‘I can’t breathe’: Why Henry Nowak’s deadly stabbing by a Sikh man might turn into British Proper’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ | World Information
Albert Einstein proved that point is relative and could be bent by the drive of gravity or by shifting at extraordinarily excessive speeds approaching mild. The identical goes for reality, which is commonly bent by quite a few variables. Not the fabric reality, however the bigger Hegelian image of reality that filters out to the world, what Jug Suraiya as soon as labelled the “actual nature of the perceived universe”. A reality that has to compete with the previous maxim a couple of lie travelling internationally earlier than the reality can placed on its sneakers.There’s a preferred quote on social media that’s held up as the primary commandment of journalism: “If somebody says it’s raining and one other individual says it’s dry, it’s not your job to cite them each. Your job is to look out the window and discover out which is true.”Like most memes that go viral on social media, it’s spinoff and reductive, like a Yuval Harari providing. Whether or not it’s raining, how one reviews mentioned rain, and the way one explains why it’s raining relies upon upon one’s availability heuristic, political leanings, scientific understanding, and even theological beliefs, or lack thereof.Sadly, the choice about what will get the oxygen of publicity, what information will probably be sliced and diced advert nauseam, and what will probably be ignored typically focuses on quite a lot of issues, just like the case of two deaths involving cops on separate sides of the Pond.
“I can’t breathe”
On Could 25, 2020, a 46-year-old black man named George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, the identical place the place ICE brokers have been tussling with suburban soccer mums, when a police officer knelt on his neck throughout an arrest and didn’t let up regardless of Floyd saying he “couldn’t breathe”.On December 3, 2025, in Southampton, an 18-year-old white man named Henry Nowak was stabbed by a Sikh man named Vickrum Singh Digwa, who then referred to as the police and claimed he had been racially abused. The police got here and handcuffed Nowak, and as he lay dying and pleaded that he couldn’t breathe and that he had been stabbed, an officer replied: “Don’t assume you’ve, mate.” Whereas courtroom proceedings discovered that Nowak’s situation was crucial after the primary deadly stabbing and no quantity of CPR might have saved him, it actually wasn’t cricket to handcuff a sufferer who was bleeding to dying.The previous act of police brutality made the Black Lives Matter protests a worldwide phenomenon, which even noticed the Indian cricket workforce take a knee, and made the progenitors of the BLM motion extraordinarily wealthy. George Floyd, a profession prison, was beatified and elevated to the pantheon of black leaders alongside the likes of Martin Luther King Jr, Thurgood Marshall and Barack Obama.
In the meantime, the Nowak case hardly discovered the identical degree of protection within the mainstream British media, actually to not the identical extent as Black Lives Matter, and when it did, it was framed as a cautionary story relatively than a much bigger image, the way in which it was achieved for Floyd. The trigger, alternatively, was largely amplified on X by Elon and his Musketeers and has turn into manna from heaven for Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, who’ve discovered, after the Pakistani grooming gang cover-up, one other case they will extrapolate to shove a crude epithet on modern-day Britain.
Two-tier policing?
Within the George Floyd case, a longstanding criticism in America was that the forces of regulation and order disproportionately goal black males. The British Proper, alternatively, claims that within the UK there’s a unique algorithm: two-tier policing.The concept behind “two-tier policing” is the notion that minorities are handled extra cautiously than whites, that racism allegations are prioritised over different proof, that police steerage discourages colour-blind remedy, that DEI and race motion plans distort policing, that right-wing protests are handled extra harshly than left/liberal protests, and that Orwellian “hate speech” is prioritised over avenue crime.The origin story goes again to what’s often called the Macpherson Report, which was first revealed in 1999 after the homicide of a black younger man in 1993 and concluded that British policing suffered from “institutional racism”.The Macpherson Report additionally beneficial {that a} racist incident be outlined as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the sufferer or every other individual”. The purpose was to cease police ignoring racism when victims or witnesses have been telling them it was there. However critics argue that the logic later hardened into one thing else: an institutional reflex the place the notion of racism acquired fast official drive.This, Robinson and his ilk argue, led to the sequence of occasions that noticed the police handcuff Nowak, the white teenager, as an alternative of his accuser.That is what has come to be referred to as “two-tier policing”, the declare that police don’t implement the regulation equally however filter it by way of identification, race, faith, politics and the worry of being referred to as racist.
Nigel Farage referred to as for individuals to reply with “pure chilly rage” and mentioned that this incident proved that the “rights and privileges of white individuals matter lower than these of ethnic minorities”.UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer rejected the declare, saying there have been “severe questions” however that there was “no such factor as two-tier policing”. He slammed Farage for not respecting the desires of Nowak’s household to not politicise the matter and likewise slammed Elon Musk for “whipping up division” and “interfering in UK politics”.Nevertheless, conservative writer Peter Hitchens dismissed the “two-tier” label in a bit within the Every day Mail, and argued that this was a part of a “slow-motion British revolution” the place the police behaved like paramilitary social staff servicing a liberal elite relatively than an neutral police drive that enforces the regulation of the land.
