For the first few months, Rafał worked at a strawberry farm on eastern England’s great, flat plain. I assume this was tough labor, out in the sun and the wind and the rain, bent over in a field doing the work the English did not want to do at wages they would not accept. But Rafał, a compact 46-year-old with greying hair, is flippant. He did not find it difficult. It was an easy life. And besides, he was making money. Soon, he had new clothes, a new suit. “I had too much money,” he grins, holding his hands apart to indicate a thick wad of cash. In Poland, an hour’s work would get him two liters of fuel, but here he could buy eight or nine. Rafał had arrived in an East Anglian El Dorado. 

We are speaking on the pavement outside a Polish supermarket in one of Peterborough’s less salubrious districts, its streets tucked behind the train station. Almost 20 years ago, this was, the Daily Mail proclaimed, “the town the Poles took over”. “This has happened so quickly,” a pub landlord told the paper. “Two and a half years ago this was a lovely place to live. People would talk to each other in the street, shout good morning or visit each other for tea. Now the old people are scared to walk out at night.” It is clear, looking around, that the demographics of this corner of Peterborough have changed — and are changing again. I walk past an Eastern European shop advertising goods from Romania, Ukraine, and Lithuania, but it is closed and clearly has been for some time. Another European shop now advertises fresh dosas. Palestine flags flop from nearby windows. New cycles of migration are being fitted over the old, compounding like the layers of a Roman road. 

Observing the shift, Rafał’s attitude has begun to mirror that of the pub landlord two decades before. “Sometimes black people ask me for spare change,” he says. “I say ‘go and work’.” His girlfriend is often scared to walk to the shops on her own at night. But he is not bothered. He is not a conflict guy. Recently, though, Rafał has seen something more concerning via Polish language media. An 18-year-old British-Polish man, Henry Nowak, bleeding to death on a Southampton street, as he begs impassive officers for help. According to the latest census, 4% of Southampton is Polish. When protesters rallied following the conviction of Nowak’s killer, they were joined by members of the Polish community.

Video footage of the demonstration shot by AY Audits, an anti-migrant influencer, shows a group of ruddy Polish men in sports gear facing off against a line of police. One clutches a tin of beer in his hand. The Poles chant in their own language before the Englishmen around them begin shouting “wanker”, and then the two sets of voices merge. “The Poles are some people,” added a viewer on X later. “Give them a few cans of Tyskie and they’d go to war with us.”

Poles began moving to Britain in any real numbers during the Second World War. The arrivals were largely male and often keen to turn around and fight their occupiers. By 1951, Britain was hosting more than 160,000 Polish refugees; most wished they could return home. 

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Those that came from 2004 onwards were different. Like Rafał, they had been drawn by the promise of higher wages and the chance to escape a brutal post-communist transition. And while other European nations put restrictions in place to limit migration from Eastern Europe, No. 10 did not. In the decade to 2014, the number of Poles in Britain rose from 69,000 to around 853,000.

Ten years after Brexit, the Poles demonstrating in Southampton reveal how far Britain’s migration politics have shifted. Quizzed in 2015, Nigel Farage said that he preferred immigrants from India than Poland. It was wrong to have a system that discriminated in favor of Europeans, and against those from the subcontinent, he told LBC the year before. Appearing on BBC 3, a youthful Tommy Robinson claimed that all migration from Poland should be blocked. Buttonholed this year by a Polish YouTuber, he insisted the opposite. “I love the Polish immigrants,” he said. “I’m for them.”

Perhaps there was always an element of cynicism. It is harder for your opponents to accuse you of racism if you argue that white immigrants are a greater problem than non-whites. But anti-Polish, anti-Eastern European sentiment went far broader. Polish migrants, the press alleged, were pillaging swans and fish from the rivers. The “Polish baby boom” would, we were told, lead to schools and the NHS being overwhelmed. 

