UK police: Another day, another outrage

I’m going to assume you are familiar with the particulars of the Henry Nowak incident. It is THE story on social media.

On 3 December 2025, 18-year-old University of Southampton finance student Henry Nowak, who was walking home after a night out in the Portswood area of Southampton, was stabbed five times in the chest and abdomen by 23-year-old local resident Vickrum Digwa, a British-born Sikh. Digwa used a 21cm ceremonial kirpan knife that he carried, notionally as part of his faith. Nowak died at the scene.

Digwa claimed self-defence, alleging that the victim had racially abused him, punched him, and knocked off his turban, but the jury rejected this account after bodycam footage showed Digwa falsely accusing the dying Nowak of attacking him, leading police to initially handcuff the victim. Digwa was convicted of murder and carrying a bladed article; his mother, Kiran Kaur, was convicted of assisting an offender by hiding the weapon.

At his sentencing on 1 June 2026 at Southampton Crown Court, Digwa received a life sentence with a minimum term of 21 years. During the hearing, a man in a turban stood up and shouted “RACIST” at the judge. The judge told Digwa he had brought shame upon his family, community, and religion. The case has also prompted an ongoing IOPC investigation into the initial police response.

The more details emerge, the more infuriating it is, and the more damning it looks. Once again it shows the police up as operationally neutered, and more concerned with racism or alleged racism than any other offence. For me, it just meant being thrown in in a cage for posting a meme on X, but this time it’s cost a young man his life.

Meanwhile, it puts to bed any notion that Sikhs are integrated. Integrated migrants do not carry daggers. It is yet more evidence that ethnic minorities are a law unto themselves and multiculturism encourages and enables it.

So far as I can see X, though, most people tweeting about it don't really care who Nowak was or where he was from. Though he’s of Polish origin, he is one of us so far as the online right is concerned. He's just the latest Lee Rigby mascot to exploit for political purposes (quite rightly - because it most certainly is political). So far as the ethno-right is concerned he was one of “our people" because he was white - and because his murderer was brown. The failure of the police is merely an aggravating factor.

This, we can assume, is the beginnings of whites playing the sectarian game. And why wouldn't we? It seems to work for every other ethnicity. Any which way you look at it, the civic national identity is evaporating, rainbow multiculturalism is dead, and the police have obliterated any residual public trust.

Repairing this, though, is going to require more than just populist slogans like "scrap DEI". It's going to require a meticulous reworking of law and codes of practice, a complete clear out of the command level, a change of incentives and a structural overhaul, reversing the amalgamations that turned our police forces into bloated and faceless bureaucracies.

As they say, a fish rots from the head, and we can find several examples of police commanders insulting their command by branding their own forces as “institutionally racist”. Command staff are HR drones who openly insult their own force - and are lavishly praised and handsomely rewarded for doing so.

Meanwhile, one can't help but notice that the ground troops tend to be young, naïve, and without proper adult supervision. Even the midranking plod are pretty low calibre. It's going to require a completely new teaching syllabus and we're going to have to drag seasoned coppers out of retirement somehow, to teach the institution how to do the job again.

While there is a lot of focus on DEI, we didn't get here overnight and it won't be repaired overnight. The cultural rot is the culmination of decades of demoralisation and dysfunction - causing experience police to leave in droves. We need policies to improve retention, and to reward experience properly so good police stay on the beat rather than seeking promotion into command and management.

Most of all, police have to be empowered to act. All to often we see brave coppers doing the right thing only to find themselves in front of an inquiry board, while their own commanders and local politicians throw them under the bus. If we want good police, we have to have their backs.

Home Office statistics show a record number of officers are working in professional standards departments. There are more police staff tasked with looking into the suspected misconduct of colleagues than monitoring repeat offenders in the general population. This is politicisation of the police. A complete overhaul is required.

The other part of this is fixing the courts - reversing the mass closure of magistrates courts. For as long as the courts are enabling ethnic minorities to play the race card, they embolden race-grifting criminals who feel entirely safe in challenging the authority of the police.

I could go on at length, but if political parties want to be taken seriously, they have to set out in detail what they will do to fix this problem - and it needs to be detailed to prove that they understand what is happening and why.

While pundits will no doubt focus on the race aspect of this tragic debacle, what’s happened here is symptomatic of a fundamentally broken police, and is just one example among far too many, indicating that the fixation with not wanting to be called racist interferes with their primary duty to protect the public. It is the reason thousands of young girls were raped and abused and it’s the reason Henry Nowak is dead. This cannot stand.