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.