The tragic death of Henry Nowak is a devastating case of institutional failure by Hampshire Constabulary, a fact the force itself has acknowledged by referring itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.

However, for the far-right, this incident has become a central piece of propaganda, weaponising a family’s grief in pursuit of a political agenda, just as they did following the Southport murders of 2024.

Henry’s father, Mark Nowak, was unambiguous outside court on the day his son’s murderer was sentenced: “We do not want Henry’s murder to be used to create further hatred, division or tension.”

His wishes were ignored within hours.

Farage incitement

This morning, Nigel Farage delivered what he called an “emergency address to the nation.” It was no emergency address, it was a calculated exercise in race-baiting and incitement.

Farage claimed Nowak’s death was evidence of a “two-tier culture” in Britain where white people’s rights “matter less than those of ethnic minorities”, and that “an accusation of racial slur was treated more seriously than an act of murder.”

He invoked mass immigration, hate speech laws and the “DEI agenda, and, ominously, called on the public to respond with “pure cold rage.”

Rupert Lowe, whose Restore Britain sits to Farage’s right, went further still. Children, he declared, “have been sacrificed to death in order to appease foreign cultures that have no place in our country”, and asserted that “it’s happening right now, in every city across the country.”

Threats

Within nine hours his post had been viewed 14.5 million times on X. Threats against police officers followed. One misidentified officer was forced to relocate to protect his family.

Tommy Robinson and his scummy grifting gang are demonstrating outside Southampton police station tonight and a ‘vigil’ has been called there later in the month. Nick Tenconi has already been in the city stirring up feelings.

The far right are expert in combining grifting opportunities with incitement.

While the police’s actions on the night of Nowak’s death were undeniably wrong, the far right has twisted the context, ignoring that the officers were deceived by a murderer’s false claim of racial abuse.

The narrative that this reveals a state-sponsored “anti-white” effort is directly contradicted by a wealth of official data from the UK government itself. Data from the Home Office, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, and the Ministry of Justice shows that the criminal justice system disproportionately targets Black and ethnic minority communities, not the other way around.

Stop and search

The disparity in how stop-and-search powers are applied is one of the most well-documented phenomena in UK policing. Data from the year ending March 2025 shows that in England and Wales, a Black person was over four times more likely to be stopped and searched than a white person.

In wealthier parts of London such as East Sheen, researchers found Black people were up to 48 times more likely to be stopped. The grounds given to justify searching a Black person were consistently vaguer than those given for a white person, often relying on generic justifications such as “wearing concealing clothing.” These searches rarely lead to charges: 65.9% of London stops result in no further action.

Escalating force

This disparity escalates from suspicion to force. The Home Office reported that in the year ending March 2025, the rate of force used by police against Black people was more than 3.4 times higher than against white people.

Black people are 4.1 times more likely to have a Taser used against them than white individuals, and police forces deployed dogs against Black people 2.7 times more often than against white people in the same period.

The disparity persists in the most invasive police procedures. More than 47% of all strip searches conducted on children in London in 2023 were on Black children, even though they constitute just 16.9% of the city’s child population. Previous Home Office analyses show that people from Black, Asian, and other ethnic minority backgrounds are disproportionately arrested relative to their share of the population.

Betrayed

Henry Nowak was betrayed by a system that was supposed to protect him. For a dying, unarmed teenager to be handcuffed, his cries that he had been stabbed going unheeded disbelieved, is a horrifying misuse of authority. It must be investigated, and those responsible must be held accountable.

However, to extrapolate this single, complex, and tragic incident into proof of a widespread “anti-white” conspiracy is to ignore the overwhelming evidence compiled by the UK government itself.

The official data does not show a system that coddles non-white offenders; it shows a system that views Black and ethnic minority citizens with persistent, quantifiable, and often violent suspicion.

While Farage and Lowe use a rare and terrible anomaly to push a hateful agenda, the real, daily violence of state over-policing is disproportionately endured by precisely those communities the far right claims are the system’s favoured class.