Nowak: What happens next? Probably nothing.
The upshot of the Nowak murder is that white people in Britain can no longer count on the protection of the police. It removes all doubt that the police are completely politicised and that Brits are second class citizens in their own country. But then many of us were not in any doubt to begin with.
The fallout is already following a highly predictable pattern and much of the commentary draws comparisons between how the politicians reacted to the death of George Floyd and how they reacted to this case.
Today, though, the anger boiled over. A protest in Southampton, later attended by Tommy Robinson and Lawrence Fox, with Farage opportunistically getting in on the act (rather unconvincingly) calling for “pure cold rage". The protest then turned into (actual) far-right thuggery and rioting.
The riot will be condemned by Starmer as far right thuggery, and this time, he’ll be absolutely right. I’ve seen a few faces in the crowd I recognise who are far right by anybody’s definition (people who want to deport all brown people and Jews), and their actions are indeed thuggery. One of the rioters is seen sporting a Restore Britain t-shirt and a skinhead. Some of the local Poles are also in on it.
The problem for Starmer, though, is that he’s the boy who cried wolf, and has long since lost any moral high ground. Having had Lucy Connolly jailed for a mean tweet, I don’t suppose anyone will particularly care if they are far right thugs. The SDP is what happens when all the sensible and nice people play by the rules - and that doesn’t seem to get us anywhere.
Meanwhile Wes Streeting devoted the day to talking about Gaza, while his fellow back benchers devoted the day to trans rights. Andy Burnham seems to have gone into hiding. We have had, however, the customary condemnation from Shabana Mahmood, in which she remarks:
The scenes this evening in Portswood are completely unacceptable. The Nowak family made a powerful call to us all yesterday to not let Henry’s death be used to create further division, hatred or tension. There can be no justification for hijacking this tragedy to stir up violence and disorder. Those responsible can expect to face the full force of the law. I thank the police who have tonight shown great bravery and calm in the face of disgraceful violence directed at them.
Regardless of the Nowak family’s “powerful call”, they don’t get a say in how the British people react to the politicisation and misconduct of the police force they pay for. Mahmood says “there can be no justification for hijacking this tragedy” but if we’re not supposed to mobilise politically over this, then when are we?
For sure, there is some hijacking. Farage, for instance, was going through the motions, mainly to stave off Restore. As ever, his performance was perfunctory. Put 50p in him and point him at the nearest camera. All the same, there is every justification for taking issue with police conduct and the political indifference.
To an extent, much of the outrage has been manufactured, There is a whiff of inauthenticity about this, but there are times when the pot needs to be stirred. We’re becoming so accustomed to this sort of thing that we barely even react to it most of the time. It’s just par for the course in modern “multicultural” Britain. I might even venture that the odd riot is warranted just to remind the powers that be that we do actually notice.
In this, Mahmood actually makes the point. “Those responsible can expect to face the full force of the law”. I believe her. Meanwhile if you happen to be a Moslem and assault a police officer at the airport, or drive through London with loudhailers shouting “rape their daughters”, the authorities are far less animated.
The protest itself, though, was probably more significant than the riot. The concept of “anti-white racism” has firmly landed, as you can see from the following footage…
Essentially, this is the first overt sign of white ethnic sectarianism. If it wasn’t already dead, this is the day we can mark in history when any residual civic national identity died a death. The lines are drawn alone ethnic lines - and from here, Sikhs will no longer be see as good immigrants - especially when they enjoy a de facto exemption from knife laws. Meanwhile, the police have completely lost the confidence of the public.
There will be much to deconstruct in the following days, not least the politics of ethnoreligious legal exemptions. There are then interesting dilemmas for Kemi Badenoch’s Cultural Cohesion and Integration Commission. By what measure can Punjabi turban wearers who carry knives as part of their daily attire be considered integrated, or even British for that matter?
Traditionally, Sikhs have been viewed as basically ok, but in recent times as the social fabric of Britain disintegrates, younger Sikhs are looking to their own ethnic heritgae for a sense of identity and belonging, and we will see the integration process go into reverse, much like Moslem immigrant cohorts. When Moslems and Sikh youth gangs eventually go at each other, Sikhs having tacit permission to arm themselves is going to be something of a problems. There’s is enough to keep pundits and columnists scribbling for at least three weeks.
