Pure cold rage

Henry Nowak and Britain's two-tier justice system

In the early hours of December 3, 2025, a first-year finance student at the University of Southampton was walking home from a night out with friends when a Sikh man stabbed him in the chest five times, killing him. The student, 18-year-old Henry Nowak, was a British-Polish kid from Chafford Hundred and one of four siblings. In sentencing his killer, the judge said of Nowak, “He was a much-loved, kind, hard-working and ambitious young man, devoted to his family and with a bright future. He was a first-year student at Southampton University, the first in his family to go to university. He was careful and principled, full of humor, warmth and promise.”

Reports say Nowak was sober enough to drive when he came across Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old who was severely obsessed with weapons and had previously been reported to police for stealing ceremonial training weapons. His father, Moga Singh, and brother, Gurpreet Singh, were later charged with possession of numerous weapons found at their family home, including multiple small knives, a flick knife, a machete, swords, kusaris, a baton, knuckledusters, an axe, and an air rifle. Police found more than 20 weapons in total at the Digwa family home after the murder.

Digwa stabbed Nowak to death with his kirpan, an 8-inch ceremonial blade that Sikhs can legally carry in Britain, whereas carrying knives in public is generally illegal in the country. Nowak tried to escape by climbing over a fence, but Digwa cornered him and filmed him trying to get away. Some reports say neighbors called the police after hearing Nowak’s cries. Other reports say Digwa’s brother, Gurpreet, made the call and told police Digwa had been the victim of a racist attack. Then Digwa called his parents, who arrived before police, and his mother Kiran Kaur took the murder weapon and hid it at their home.

When police arrived, Digwa told them Nowak had grabbed his turban and racistly abused him, but the judge later said he did not believe this claim because it was completely at odds with Nowak’s character. But also, if you think having your turban pulled and being racistly insulted justifies stabbing a young man in the chest five times then you are an animal who is not fit to live in British society. Nowak repeatedly told police he had been stabbed, but an officer replied, “Don’t think you have, mate.” Digwa then said, “He hasn’t been stabbed,” and a female officer responded, “I know. But we have to check, don’t we?”

The officers then handcuffed the dying teen as he lay bleeding on the ground, pleaded for his life and saying that he couldn’t breathe. He died moments later. A pathologist later said nothing could have saved his life, even with immediate treatment, but that’s not the point. Digwa was convicted of murder and sentenced to life with a minimum of 21 years, but that’s not the point either. His mother was convicted of assisting an offender by hiding the murder weapon and his father and brother were charged with multiple weapons offenses. But the point here is that they let a young boy die because he was white. The point is that if Nowak had been a brown Indian boy, and his killer a white British lad, the police would have reacted differently.

I saw an interesting panel discussion about this on the Piers Morgan show this morning. Marc Lamont-Hill was there to argue that we should not have any police at all. But I found myself agreeing with Michael Knowles, who replied by saying this incident clearly illustrates that Britain has a two-tier justice system and that “what happened to Henry Nowak is the real version of what people pretended happened to George Floyd.” People pretend Floyd was innocent, or even noble of heart, when he was a violent criminal who preyed on the innocent and was in the process of breaking the law at the time. Also, his murder was complicated by the fact that he physically resisted arrest and was high on fentanyl and meth. So now we have murals and statues of him and we all pretend like the guy was Thomas fucking Jefferson or something.

We also paint Derek Chauvin as some kind of pathologically racist demon cop, and there is some evidence to suggest that he might be racist, but also he apparently did use the “maximal restraint technique” that was clearly taught by the Minneapolis Police Department. This is not to say what happened was not a tragedy. It absolutely was. Whatever you may think of him as a person, Floyd left behind five children, some of whom knew him. Besides, his was a human life. However, Nowak actually was a good-hearted person and Digwa actually is the sociopath we were all supposed to see in Chauvin. Yet Floyd’s murder generated the largest protest movement in American history, set multiple cities aflame, wrought billions in damages, left many injured, multiple dead, and politicians just kinda shrugged and called it a “reckoning,” as if we deserved it, meanwhile Novak’s murder gets almost nothing by comparison. And we all know exactly why. And it’s appalling.

Whenever I hear about talk of a two-tier justice system in Britain, it immediately brings to mind the story of Hamit Coskun. In February 2025, Coskun, a half-Kurdish and half-Armenian man from Turkey, bought a Quran and set it on fire outside the Turkish Embassy in London to protest the Turkish president’s failure to uphold his country’s secular values. A man named Moussa Kadri saw what was happening and began stabbing, kicking, and spitting on Coskun in broad daylight. Coskun was arrested and charged with religiously motivated harassment under the Public Order Act. He was convicted and ordered to pay a fine of 240 pounds, plus a surcharge of 96 pounds. Kadri was charged with the minimal offense possible and given a 20-week suspended prison sentence, 150 hours of unpaid work, and 10 days of rehab. The judge said Kadri had simply lost his temper. Hey, it happens to the best of us.

The judge also said Cousin was clearly guilty of causing a public disturbance, as proven by the fact that a crazed Muslim was stabbing him, which was clearly disturbing to the public peace. Yes, the judge really did say that. And Coskun now carries a criminal record for life, as well as the physical scars from his attack, while Kadri faces no jail time and won’t stand trial until 2027.

Or there’s the Lucy Connolly case. Last year, Lucy Connolly, a childminder from Northamptonshire with no criminal history, posted the following message on X in the hours after yet another mindless Muslim stabbing attack:

Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.

