Minorities in the UK are touchy when whispers of revolution drift into the nation’s dining rooms at night, but cheerfully, I’m here to inform them. With the exception of grooming gangs, they’re okay, because if revolution is occasioned, which many scholars suggest it will, there will be years of priorities, and the overwhelming majority of those scholars are white people who wear clothes from Next or TK Maxx.
It may be that the lanyard class who’ll get it first are lazy civil service personnel, (tempered by the kidnapping and torture of say, a former, especially buffoonish Prime Minister) for the appearance of fairness. But when that’s done, the next stage will involve confronting the avatars of institutional “anti-racism” theory in the UK who have just claimed their latest victim.
Henry Nowak was an 18-year-old accountancy student from Southampton, on his way back from a Christmas drink with his soccer team in December last year. On a pavement he collided with a Sikh called Vickrum Digwa – a man used to wearing his ceremonial knife, or kirpan. After what appears to have started as a shove, Digwa unsheathed another knife and stabbed Nowak, slicing his lung.
Nowak tried to escape but was stabbed again. He climbed over a wall then collapsed. The police were informed of a stabbing by a neighbour, but didn’t respond. When Digwa’s brother called them, having arrived at the scene with his mother and father, he told them his brother “had been racially attacked”.
The police arrived. In bodycam footage, Nowak, clearly dying, can be heard telling the police he was stabbed. The police dragged his body before doubting his claim: “Don’t think you have, mate.”. Nowak was then cuffed and read his Miranda before rasping “I can’t breathe” (nine times). Only then, amidst Digwa and his brother repeating the lie of the “racist attack” did police begin to suspect that something was wrong with Nowak. Not ninety minutes after his encounter with Digwa, he was pronounced dead.
From 2020, strange things started happening to institutions in the UK. Inquiries into racism had become a sick fad and reports were being generated everywhere, all starting with the words “The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 made us all…” Returning to this era is the equivalent of a Shamanic experience involving the use of Ayahuasca to dislodge stubborn trauma, the most visible symptom being uncontrollable nausea.
For everyone’s sake, it’s a time best forgotten, but it remains a time unforgiven. The image of then opposition leader Keir Starmer kneeling (one of countless examples of how white UK managers seized an incident an ocean away to enhance their credentials) continues to stalk the country. It was during that time that an absurd Marxist tool of consensus, snatched from dormant pockets of academia at the turn of the millennium, was bled into the mainstream.
Critical Race Theory, or CRT, insists that black people cannot be racist, and that truth requires no proof. In 1999, a report published by a judge called William McPherson into the death of a young black man called Stephen Lawrence described the police as “institutionally racist”.
In another age the judge’s circumstances would defy belief. He was posh Scottish and privately educated. Yet in 1999 he would use black panther language (CRT), to describe UK law enforcement, placing a target on the back of the very establishment within which he had prospered.
Just over two decades later, the tool was unleashed to chilling effect within the police. “Racism action plans” consisting of layers of incoherent diversity-speak were composed by every single constabulary in the country. The Royal College of Policing’s guidance incorporated new “anti-racism commitments” and “stakeholder engagements” – with GANTT charts. This training, delivered through infinity seminars, would not just capture the police, but the courts, sports, the media, academia and the professional activist classes too. The language used in the DEI-fication of law enforcement was especially ambiguous: an important consideration, because for the police to be truly “anti-racist”, aligned to the contentious research of American con artists like Robin d’Angelo and Henry Kendi, they had to be racist. Against white people. It just couldn’t work any other way.
In averting their gaze from America to pursue their own madness, the UK’s lanyard class missed critical early failures of “anti-racist” practice within the police there, the most obvious involving “defunding”. On occasions when this was entertained, it became apparent that casualties of reduced policing were black communities. Progressive white people felt nice. Black people got shot.
“Anti-racism” theory also captured a group adjacent to police: social workers: another mostly white group overrepresented by women. Before Nowak’s murder, two social workers could be indirectly linked to the murder of three young girls in Southport in 2024, and the murder of three people, including two young people, in Nottingham in 2023. In each case, a female worker had scolded parties and dismissed their pleas for institutionalization of respective perpetrators Axel Rudakabana and Valdo Calocane, “to avoid stereotyping” black people.
There is no shortage of explanations as to why the UK exists in its current state, where a former Prime Minister (Tony Blair) feels the need to intervene with a 5000-word essay pleading with his former colleagues to change course. Here some look to brazenly self-sabotaging Conservative initiatives such as Theresa May’s Net Zero, or the Johnson “Boriswave” of economic migration that suppressed wages. Others look to the ineptitude of the current administration and its woefully inadequate Treasury personnel. Whilst these are instructive, neither addresses the plummeting standards in a society now so over-proceduralized, over-judicialized that it is nearly impossible to get anything done.
And even that: impeding successful routine for no discernible purpose (sic), doesn’t capture the insanity of hardcoding prejudice into one of the state’s top features. “Anti-racism”, in a breach of actual law, demands that different groups be treated differently (“equality of outcomes”). In addition, as McPherson’s legacy, an accusation of “racism” should be documented as fact until litigated, by which time insidious dehumanization would have already ruined the state of mind of the accused.
The question of why the UK, the nation central to the dismantling of slavery, experienced such frenzied behaviour is something I reflected on in chapters of a book three years ago. After exhausting various explanations, I contended that while America technically started it, no craze since colonialism had been so feverishly embraced in the UK. Just as with colonialism, there is a seductive, addictive power to CRT’s “anti-racism”. Although largely moral, it was still power.
There were some of us who, against the backdrop of lockdown, couldn’t unsee stuff, had columns spiked, refused to engage in the theatrical black square or were scolded on Zoom for the view that Black Lives Matter was a scam (evidenced immediately by the use of the Democrat’s ActBlue platform to acquire donations). We tried to emphasize one point above all: accommodate this, and you’re not going to like it when things change. Now, here it is, six years later, a group with its own racial dimensions, expecting the same level of outrage and grovelling.
Every politician from every party consumed by this curse worries about the prospect of violence in the future of the UK, believing that protected groups will be the first victims. This alone betrays the level of delusion: the now pervasive, inescapable anger has had six years to refine its perceptions about who initiated the contamination, and it’s neither black people nor brown people. I would love the UK to strip itself of the madness, but sadly, when denial rapidly usurps anger in the aftermath of tragedy, well, that’s just not going to happen, now is it?
[Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Floyd_mural_Mauerpark_Berlin_2020-05-30_01.jpg]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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