Reversing the racism – Henry Nowak, two-tier policing and far-right riots

Blog post by Dr Aaron Winter, Lancaster University and co-editor, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Cross-posted from LSE Blogs.

​On 2 June 2026, a “protest” against alleged racist policing in Southampton led to injuries to police and multiple arrests. While historically, the far-right have tended to deny racism, defend the police and demonise or attack protestors, in this case it was the far-right accusing the police of ‘reverse racism’ against white people and “two-tier policing” which holds that racialised and migratised people are given preferential treatment. It followed the trial and conviction of Vickrum Singh Digwa, who is Sikh, for the stabbing murder of Henry Nowak, a white British-Polish university student, with a ceremonial knife on 3 December 2025 and the release of police bodycam footage. It showed the police, appearing to believe Digwa’s claims that he was the victim of the stabbing and racism, rejecting Nowak’s pleas that he was stabbed and could not breathe.  
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 The “Justice for Henry Nowak Protest”, included far-right leaders and influencers such as Tommy Robinson and Britain First leader Paul Golding. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage argued that Britain has a “two tier culture where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities” and that “white lives matter just as much as black lives”, evoking the BLM protests of 2020. He also called for an end to “anti-white prejudice” and the public to respond with “pure, cold rage“. Like so much these days, it is not limited to the far-right. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch blamed “the training that police have been given, all of this nonsense that came in after the Black Lives Movement”, adding “I do not want police looking at the colour of your skin when they’re deciding how to treat you”, and Tory Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said that the "police appeared more concerned with the accusation of racism than they were with helping Henry".

There were also voices from the US, including Elon Musk and Vice-President JD Vance who argued “He [Nowak] should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants.” The US State Department wrote that “ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline” and The Wall Street Journal called it “woke murder“. This was the latest in a series of ongoing and escalating far-right actions in response to major incidents that are, I argue, part of a wider mainstreaming, emboldening and consolidation of far-right ideas, power and influence predicated on white grievance narratives.

White grievance narratives and tropes

The first such narrative equates anti-migrant racism and anti-Muslim politics as the will of the people. The second is that white people are “left behind” (often represented as the working class but extended to all white people, “the people” and nation). The third is that the far-right represents these people and white grievance politics must not be countered but called expressions of “legitimate concerns”, pandered to and parroted to keep the far-right out of government and off the streets. A narrative and strategy that has clearly failed but underpin mobilisations and the responses to them. From this case and the responses mentioned, we can also identify a series of specific tropes or patterns that accompany each such mobilisation.

The first such trope is the exploitation of a crime committed by a racialised or migratised perpetrator that harms a white British individual or individuals, and subsequent mobilisation in response to it. While the harm that has come to the victim is central to the mobilisation and allows for a wider mainstream emotional identification, sympathy and support for victims, it is predicated not on the victim unconditionally, but on the racial-religious-national identity of the alleged perpetrator. We have seen this previously in the case of the murder British Army soldier, Fusilier Lee Rigby who was killed by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale in Woolwich, London in 2013 and played a significant role in the growth and mainstreaming of the far-right. Their main focus in recent years has been “Asian grooming gangs” and asylum seekers who they claim are targeting white women and girls, and role of “two-tier policing” in the failure to stop it. Since 2023, there have been cases of violent “protests”, and vigilante justice or pogroms at hotels housing asylum seekers and nationwide riots that followed the murder of three young girls in Southport by a perpetrator falsely identified as a Muslim asylum seeker on 29 July 2024.

Following from this, the second trope is that not only are white people being victimised by racialised and migratised perpetrators, but that the system has abandoned the former in favour of the latter due to a combination of allegedly open borders, multiculturalism, EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion), wokeness and more explicitly far-right conspiracy theories such as Cultural Marxism and Great Replacement. It is an argument that also exists and has gained legitimacy through the white working class “left behind” narrative that has animated British politics since Brexit. It is a clear co-option, reversal and re-presentation of claims of not just “hate” but systemic and institutional racism by racialised people. This claim is made despite the fact that racists and the far-right typically reject such accusations and all the evidence is that “two-tier policing” does not exist, but institutional racism does as the Runnymede Trust points out.

Finally, the claim that progress has gone too far and demand that it be rolled back because it is ineffective, unequal, unjust and leads to national decline and death. The responses from both the far right and politicians quoted earlier seem to show that there is no problem with or scope for reviewing, reflecting on and reforming police procedure, guidelines and training beyond that defined as reverse racism and “two-tier policing” and affecting white people, as opposed to the wider public. The fact that some mainstream politicians and media immediately re-iterated far-right talking points about this not only illustrates the problem of mainstreaming, but also that there is a support for, an investment in and danger of undoing what progress has been made since the murder of Stephen Lawrence and MacPherson Inquiry, which were evoked by many along with the 2020 protests, and that this could lead to more harms as Doreen Lawrence has argued.  

How to resist the spread of violence

One would think that the political and media establishment, as well as the wider public, would be able to see and expose this established and repeated pattern, and its role in the increased mainstreaming of the far-right and violence, particularly as in each case, the facts are easily debunked and damage is evident. Yet, less than a week later, on 9 June, riots broke out across Belfast following the stabbing attack of Stephen Ogilvie by Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese man who had been granted refugee status. Although in a different context and influenced by different factors, including the role of loyalism and links to the far-right, this was another racist, far-right mobilisation. The riots, which spread across Northern Ireland and into Scotland, saw widespread property destruction and rioters attempting to identify immigrant houses. In social media posts shared by Musk, Tommy Robinson identified protest locations online and Restore Britain posted “Do not make peace with evil. Destroy it”.

While widely condemned by political figures, including PM Keir Starmer, many failed to call out the racism and fascism. Some even legitimised aspects of it. Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly condemned the violence, but blamed people trying to “manipulate a genuinely held concern by many people, a frustration by many people” about immigration, while Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation Jonathan Hall KC called for a discussion of migration’s impact. There were also exceptions, including Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Hilary Benn who called it “racist thuggery” and South Belfast MP Claire Hanna who told BBC Newsnight that “What you’re seeing is a race-based pogrom”.

Statements such as the latter two should be the rule not the exception and expected not celebrated, but in a context where the far-right’s agenda sets the terms and conditions for politics, it can offer some hope. At least as long as what follows is not only a review and recognition of what took place but of how mainstream, systemic and endemic the problem is. Yet, it is not formal politics and political elites – who have ceded so much ground – which we need to look to, but to people like Nowak’s father who expressed his grief and called for action, but stated he did not want his son’s death to be “used to create further division, hatred, or tension“. Or Ogilvie’s family who expressed their devastation, but defended migrants and stated: “We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility“. We also saw many rising up to defend those targeted and oppose racism and the far-right in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.
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For too long the political and media establishment has looked to the far-right and racists as those who require democratic representation, refusing to see each violent mobilisation or riot, or the cumulative effect of this, as a wake-up call. It is to those who are targeted and resisting that those seeking to represent ‘the people’ should look and listen.  

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This blog post was originally published by LSE Blogs, 19 June 2026.

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Photo by Tolu Akinyemi 🇳🇬 on Unsplash