I think Nigel Farage is right. We do have two-tier policing.
No, let me finish, as the man himself is fond of saying.
A couple of years ago, Lucy Connolly, a troubled and not especially clever individual, posted an unpleasant and inflammatory tweet in the aftermath of the Southport murders. She thought better of it and deleted it after a few hours. And it is difficult to believe that anybody sought to set fire to anything simply because of what an obscure woman from Northampton posted on Twitter.
What Connolly wrote was deeply unpleasant, but I can’t help feeling that the most appropriate thing to do with her would have been to tear her off a strip and tell her not to be such a fool in future. Given the very prescriptive approach to sentencing which now applies, of course, the judge’s hands were tied and she was jailed for two and a half years.
A few days ago, Nigel Farage ignored the request of Henry Nowak’s family not to make his murder the cause of division. With all the authority of the leader of a party that polled 17% at the last election, he made an Emergency Address To The Nation, which, because it was Good Old Nige, didn’t provoke gales of laughter. And he called for people to display “pure cold rage”. Unlike Ms Connolly, Farage is a highly intelligent wordsmith, who chooses his words with care. And he did not invite people to be angry. He invited them to display rage.
And the following day, bang on cue, a couple of hundred of Yaxley-Lennon’s plastic patriots displayed rage and started chucking rocks at the police.
Farage’s conduct is straight out of the playbook of one of the two politicians he really admires (the other one, of course, being Vladimir Putin). After losing the 2020 election, Trump called on his followers to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and then when a mob of them stormed the Capitol, threatened to hang the Vice-President, and left a trail of devastation in their wake, put on an air of innocence and said “Well, I didn’t tell anyone to riot…” Just as Farage says “Well, I didn’t tell anyone to heave rocks at the Police…”
Trump didn’t end up in jail for inciting an insurrection. Farage won’t either. Because it’s one law for little people like Lucy Connolly and another for monied rabble rousers. It’s two-tier, all right. Just not in the way Farage likes to claim.
* Neil Hickman was a Liberal constituency chair long ago and is currently a member of Breckland Liberal Democrats, Norfolk.
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Knaptoft: The very heart of England
We do have a two-tier policing system but it is not what our homegrown racists think it is.
From Norman settlement to a civic square
Tom Arms
Ruth Bright
Tom Bailey
Alex Macfie
14 Comments
Let’s not have any misunderstandings here. Politicians who are rightly asking for restraint regarding the recent awful events in Hampshire are the same ones who championed a movement that wanted to defund the police and close down prisons. Starmer and Rayner taking the knee inside the office that once held the likes of Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan, Foot etc., is one that, looking back, they’ll regret. Take a minute to reflect on what the last 72 hours would have been like if the ethnicities were reversed. Ultimately, you reap what you sow.
The idea that we put too many people in prisons is in no way equivalent to encouraging people to riot.
Lucy Connolly was jailed because she directly called for people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers. Nigel Farage said he felt a sense of cold rage. Those comments are very different, and only one of those was a clear unambiguous call to violence. So I don’t think you can read ‘two tier system’ from the fact that one comment fell foul of the law and the other didn’t.
Realistically, there are legitimate questions about the circumstances of Henry Nowak’s death, and whether over-zealous DEI policies and a fear of being accused of racism contributed to the police officers’ actions at the time, and we shouldn’t be blind to that. Hopefully we’ll get more answers from any subsequent investigations into what happened. But in the meantime, focusing entirely on complaining about Nigel Farage’s choice of words while ignoring that he is actually talking about these issues while we seem to have opted for silence, is not a good look.
@Simon Robinson – Farage didn’t say he felt rage. What he said was “But I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage”, with rage usually defined as violent anger, so not really that different. Do you really think he didn’t anticipate the violent demonstration that followed, providing a very convenient distraction from the £5m donation from a crypto billionaire that had been forcing him to keep his head down?
I’m not sure what point @Chloe is trying to make above. The Police gave a long history of making mistakes with fatal consequences for people of various ethnicities. The investigation will show whether “over zealous DEI policies” were really a factor here, or whether it was just a terrible mistake caused by a lack of attention and professionalism by the officers involved.
@Chloe – I think it’s a bit loaded to describe Black LIves [Also] Matter in the way you do. However, Starmer and Rayner taking the knee did come across as a bit pretentious. It was also somewhat paradoxical – people on the left of the party who might be thought likely to be sympathetic towards BLM have been told they are not welcome, while those who have flirted with Reform have officially been designated “hero voters” who must under no circumstances be criticised and whose prejudices must be humoured.
