The full horror of Henry Nowak’s last moments was only just sinking in on the morning after the release of police footage showing him pleading for help when Reform UK served notice that its leader would be making an “emergency address”.
Appearing via a live stream from a location with fields in the background, Nigel Farage paid tribute to the “extraordinarily dignified” response of the Nowak family, before wading in with remarks of his own.
“I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage,” Farage said.
He went on to link the case of Nowak – handcuffed by police after being fatally stabbed by a Sikh man who claimed the student had racially abused him – to “anti-white prejudice” and call for the “promotion of the idea that white lives matter just as much as black lives”.
Of course, a few months ago Farage might have been expected to call a press conference to take questions on the Nowak case – or any others.
But Farage has been unusually reticent to host press events in recent weeks: the Guardian’s revelations about the £5m gift he received from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, and his much-derided claim that his phone had been hacked by the Russians may be behind his unwillingness to answer questions.
Yet in many ways, the 8am intervention was classic Farage, seeking to seize the moment and immediately placing the onus on Labour and the Tories to respond. When Kemi Badenoch appeared on ITV and was asked about his “white lives matter” comment, her response was: “We should not make this about Nigel Farage.”
But while Reform’s position is the latest iteration of the party’s claims that Britain has a “two-tier” policing and justice system, the Nowak case is also not without risks for Farage.
While the Reform leader is eager to channel public anger at the sight of Nowak telling police officers that he had been stabbed and was unable to breath, it comes as Farage faces being outflanked by those even further to his right.
As the Reform leader urged the attorney general to review the sentence of Nowak’s killer, Vickrum Singh Digwa, Farage’s populist rival Rupert Lowe went further. He pledged that Digwa would have been “put to death” by a government led by Restore Britain, the hard-right outfit set up by the former Reform MP, which could yet take enough votes to cost his old party the Makerfield byelection.
It also comes after Elon Musk, a critic of Farage and backer of Lowe, took a keen interest in the case, heavily tweeting about it and pledging to “to fund a wrongful death lawsuit” against the police officers involved.
As horrific as the case is, it is also almost tailor-made for those on the ethnonationalist far right who are to drive an explicitly racist agenda beyond what they view as Reform’s softness on questions of British and English identity.
When the British National party (BNP) was in a moment of ascendancy in 2000s, the far Right party’s attempts to exploit the kidnap and murder of Glaswegian teenager Kriss Donald at the hands of a group of men of Pakistani origin ultimately failed.
This time might be different. Among those eager to exploit the case of Novak, there is already a move to liken it to the killing of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who was fatally stabbed in North Carolina in 2024 by Decarlos Brown Jr, an African Amercan man with mental health issues.
Again, supposedly “woke” policies were blamed for why Brown was being allowed to roam freely despite a criminal history, while some rightwing influencers even alleged the crime was racially motivated.
Both have taken place in an age when social media allows for the dissemination and amplification of far right messaging as never before, boosted by AI.
Just hours after the footage of Nowak being handcuffed was released by Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, the image of the student’s pale white hand had become a far-right meme.
“Millions must go,” stated one, echoing a slogan used by Lowe, while AI was used in another case to create a clip in which a rose wilted in a handcuffed white hand while demonic red hands grasped towards it.
Continuing in the background is a narrative, pushed by far right activists but also being voiced by some media and academic commentators, that Britain is somehow heading for an inevitable civil war.
In his “emergency address”, Farage found time to nod to this, warning: “I fear for where our society would be in a few short years if we don’t grip this and do it very, very quickly.”
The Reform leader has long been fond of claiming responsibility for heading off the BNP’s rise, while Farage’s supporters would argue that his language was far from being an echo of those who warn of a coming race war. To critics though, it might have sounded more like an attempt to ride that same tiger.