In 2015, Polish workers went on strike and gave blood to push back. George Byczynski, who organized the donation drive, told the press a compatriot in Kent had been subjected to an arson attack and graffiti telling him to “go home”. “There is an issue,” he said, “with the language politicians use and sometimes they do scapegoat Polish people.” After Brexit, though, bigotry truly exploded. “It was an extremely stressful time,” remembers Tomasz Wisniewski, a Worcester businessman and community activist. “I remember Polish shops being attacked, people on the street being attacked, children at school being attacked.” In one instance, a mother was beaten on her way home from picking up her kids. “I still have the pictures on my phone,” Wisniewski tells me. “You can see blood on their faces. I will never forget it.” 

For Wisniewski, the disregard for people who had spent years working in Britain was reminiscent of the way in which the Government had appeased Stalin by failing to invite Polish troops to a victory parade held after the Second World War. Many Poles, he says, made this comparison to him in 2016. He believes he only avoided discrimination himself because he always makes sure to wear a suit. As he puts it: “I noted that people respect other people in suits in the UK.” 

As Rafał’s Peterborough implies, the demographic mix of migrants to Britain has shifted once more. Free movement for Europeans ended; entry barriers for workers and students around the world were lowered. As a result, around 4.2 million people entered the country legally between 2021 and 2024. At the same time, tens of thousands began arriving yearly by small boat. 

The idea that the British state is practicing anti-white discrimination has meanwhile become central to Right-wing politics. Writing earlier this month on Substack, Nigel Farage argued that there is “nothing fair” about the way “White people” (his capital “W”) have been treated by successive governments. (Had he taken power in 2015, it might be noted, he would presumably have contributed to such discrimination by favoring Indian over Polish migrants.)

Acknowledging that the white British share of the population is due, in time, to become a minority, Farage appears to be positioning Reform UK as the white identity party for a balkanized nation. “Without a voice to speak up for [White Brits],” he concluded, “the future will be manifestly unjust.” The sight of Southampton’s Poles confronting the police alongside furious, anti-migrant Britons might therefore be read as a sign of their assimilation.

“So you had a Portuguese wave, you had a Lithuanian wave, you had a Polish wave and then you had Bulgarian wave and Romanian wave,” says Iga Paczkowska. “So now we are good foreigners. The other foreigners are bad, but we are good foreigners. ‘We don’t like foreigners, but we like Polish.’ This is something I heard so much, so many times.”

We are sitting in her office in the center of Boston, once the locus of Polish migration to the UK. When the 2011 census was taken, this rural, Lincolnshire town had the highest population of Eastern Europeans anywhere in the country. Workers had made a beeline for the place, taking jobs in agriculture and food production and transforming the area. In response, Boston registered the highest Brexit vote in Britain. Three quarters of residents voted to Leave. 

Paczkowska had thought it was impossible that Remain would not win. “For us, it was so ridiculous that it was unbelievable,” she says. Earlier in 2016, she had set up a business, Lincs-EU, that would help Polish migrants fill out paperwork and settle into Britain. A decade on, she is still busy, but far less than she would have been had we remained. Boston, which even for a provincial English town seems to have a high rate of shuttered shops, has declined since, she thinks. “It changed, here you are. But definitely not for the better.”

Like other British-Poles I speak to, Paczkowska is cynical about the attempt by some on the Right to defend Henry Nowak. Farage should be told about his preference for Indians over Poles, she says. “Let’s remind him that he doesn’t want to live next to Eastern Europeans.” 

The apparent co-option of Poles into a coalition against anti-white discrimination does not reassure her either. “I think that Farage is a great politician,” she says. “But this is the person who, in my opinion, is as stable as a gummy bear. Whatever way the wind is blowing he’s going to go. He’s just using Henry’s death for his agenda. He sees the opportunities to campaign and that’s what he does.”

Though she opposes Farage, Paczkowska is not uncritical of Britain’s immigration regime. A jump in Romanian migrants to Boston after Brexit has caused new social fissures, she says. “They are more loud, more noticeable. They are shouting, they are dancing. They are playing music on the street, they are playing bowl on the street, they are playing soccer.” 