Her post was viewed 310,000 times and she was sentenced to 31 months in prison, the longest sentence ever handed down in Britain for a single online comment. As Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said on X, “Her punishment was harsher than the sentences handed down for bricks thrown at police or actual rioting.” Critics pointed out that the man who stabbed Coskun for burning a book received a suspended sentence and no jail time whatsoever while Connolly received 31 months for words on a screen.

Then you’ve got the Rotherham child rape scandal. Between 2005 and 2017, groups of primarily Pakistani and other Asian men molested and raped hundreds of children but even though police and social services received reports of the abuse for years, they failed to investigate properly. An independent inquiry in 2014 found that authorities deliberately ignored evidence because they feared being accused of racism and worried about upsetting members of the very communities that had preyed upon these girls. A five-year investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct later concluded that Rotherham police ignored the child raping for decades because they didn’t want to offend Pakistanis by arresting Pakistani rapists. Well, I’m sorry, but if that’s the kind of thing that upsets your community then maybe your people aren’t really cut out for life in the West.

In Rochdale, there was a similar pattern of police and prosecution services refusing to follow up on appeals for help because, as former Labour MP Ann Cryer put it, authorities were petrified of being called racist. And this was despite the fact that one child gave police DNA evidence of her rape. Former MP Simon Danczuk said senior Labour politicians warned him against mentioning that the rapists were pretty much all Pakistani men — because they feared losing votes.

Daughters of England

Part of the cause, layered underneath all of this, is the import of American critical race theory and what’s broadly called woke ideology into British institutions, along with the idea that systemic racism is the primary explanation for disparities in outcomes between racial groups, or that Britain is an inherently sinful culture thanks to its history of colonialism and slavery, and that white Brits benefit from this evil system of institution al racism.

This framework arrived in Britain through universities, NGOs, and eventually into the civil service and criminal justice system itself. The idea that disparities in sentencing or charging must be evidence of racial bias rather than other factors became orthodoxy. British institutions like the Sentencing Council and the CPS adopted American-style diversity training and ideological commitments to reducing disparities by demographic group rather than by ensuring equal treatment under law, and this uniquely American export — the notion that equality means proportional outcomes rather than equal application of rules — fundamentally reshaped how British prosecutors and judges approach their work. Where traditionally British justice operated on the principle that the law should be blind to race, the new framework made race central to every decision. That philosophical shift is what ultimately created the conditions for the two-tier system we’re seeing now.

Which is to suggest, the police in this story were not necessarily racist themselves, nor were the people who created these laws. The problem is, as they say, systemic. Writing about Henry Nowak, Konstantin Kisin recently said something I like:

I am not saying that the officers who attended the scene that night are bad people, or that they set out to let Henry Nowak die. I believe, in fact, the opposite: that they were following the spirit of their training, and of the culture that had been built around them, in good faith, over years. The problem is not the individuals. The problem is the system that produced them — a system that taught them, in effect, that an allegation of racism is a trump card that overrides normal investigative procedure, normal medical common sense, and normal human judgement.

That system was built with the best of intentions, by people who genuinely wanted to address real injustices. And it has produced a policing culture in which a killer can stab a teenager five times, claim to be the victim of racism, and watch the officers handcuff the person bleeding out on the street.

They will not acknowledge what they built. They will say that this was an isolated failure of individual officers, not a systemic problem. They will say that raising this case is itself a form of racism — an attempt to undermine legitimate anti-racism efforts by dwelling on an edge case. They will say, as they always say, that the real problem is that we haven’t gone far enough.

But that game is up. Anyone with the eyes to see and the ears to hear the truth knows what happened here. A young man is dead. His killer exploited an ideology to escape justice, if only briefly. And the institutions that were reformed in the name of anti-racism are now openly racist against white people.

The most straightforward solution to the two-tier problem would be to return to the foundational principle of equal treatment under law. The law should be blind to race, ethnicity, and religion. Everyone should be treated fairly, regardless of race. This should be common sense. But that means several legal changes with regard to sentencing guidelines and other areas of the law, and it means reforming the education system, and probably immigration law. But the deeper answer to this is cultural. Britain needs to reassert the idea that merit and individual conduct matter more than one’s group identity. Or Britain needs to assert its own British identity over that of all others, at least on British soil. But currently, the system is trying to achieve equality of outcomes by race through the law, while paradoxically requiring that white people are treated as lesser. Making these corrections are a gargantuan lift, and I am not entirely convinced that the British people have it in them, or that their demographic fate will allow them to make such changes even if they do.

In the end, it seems that the multicultural project, which promised to accommodate all cultures equally, has instead created a system where the majority culture is treated as guilty and suspect while minority groups receive preferential treatment through the criminal justice system. Normally, the British would have a fantastic response for this. Namely, their noble tradition of free speech, the cornerstone of British liberty. But this has been eroded through hate speech laws and social pressures, leaving ordinary citizens unable to voice legitimate concerns about what is happening to their own society without being branded racist and possibly even arrested.

Only by reclaiming its own values and sense of moral good can Britain find itself again. We shall see, I suppose. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has presided over and defended this two-tier nightmare, recently accused Nigel Farage of making hay over Henry Novak’s murder because Farage said this:

Henry’s family have responded to this tragedy in just the most extraordinarily dignified way. But I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage.