Nothing ruins someone's life quicker than calling them racist. And Vickrum Digwa knew that better than anyone. Having stabbed 18-year-old business student Henry Nowak five times in a frenzied attack one evening in Southampton last December, he lied to police by claiming Henry had racially abused him and 'knocked off his turban'. Digwa then watched as officers arrested young Henry, handcuffing him and dragging his bleeding body across the gravel, where he lost consciousness and died.
Digwa knew, in the words of the prosecutors at his trial which concluded this week, that racism was his 'trump card': the magic words that would make the authorities show him preferential treatment, grotesquely inverting victim and villain. Henry had been stabbed in the face, the backs of his legs as he was trying to run away, and fatally in the chest by Digwa's 8in 'ceremonial' blade. The teenager told officers he had been stabbed and couldn't breathe. Perhaps it was hard to make out his injuries in the dark, but even so. The mere suspicion that he had said something racist was enough for the officers to make a snap judgment.
A Case That Sparks Outrage
The case has sparked headlines around the world, with tech billionaire Elon Musk offering to fund a private prosecution against the Hampshire Constabulary, demands for the officers to be suspended, and increasingly noisy calls for the relevant bodycam footage to be released. (And I can see no reason why it would not have been already, other than to obscure the failings of the three officers involved.) But Henry's death raises another, even more important point: the extent to which the doctrine of 'anti-racism' has permeated our society, from public bodies such as the police, schools, the civil service and universities, to businesses, cultural bodies and almost everyone in between.
The Weaponisation of Racism Accusations
As a black woman who has long warned about the modern tendency to see everything through the prism of race, I've witnessed too many people exploiting this issue to discredit their rivals and play the victim – a cowardly tactic that in Digwa reached its nadir. The truth is that a false accusation of racism is another kind of weapon. Since Sir William Macpherson famously found the Met 'institutionally racist' back in 1999 – in a report commissioned following the horrific murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence by a group of white thugs in south-east London six years earlier – the fear of being branded racist, or prejudiced in some other way, has become an overwhelming national preoccupation. But the noble and understandable wish to expunge racism from our public life has now reached pathological proportions.
Deadly Consequences of Anti-Racism Dogma
And we have all repeatedly seen the consequences. Last year, in a landmark report, Baroness Casey found that police and councils across Britain had for decades shied away from seeking to end the industrial rape of English girls in countless towns and cities – predominantly by men of Pakistani origin, for fear of appearing racist. We saw a terrible example of it, too, at the Manchester Arena in 2017, where a teenage security guard later admitted he had a 'bad feeling' when he saw a 'fidgety and sweating' North African man walking through the venue carrying a large, heavy backpack. 'I did not want people to think I was stereotyping him because of his race,' the guard later said. 'I was scared of being branded a racist and getting into trouble.' Minutes later, Salman Abedi, 22, detonated a bomb packed with 3,000 nuts and bolts, killing 22 and injuring more than 1,000.
We saw it, again, with the case of Valdo Calocane, a paranoid schizophrenic whom mental health professionals decided not to detain after fretting about the 'over-representation of young black men in custody'. Calocane went on to stab three people to death in Nottingham in 2023, two of them young students, and severely injure three others. And we saw it with Axel Rudakubana, jailed for 52 years for the sadistic murder of three little girls in Southport in 2024. This monster's ex-headteacher told the public inquiry investigating his crimes that, even though he had repeatedly brought weapons to school 'to use them', she felt 'shut up' and 'closed down professionally' when health workers ordered her to water down her concerns about him, accusing her of racially profiling a 'black boy with a knife'.
A Movement with Blood on Its Hands
Some of their victims might still be alive had an obsession with anti-racism not been drilled so successfully into everyone from teenage security guards to health workers and council officials: an imperative not merely to be non-racist, that is, but to suspend reason in the name of anti-racism, no matter the cost. This movement, however well-intentioned, now has too much blood on its hands. As a phenomenon, of course, it was supercharged in 2020, when George Floyd – a convicted felon and drug addict suffering from heart disease – died, having ingested the ultra-powerful opioid fentanyl, while being restrained during his arrest in Minnesota. In the middle of the Covid pandemic, when half the world was locked indoors staring at social media (with all its tendency for outrage and fury), Floyd's death galvanised the Black Lives Matter movement.
'I can't breathe' – his last words – became a rallying cry, as tens of millions of people, according to a study by America's Harvard Kennedy School, took to the streets protesting against 'systemic racism', including riots and looting in some places. Politicians almost literally fell over themselves to 'take the knee' in a self-abasing sign that they, too, opposed racism – including then leader of the opposition Keir Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner. 'I can't breathe' were Henry Nowak's last words, too, but there will be fewer marches in his name; while of his death, our current Prime Minister and the usually loquacious Rayner have said precisely nothing.
A Turning Point for Justice
Astonishingly, considering the kind of man he actually was, George Floyd's name has been mentioned 19 times in the British Parliament – almost invariably in sanctified terms – while Henry's has been spoken just once, by Reform's treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick. Yet we should all continue to say his name, because Henry Nowak's death should mark a turning point. We must end two-tier policing in Britain, and the pervasive sense that some racial minorities are extended courtesies and exemptions not afforded to everyone – including, I might add, the legal right to carry deadly 'ceremonial' knives – and can weaponise accusations of racism.
(Yesterday's decision by the Crown Prosecution Service not to pursue a third trial of the brothers accused of assaulting a police officer at Manchester Airport, despite shocking CCTV footage of the incident, will hardly dispel these concerns about the law being applied unequally.) Yes, racism and prejudice still exist in Britain: I have experienced them myself. I was stalked by a Nazi-obsessed, far-Right activist back in 2023, a man subsequently jailed for 22 years for the attempted murder of an asylum seeker. But I am in absolutely no doubt that had Henry Nowak been a black man handcuffed by police while he lay dying, we would currently be seeing protests across Britain on an unprecedented scale – and Keir Starmer would be leading the calls for 'justice'.
Nothing can bring Henry back, of course, but his death might still provide some lessons. Just as Stephen Lawrence's murder exposed the rotten, racist heart of the Metropolitan Police as it then was, so the tragedy of Henry Nowak now reveals in the most glaring terms the awful dangers of our obsession with anti-racism – and the terrible places it can lead us.