Other British-Poles are paid up supporters of Reform UK, such as Adam Mitula, who served as the party’s interim campaign manager for the Gorton and Denton by-election until he was suspended over racist comments on social media. “Henry Nowak is half Polish. His dad is Polish. He could have been my son,” he wrote on Facebook after the trial of the teenager’s killer concluded. “I don’t want illegal immigrants in Europe,” Mitula added. “I don’t care. I don’t want foreign criminals in Europe. I don’t care.” 

Given that Poland has repeatedly elected governments opposed to mass migration and asylum, this is perhaps unsurprising. For many on the Right, the central European nation is an inspiration. Robinson, now all in favor of Polish migrants, has attended a Warsaw nationalist march. He counts Dominik Tarczyński — famous for his boast that Poland would not admit one illegal Muslim migrant — as a friend; the Law and Justice MEP would have spoken at the latest Unite The Kingdom protest had Sir Keir Starmer not banned him from Britain.

In many ways, we are a long way from 2016. Over the last decade, Poles have climbed the economic ladder. They are far less likely to work on a factory floor, far more likely to speak English, and many, like Nowak, are slipping into the native population, identifiable only by an unfamiliar surname. As Britain’s migration debate becomes more sharply racialized and as white identity politics rises, they may yet be assimilated further. 

When I ask Wisniewski if he now feels secure in Britain, he tells me it is still unclear. “What will happen in the future, it depends on the political mood,” he says. “If politicians say Polish people are taking our jobs and eating swans then we’re going to be in trouble again.”

Yet as more and more people arrived, a man with a quizzical look approached me. He asked if I was a journalist. When I said I was, he told me that this was a private event, and that nobody would talk to me anyway. The meeting’s outcome, he added, would be publicized on social media. When I asked where exactly, he smiled and answered glibly. “The same channels where you found out about this meeting.” I wasn’t going to argue, shuffling past a thronged mass of conical turbans towards the door.

I had come to the Shri Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji Chauni Temple, in a quiet Coventry suburb, in search of the Nihangs: a fearsome Sikh warrior order. You likely haven’t heard of them — but you’ll almost certainly have heard of Vickrum Singh Digwa. He’s the man who stabbed Henry Nowak on a Southampton street last December, and whose resulting conviction for murder has generated one of Britain’s periodic fights about multiculturalism and belonging.

These debates have now raged for weeks, but one thing has remained largely unnoticed: a passage in Judge William Mousley’s sentencing remarks, where he paused to explain that Digwa belonged to the Nihangs, the same Sikh group I’d encountered in Coventry. This matters, and far beyond Vickrum Digwa — for the Nihangs are in many ways a symbol of our troubled moment.

Only about a quarter of the world’s 25 million Sikhs are baptized. These so-called Khalsa are the only Sikhs required to wear the religion’s “five Ks”, including uncut hair (kesh), the steel bracelet (kara), and the now-infamous kirpan blade. The Nihangs are a minority within this minority. Today, there are estimated to be somewhere between a few hundred thousand and a million worldwide, concentrated in the Punjab. In the UK, the movement has a few hundred adherents.

The word “Nihang” itself means “crocodile” in classical Persian or “without attachments” in Sanskrit. Both translations evoke the order’s martial roots. Formed in the 18th century, as a vanguard against Muslim Mughal persecution, the Nihangs embodied an ethos that fused spirituality with steel. “When all other means have failed,” wrote Gobind Singh, the tenth and final living Sikh guru in 1705, “it is righteous to unsheathe the sword.”

And so it proved, with the Nihangs long acting as the shock troops of Sikh military power. These irregular formations fought the Mughals, held mountain passes against Afghan invaders, and were so notorious that the British later issued shoot-on-sight orders against them. G.H. Hodson, a colonial officer who fought them in the mid-19th century, described how one Nihang “rushed to meet me like a tiger. I never beheld such desperation and fury in my life.”

