where we are today. The Britain of recent decades is a failing, actually-existing post-liberal regime, governed by racial hierarchies and unequal laws, overseen by an increasingly oppressive and authoritarian state unable to govern the society it has created.

The ends of a Reform government, at least judging by today’s rhetoric, and the hopes of its voters, are a return to Britain’s governance of the Nineties, by contrast with today a stable, prosperous, well-governed and fundamentally happy country. While Reform forthrightly condemns “antiwhite racism”, addressing itself directly to the dwindling majority in what was hitherto only tacit signalling, the Conservatives invert the rhetoric, focusing on the excessive emphasis on race over fair policing. Yet for all that Kemi Badenoch condemns Farage’s language, her chosen policy outcomes, of a return to equal policing under the law, are the same. There is little distance to be found between the two conservative parties: each of them, rhetoric aside, can be viewed as the last defenders of a race-blind, liberal conservative settlement already shown to be superior, in managing a diverse country, to everything that has followed.

There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical of the competence of a future Reform government, or its ability to bend Britain’s state towards a belated reflection of the electorate’s will. But what can no longer be argued against is the necessity of trying to do so, before the state loses the last vestiges of its legitimacy. The progressive obsessions of our masters have dramatically worsened Britain’s cultural and racial politics, to the extent that it is reasonable to fear where it will end; to fear that unreformed, the state will lose what little popular acceptance it still possesses, and that the reaction will sweep us into a dangerous new world, unwanted by all but the most committed extremists.

Farage’s apocalyptic language, presenting Reform as the only political choice “if our society is not to be ripped apart, where communities start to distrust each other and deeply distrust the police and all the other institutions of this country”, where “I fear for where our society will be in a few short years if we don’t grip this and do it very, very quickly”, is now no longer beyond the bounds of political speech. Indeed, many of the comments underneath his address, shared on social media, are from voters declaring he does not go far enough.

That Reform has positioned itself as the only party both willing and capable of saving the British state from itself is precisely why it is the likely next party of government. That neither the Conservative nor Labour architects of our racialised regime can be trusted to salvage what they have wrought is their epitaph. While Westminster awaits the results of the Makerfield by-election, and its probable elevation of the next interim prime minister, uncharacteristically silent on the news of the moment, it is both the Southampton murder and Farage’s unapologetic response that now crystallise the national mood. It is not in the interests of Britain’s ethnic minorities for those claiming to represent them to have brought us so close to the precipice. Conversely, it may only be through Reform being seen to defend the interests of Britain’s majority population, in rhetoric delivered through its multiracial shadow cabinet, that much of the liberal settlement of previous decades can be preserved.

Like Lampedusa’s Tancredi, a natural conservative forced by events to adopt revolutionary airs in order to preserve what was good about the society crumbling around him, it seems that for Farage, for things to stay as they were, everything must change. It is not hard to foresee, once Reform’s likely victory becomes a certainty, the functionaries of the state who so eagerly bent their knees to the enforced religion declaring their earnest allegiance to the new settlement. Britain is, after all, a country of few natural zealots, but many amoral and shallow-witted careerists.

Indeed, a key element in Reform’s victory, now, will be encouraging elite defection towards the new regime, among civil servants and others who will be encouraged to weigh the benefits of cooperation against the looming costs of defiance. Just as Hungary’s election has brought about a total clearing-out of the old order and its political appointees, so will Reform’s success or failure be determined by the party’s ability to reshape the state according to its vision of the common good. The alternative is no longer a return to the failed nostrums of the past, as our antiquated Blarite media class still believes, but the British state as we once knew it becoming its own final victim.

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