He wrote: “The tough catch-all time period (institutional racism), considerably, was invented in 1967 by the American black energy activist Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael was a nasty anti-Semite who informed the TV interviewer David Frost in 1970 that he thought Hitler was a genius. Ought to the sweeping reinvention of Britain’s police have been primarily based on a cost invented by such an individual? It was that sweeping reinvention that led inexorably to the lonely dying and insulting handcuffing of Henry Nowak. Political conservatism has been amazingly feeble on this topic since Macpherson. Day-to-day, proof has poured in that the police have stopped serving the general public, ignoring burglaries, marijuana possession and vandalism however pursuing thought-crime with wonderful vigour. And so they angrily brush off criticism.”Many of those arguments are posited by Robinson and Co as properly.
The media protection
The argument was additional bolstered by the media protection of the 2 lives that ended with the dying phrases of “I can’t breathe”. Floyd’s killing was proof of your entire system being corrupt and police brutality in opposition to black individuals being the most important situation dealing with America, with many no-go zones and “Defund the Police” even turning into a nationwide liberal slogan.
SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND – JUNE 2: Individuals protest concerning the Police’s dealing with of the arrest of sufferer Henry Nowak, outdoors Southampton Central Police Station on June 2, 2026 in Southampton, England. Far-right and nationalist teams have actively organised demonstrations and vigils following revelations from the continuing homicide trial of 18-year-old pupil Henry Nowak. The case includes the deadly stabbing of Nowak in Southampton in December 2025 by Vickrum Digwa. Court docket particulars revealed that Digwa falsely claimed to arriving officers that he was the sufferer of a racist assault, main responding police to briefly handcuff the fatally wounded teenager earlier than discovering his accidents. (Photograph by Finnbarr Webster/Getty Photos)
On-line, tutorial researchers later described the eye round Floyd as unprecedented, with one research noting that his title grew to become one of many ten most steadily used phrases on Twitter in a single day, a unprecedented feat for an individual who was not publicly recognized earlier that week.The media additionally broke the tricycle rule. The phrase “I can’t breathe” grew to become an authorized slogan. Taking the knee grew to become an authorized ritual. The Premier League did it. Worldwide cricketers did it. Company manufacturers did it. Universities and newsrooms issued statements. Streaming platforms curated anti-racism lists. The previous distinction between reporting an occasion and becoming a member of its ethical environment collapsed. Floyd’s dying grew to become a world template by way of which each and every establishment might show it had understood the second.Henry Nowak’s case has travelled by way of a unique pipeline. The mainstream media didn’t take in Nowak’s dying as a nationwide ethical reckoning in the identical manner. As an alternative, it centered extra on these talking up about it, as if Nigel Farage’s criticism of the incident was extra newsworthy than the dying of Henry Nowak or the circumstances that led to his dying.
British Proper’s BLM?
And in some methods, Henry Nowak’s dying is the British Proper’s George Floyd second. Not as a result of the instances are related. In Floyd’s case, one can draw nearly direct causality to his dying being the results of police brutality. Digwa, alternatively, was the one who killed Nowak, however the police scandal lies within the false racism allegation, the handcuffing of a dying sufferer, and the failure to right away recognise a bleeding teenager. However very like Floyd grew to become a totem for the liberal motion, Nowak is quick turning into one for MAGA and the British far Proper.Whereas the political institution would possibly make the fitting noises, the anger throughout Britain is palpable, extra so in opposition to a Prime Minister who seems hapless in opposition to each problem: the American president, his Labour friends, Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Elon Musk, and even Larry the Cat.A few years in the past, Peter Hitchens’s late brother Christopher Hitchens, one of many 4 Horsemen of Neo-Atheism, gave an epistemological dictum that got here to be often called Hitchens’s Razor: “What could be asserted with out proof can be dismissed with out proof.”
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, centre, gestures as he visits the York Central building website in York, England, Thursday June 4, 2026. (James Glossop/The Instances by way of AP, Pool)
Because of the way in which British authorities, together with the Fourth Property, reacted to Nowak’s killing, it has turn into extraordinarily arduous for everybody to dismiss the assertions made by Messrs Musk, Robinson and Farage with out proof, notably once they say Britain will not be protected for white individuals.That is the place Hitchens’s Razor cuts each methods. “What could be asserted with out proof can be dismissed with out proof” works solely when the assertion floats within the air like a pub bore’s monologue. The issue for Starmer, the police and the media is that the Nowak case offers the British Proper one thing stronger than argument: a sequence of info that seems to rhyme with its worldview.That doesn’t imply each declare made by the British Proper is true. A lot of it’s crude, opportunistic and designed to show grief into political gas.That’s how actions are born. Not from good proof, however from pictures that really feel like proof. George Floyd gave the progressive Left its strongest visible indictment of American policing. Henry Nowak might now give the British Proper its personal counter-myth: that fashionable Britain sees race earlier than it sees actuality, that it fears the incorrect accusation greater than the apparent crime, and that some victims turn into inconvenient as a result of the incorrect individuals are offended on their behalf.Which brings us again to the rain. The previous journalism quote says the job is to look out of the window and say whether or not it’s raining. However in Minneapolis, the rain was declared a flood. In Southampton, the primary intuition was to verify who was holding the umbrella.And that, maybe, is why Henry Nowak might turn into the British Proper’s Black Lives Matter second. Not as a result of the 2 deaths are the identical, however as a result of each gave an ideological motion what it at all times waits for: a lifeless man whose closing phrases appeared to show every part it had already been saying.