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Clothing was crucial to this fiery reputation. Their appearance, then and now, is extraordinary. The traditional Nihang outfit is deep navy blue, the color chosen by Gobind Singh after campaigning against the Mughals at the turn of the 18th century. Over this, and as I saw in Coventry, Nihangs wear towering conical turbans, the dastar bunga, ringed with steel quoits called chakram. They have a special, almost theological, relationship with steel itself, which they call sarbloh, the “all-iron”. Crafting their weapons from steel, they even eat their food with sarbloh utensils, viewing the metal as infused with divine strength and martial purity.

It’s precisely this glimmer of violence that makes the Digwa case so distinctive. The killer carried two knives the evening he stabbed Henry Nowak. The first — a small, curved kirpan under his clothing — is the ceremonial blade required of all Khalsa Sikhs. Its carrying is protected under British law, provided the blade doesn’t exceed nine inches. This is familiar territory: even before the Nowak case, and all the public debate that’s followed, the kirpan exemption had been debated, defended, and litigated for decades. What made Digwa unusual was that second knife. It was an 8.2-inch pesh-kabz, a straight-bladed dagger designed to pierce chainmail armor and worn visibly. Though it’s also sometimes worn by other Khalsa Sikhs, this other blade is especially associated with the Nihang. Digwa himself wore it to work. He wore it in public. He had told himself that this was part of who he was.

Professor Gurnam Singh, a sociologist at the University of Warwick who gave evidence at the trial, said that over the last 30 years there has been a trend among younger Sikhs towards wearing the kirpan with pride. Many, he explained, see it as an act of resistance to erasure — a way of insisting on a visible identity in a country that often wants minorities to be present but inconspicuous.

Other commentators have linked this resurgence to the “manosphere” phenomenon of young men looking for meaning, not dissimilar to those Muslims drawn to jihad. I heard hints of this in Coventry, as I listened to the chatter among excitable teenage Nihangs, a group affectionately known as bajungis (young snakes). “Well, I’m with the bumbaclaart Buddha Dal,” one proudly told his mate. He was referencing his Nihang sub-order, but the strange blend of Jamaican street talk and Punjabi hints at a boy in search of an identity. “Well look at me,” I heard another kid say, like everyone else dressed in Nihang robes. “Do you think any gora [white man] is going to approach me now looking like this?”

Of course, it’d be wrong to equate Vickrum Digwa with all Nihangs, let alone all Sikhs. To wear that second blade without discipline, without years of study and submission to the order’s internal hierarchy, is a kind of borrowing that the tradition itself would not easily recognize. No less important, carrying the kirpan symbolizes a duty to defend the weak, meaning it should never be drawn lightly, or used on the unarmed.

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Judge Mousley, to his considerable credit, understood this distinction, and indeed made it the crux of his sentencing. He accepted that carrying the pesh-kabz under Nihang tradition might initially have constituted a good legal reason for having it — a religious and cultural justification sufficient to meet the threshold of the knife-carrying exemption. But, he added, that reason must have come to an end the moment Digwa removed it from its sheath. He used it offensively. Then he lied about it, letting Henry Nowak die handcuffed on the street.

Little wonder Kamalroop Singh, a Sikh scholar and representative of the Buddha Dal Nihang order, says that though Digwa often turned up at Nihang events, he was not an official member — describing him instead as a “fantasist Nihang”. Other Sikh leaders make a similar point. “We’ve seen all Sikhs of whatever background or order roundly condemn the actions of Digwa,” says Gurpreet Anand of the Khalsa Jatha British Isles, the country’s oldest Sikh temple, “and there is a concerted effort to ensure nothing like this happens again.”

Yet these fair-minded condemnations don’t change the fact that for Khalsa, even those who only wear a single blade, the kirpan remains non-negotiable. Shamsher Singh, of the National Sikh Youth Federation, which supports the creation of a Sikh homeland in Punjab, describes the knife as a sign of “Sikh sovereignty”. “If the Government wants to ban the kirpan,” he says, “many Sikhs would continue to wear it, as our right to wear the kirpan doesn’t come from English law, it comes from our own sovereignty which predates our encounter with the British.” It’s a view echoed by another prominent Sikh leader, who tells me he’s personally informed Keir Starmer that if the kirpan were banned “the UK’s jails will be filled with Khalsa Sikhs”. The Nihang tradition is even more uncompromising. Not merely a cultural identity, but a martial order with a code of conduct, its weapons are instruments of a discipline that is both physical and spiritual.