But then, as we know, it all soon goes back to normal. As when a psychotic African slaughtered three baby girls, nobody was ever really held accountable and no lessons were learned. We all just went back to tweeting. This might dent Labour’s polling and may influence the outcome of the Makerfield by-election, but institutionally, nothing will change. Nothing ever does. The country is just that little bit more demoralised and fragmented - until the next time.
Meanwhile, we see that the political parties of the right are unable to capitalise on this in any useful way. In a BBC interview, Zia Yusuf was asked "what needs to happen now?", for which he did not have compelling answers. He rightly noted that the religious exemptions on knives must end along with the dismantling of "anti-white racism", but this requires a much more in-depth analysis because we have to recognise that the state the police are in is the culmination of decades of political meddling, demoralisation, centralisation, and bureaucratisation. It may even take decades to reverse.
In recent years the police have become a bloated, corporatised unresponsive bureaucracy, that actively deters serious people form joining, in favour of bland functionaries who cannot think for themselves. The force is in the midst of a serious retention crisis meaning that the rank and file have very little in the way of experienced supervision, while the senior ranks shape their forces to a political agenda because political narrative conformity is the path to promotion.
What you then have is a neutered police force, afraid of its own shadow, where every decision is micromanaged and scrutinised and officers have to watch what they say and what they think, in public and in private - where even something as basic as professional banter can be career ending.
We then have the disgusting spectacle of Chief Constables insulting their own commands by branding their force "institutionally misogynist and racist". Officers then have to work under greater surveillance than the citizens of East Germany.
What you then have, is a court system that works on the presumption that the police are racist, and criminals have learned how to exploit liberal anti-racism dogma to insulate themselves from punishment. We've seen exactly the same in schools where teachers are no longer confident of imposing discipline in fear of having a parental complaint to deal with.
Anyone with half a brain will not stick around in a dangerous, often tedious job, to then be a political functionary saddled with endless compliance paperwork, when they can make more money and work fewer hours doing virtually anything else.
While we very much do need to shitcan the College of Policing and purge wokery from the system, most of the rot predates these political HR fads, and much of the problem stems from a police force that has lost its way, lost any concept of what they are actually for, and amalgamated to the point where they have little knowledge of the communities they notionally serve. They spend half their shift either driving around a massive patch or waiting in the detention centres to fill out forms. They are glorified delivery boys and taxi drivers, occasionally expected to be paramedics, social workers, riot control and community outreach worker.
With the system as rotten as it is, nobody serious would want to be a copper, which is why we're seeing police who are too young, too naïve, and too indoctrinated - lacking supervision and too stupid to be let out on their own. You then get to a point where the arrival of moronic plod stands to exacerbate already tense and dangerous situations - which is exactly what's happened in the Nowak case.
What you need is seasoned grown-ups and a system that has their backs. You can't have that if the ground troops have their every decision second guessed and evaluated for political conformity.
I was recently arrested for posting a meme on X. What staggered me was not so much the arrest. It was that nobody in the chain of command questioned the stupidity of driving halfway across the county in the middle of the night to put someone in a cage for posting an anti-Hamas meme. The entire force is intellectually subnormal and nobody had the gumption to push back on it, probably because it wasn't worth the political argument. That's how we got where we are today, with jobsworth coppers too afraid to put their heads above the parapet.
As such, when a politician is asked "what needs to happen now", if we are to take them seriously, we need better answers than the ones given by Zia Yusuf. I doubt Restore Britain will have anything more intelligent to say. As such, we shouldn’t expect real and lasting change, regardless of who wins the next election.
I didn’t realise I wasn’t already subscribed. You are probably right about this and most other stuff, & depressingly so. Policing has never necessarily been a job undertaken by our best and brightest. But that didn’t matter: the job was more doable, and the training vastly better, in the days of yore when police resided and were deployed locally, the Macpherson Inquiry hadn’t wrecked police priorities and norms of conduct, higher levels of trust meant that police exercised discretion rather than relying on a litany of inflexible and ideologically poisoned rules (many of which do not adequately suit the reality of policing on the ground), family collusion wasn’t suddenly a massive thing, and we didn’t have literal tribal warfare.