All this is taking place in Britain, a country where arms are politically and legally charged in ways that headdress or dietary practices obviously aren’t. Taken together, the Nihangs are an object lesson in the challenges of balancing minority rights with the demands of the liberal state — especially when some members are political far beyond the kirpan.

In India, Nihangs have occasionally attacked Christian pastors and worshipers. In Britain, some have gravitated towards Tommy Robinson, which is ironic given his self-declared Christian credentials. A few even joined the now-defunct English Defence League in its short-lived “Sikh Division”. Any links are tenuous, issue-specific and individual rather than institutional, especially given the Nihangs are traditionalists by nature. The nexus that does exist stems primarily from shared opposition to radical Islamism. Sikh street gangs, like the Shere-Punjab in Birmingham, were originally formed to fight white racists in the Seventies. In later decades, though, some elements morphed into a vehemently anti-Muslim campaign amid fears that Sikh girls were being groomed and forcibly converted, especially at so-called “Daytime Bhangra” music gigs. More recently, groups like Sikh Youth UK have openly supported Robinson, claiming they’re fighting Muslim grooming gangs.

Once again, more mainstream Sikhs are keen to distance themselves from these trends. “This alliance is limited to a vocal minority of Sikhs,” emphasizes Shamsher Singh, “some of whom were members of the English Defence League, much to the horror of most Sikhs. It’s a short-sighted strategy by these misled Sikhs who are only serving to divide their own communities.” All the same, a sect born resisting Islamic persecution in India still finds itself entangled, in its fringes, with anti-Islam currents in Britain, while also being associated with a killer whose actions have damaged the broader Sikh reputation as a “model minority”.

So what of the future? One possibility is that the shock of the Nowak case nudges the Nihangs closer to the Sikh mainstream, away from performative militancy and into a quieter, more clearly bounded expression of faith. Another outcome, though, is that the fringe hardens, drawing strength from grievance, street culture and ever-stronger alliances with Britain’s anti-Muslim Right.

Whatever happens next, I find myself returning to those overheard conversations in Coventry. The slang, the bravado, the football talk, the half-played identities — it all felt like the talk of boys trying on a future, measuring themselves against one another, against history, against the gaze of strangers. In that sense, the Nihangs are not only an old warrior order but a contemporary one too. That isn’t because they’ve solved the problem of identity, but because they embody just how unsettled identity has become. Here was a tradition built for a world of empires, still speaking in the language of honor and swords, now being carried forward by young men in a Britain shedding all its old certainties. Whether that leads to greater integration, harder fragmentation, or some uneasy balance between the two may depend less on theology than on what those boys decide they’re trying to become.

The British state will eventually need to decide whether it wants firmer legal clarity around the kirpan, or whether it prefers the current ambiguity, in which a sacred object can become a lethal weapon. That decision will matter beyond the Nowak case, for it digs to the core of what multicultural Britain is prepared to tolerate, what it is prepared to regulate, and whether pluralism can survive without some common rules that even the most distinctive traditions must respect. In our country’s restless search for cohesion, steel alone can’t forge belonging.

But soon enough it became obvious, even within the bubble, that Nowak was not just a murdered teenager but a moment, a moment demanding a response. After days of trying to quell the situation, Sir Keir Starmer has hosted the Nowak family at Downing Street. Yet the response so far has generally been half-baked. There are vague references to avoiding “division”, indistinguishable from what came in the wake of Manchester and Southport. There seems to be no effort whatsoever to grapple with the — admittedly difficult — facts of the case. Nigel Farage has been met with incoherent screeching. It is seriously suggested that his call for “pure, cold rage” somehow “incited” yobs to hurl bins at discombobulated bobbies. “Eleven police officers were injured during unrest in Southampton last night”, said James O’Brien: “is that cold enough for you?” One wonders what he thinks “cold” means. Starmer called Farage’s “appeal for rage… unforgivable”, but he feels angry all the time. The Mandelson rigmarole made him “absolutely furious”. Does the murder of Nowak make him furious? Does it not fill him with pure, cold rage?  

The bubble’s response is awash with deflection and denial. Their Hail Mary is that we all have goldfish memories, or that we will have the good graces to forget the events of the past six years. “Beware those cunningly politicising people’s pain,” said Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi MP. In 2020 he wrote that “we cannot allow #GeorgeFloyd to become merely another statistic, but need structural change to ensure a better society for all”. Not only do calls for “structural change” now fall on deaf ears: you are guilty of “sowing division” or “politicising pain” if you dare to make them.

The government’s effort to cast “two-tier policing” as a crankish conspiracy theory also rests on some forlorn hope of collective amnesia. In 2020, it was unilaterally decreed that the police should junk color-blindness as an ideal. They were foolhardy enough to put this in writing: “Our commitment to racial equity… does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘color blind’.” Shabana Mahmood recently had to intervene to ensure that the sentencing guidelines would not grant special leniency to ethnic minorities. Now they have the temerity to say that the very notion of two-tier justice is a far-Right fantasy, that the only reason anybody in Britain believes it is Elon Musk. I have always disliked that voguish and overused term, “gaslighting”: gaslighting is simply lying, and usually bad lying at that. The “politics bubble” response to Nowak’s murder, their flat-out denial of two-tier policing, isn’t making us question our own sanity. We are only questioning theirs. 

It has become the standard position of the “politics bubble” that now is not a good time to speak about the Nowak murder. This is the gist of Starmer’s response to Farage, and of the calls from various quarters against “politicizing” something that is, apparently, otherwise non-political. It is deemed improper or uncivil to try to draw any lessons from it at all. Instead we are told that the tragedy should not be “politicized” because this would be disrespecting the wishes of a grieving family. What kind of sick person would do that? Only “scum”, wrote Dan Hodges — a rather divisive word. Drawing a leaf from this book, Robert Peston asked Farage: “Why does the family of Henry Nowak mean nothing to you?” The strategy has ascended now to the highest level, to be limply deployed by the prime minister at PMQs. Rage, Starmer declared: that is Farage’s “response to a father who’s lost his son and asked for that not to happen”. 

The strategy is selective. We have heard much in recent days about “exploiting” and “weaponizing”: the bubble is exploiting and weaponizing people’s compassion. They are demanding that total deference be paid to the wishes — or, rather, what they purport to be the wishes — of a family that has been through unspeakable anguish. But no such deference has ever been paid to the family of Rhiannon Whyte, stabbed to death with a screwdriver by an asylum seeker in 2024. Her grieving mother has said that Starmer has “blood on his hands”; her message, that we should stop the boats, remains unheeded. Sir David Amess MP was murdered by an Islamist extremist in 2021. His daughter has been repeatedly appealing to Downing Street for a public inquiry. Starmer still has not commissioned one: Katie Amess says he has “just ignored us”. 

If the wishes of grieving families risk posing any challenge to the status quo, then they are ignored; if they fit the agenda, then they can be indulged. Recent years have seen a spate of “[victim’s name] Laws”, kneejerk responses to heart-wrenching tragedies, usually ill-conceived. Martyn’s Law, named after a victim of the Manchester arena bombing, is costing businesses billions, and does nothing to address the actual cause of the attack. It is not hard to see why these laws sail through parliament; who would dare set themselves against a dead child? These quick fixes duck thorny questions about immigration, integration, and crime, and bring governments back into their comfort zone: burdening businesses with statutory obligations and red tape. These laws, like the mawkish appeals now to the wishes of Nowak’s family, are examples of what Madeleine Grant calls “tweeslop”, a “mobilization of the British people’s worst instincts for sentimentality and self-congratulation”. It is, we might say, the British vice. 

The bubble repeats ad nauseam a single sentence from the statement given outside the court by Nowak’s father. It is the only part of his remarks which has garnered attention: “We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension.” The statement as a whole, however, makes perfectly clear that the Nowak family does think the murder has a political dimension. In fact it strays quite close, in places, to talk of two-tier policing, dwelling on the difference between the police’s treatment of Digwa and of Nowak. In calling for “stronger action” on the “ownership and carrying of all knives”, it seems to suggest removing the legal exemptions given to religious Sikhs. The family urges a “common sense approach to law and order”: “common sense” always was, in ordinary parlance, the antithesis to “woke”. 

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But let us suppose for a moment that the Nowak family really did want the murder to be kept out of “politics” altogether. Of course we must feel sympathy for a grieving family; but sympathy cannot be our only feeling. Victims’ families do not have a monopoly on our response to a crime. It is wrong to suggest that a grieving family ought to dictate the parameters of public conversation. To grant them such a thing would be to dissolve a foundational premise of our criminal law. Crimes are not just crimes against a person or a person’s family: they are crimes against the crown, breaches of the king’s peace, attacks on the very fabric of society, attacks against us all. There is a good reason that the case which convicted Nowak’s murderer is R. v. Digwa, rather than The Nowak Family v. Digwa.

These appeals to the supposed wishes of the Nowak family rest on the old logic of the clan. Someone from Family X kills someone from Family Y; then Family Y determines how to respond. The patriarch of Family Y, in the Nowak case, has issued (what is held to be) his definitive response; now the rest of us ought to quiet down and move on. This seems to be the government’s position. But, to put it bluntly, that is not how we do things. It is not how we have done things since the very early Middle Ages. Our systems of criminal justice moved past the feud a long time ago. We moved past it when the family or the clan forfeited its traditional monopoly; when it came to accept, in other words, that any crime is inherently political, that everyone else in society has an interest in punishing and preventing it.

 We know, of course, that not all cultures work this way. The logic of the clan and the feud predominate in many parts of the world. It is especially important to reject the clan logic in this instance, because that very logic was at play in the murder of Nowak. The family of Vickrum Digwa embodies the alternative theory of justice which England overcame long ago. Crime, for the Digwa family, really was non-political. Finding their son committing a murder — catching him red-handed — they felt no higher obligation to the state, to the crown, to the king’s peace, to British society. The mother hid the weapon. The brother spun a cover story. Even after Digwa’s conviction, they shouted at Nowak’s family in court. They resented that the case had ever got to court. Perhaps they thought the murder ought to have remained a private, family matter. 

These appeals to the wishes of families are appeals to clan logic; and if clan logic is now infiltrating wider British society, it makes sense that it should do so via emotional manipulation, to which Britain is so susceptible. The appeals are designed to banish avoidable events from the realm of the political: that is the plain meaning of “politicize” as a verb of disapproval. They turn human tragedies into acts of God, about which nothing can be done save a sigh and a sob. The British mainstream has always liked to tut at those Right-wing Americans who traffic in “thoughts and prayers” after every school shooting. But the “politics bubble” could hardly be clearer: there is to be no talk of radically overhauling the police, of abolishing “two-tier” justice, of restoring an older, liberal ideal of treating people as individuals rather than members of groups, of defining anti-racism in terms of color-blindness. There is, in the “politics bubble”, supposed to be no political talk at all. “Thoughts and prayers” are reassuringly inert and inoffensive. “Thoughts and prayers” are what they’re after. But “thoughts and prayers” do not meet the moment. And they will not spare other families from the devastation that has torn through Henry Nowak’s.  

While the Home Secretary defers judgment to the results of yet another inquiry, the Right’s political narrative, convincingly supported by the released footage, is that the racialized 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 favor 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.”

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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 signaling, 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 skeptical 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.

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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 racialized 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 crystallize 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.