That Starmer and Rayner took the knee in an office once occupied by the architect of the Kenyan Asians’ Act is one thing that doesn’t trouble me.
@Simon – I am aware that Lucy Connolly directly called for people to set fire to hotels. My point is that it is vanishingly unlikely that anyone actually took any notice of her. Farage did not say “he felt…”. He said “I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage”. He was explicitly calling for A RESPONSE; and he is someone to whom people listen. And the response which that called forth was the chucking of bricks at the Police.
@Chloe: The most similar case to Henry Nowak, but with BAME victim and white killer, is probably the 2013 Murder of Bijan Ebrahimi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Bijan_Ebrahimi
Similarities include police treating the victim as the troublemaker and ignoring his cries for help. However, in the case of Bijan Ebrahimi they were doing so in far more systematically over several years by not protecting him when he was subjected to racial and other abuse. Also the police took at face value the baseless claim from Bijan’s eventual killer that Bijan was a paedophile, and a few days before his murder arrested him instead of any of the crowd that were shouting abuse at him.
There can be no doubt that if Bijan had been properly protected by the police he would not have been murdered. The same is not true of Henry Nowak, where police had to make split-second decisions and recognised him as a victim as soon as they realised he had actually been stabbed as he had said.
Bijan’s killer was brought to justice (and sentenced to life with a minimum of 18 years). Two of the officers involved in the matter were also convicted of Misconduct in Public Office; two others (including the one who wrongly arrested Bijan) were fired from the force. Whether any charges will be brought against the police officers in the Henry Nowak case is a matter for the independent inquiry. But the idea that it had anything tyo do with institutional racism is just silly.
There have been several murders with white killers and BAME victims recently. There were no riots following them, from anyone. The far right ignored them because they don’t fit its narrative.
And the incessant Farageist claptrap about “wanting to protect our women” was notable by its absence when John Ashby raped a Sikh woman in her home while subjecting her to a tirade of anti-Muslim abuse, wrongly believing her to be of that faith
To be fair to the police, they were summoned to respond to a ”racist Attack’… The fact that they acted, in the dark, to what they were expecting to find (especially as, during the incident, Vickrum Digwa repeatedly told the police that he’d been assaulted and that his eye was injured..
The pathologist told the court that the blood from Henry Nowak’s wounds drained into hi chest cavity leaving little sign that he had, in fact, been stabbed..
the way that Farage and his ilk have distorted what Henry Nowak’s father called ‘a murder’ is a stain on everyone who supports Farage and his party..
Alex, Henry said repeatedly that he’d been stabbed and was already incapacitated on the ground, spoken to in such a shocking manner, and dragged unceremoniously across a gravel drive. He was handcuffed and then read his rights; this was not a ‘split-second decision.’ As for those virtue-signaling an act of symbolism for a movement that descended into chaos and corruption, don’t be surprised if their calls asking to depoliticize events are treated with disdain. As I said, imagine what the last 72 hours would be like if the ethnicities were reversed and that footage was released.
@Nick: Actually Farage said both things. The full video is here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBFH3ydyfKs. The remark you quoted is at 05:30, the one I quoted is a bit earlier. There’s lots of stuff to disagree with in the video, but I don’t see any point in it where he calls for violence. I think you’re attributing too much to his use of the word ‘rage’, which he’s using in a context that clearly means ‘anger’ – an emotion that politicians in all parties regularly express. (To be clear, I don’t like much of what Nigel Farage stands for, but I also don’t think it’s helpful to constantly look for the worst possible interpretation of everything your opponents say)
But the wider point is that there are real questions about the state of policing, which in the light of the police’s response to Henry Nowak’s murder, many people are going to be legitimately worried about. Nigel Farage is talking about those questions. Maybe not in a good way, but he’s talking about them. We’re basically taking potshots at his choice of words while ignoring the actual issues. Which of those approaches do you think is most likely to resonate with voters?
@Chloe: Well the time Bijan Ebrahimi was arrested instead of his future murderer was on video. It didn’t lead to any rioting or “vitue signaling” from what I recall. There was an inquiry that did conclude that institutional racism was a factor. But there were no large-scale demonstrations or riots about it. So there’s your answer.
@Simon Robinson &c: Please stop pretending Nigel Farage is acting in good faith. He has just seized on one case of supposed “anti-white bias” by the police (the only one available) and he ignores all the others that show no such thing or even the opposite. It’s blatant hypocrisy, and we should lend no credibility whatsoever to anything he says.
Alex Macfie says:
“He [Farage], has just seized on one case of supposed “anti-white bias” by the police (the only one available)”
So the 3 decades of British white girl children raped, abused and even killed at the hands of Pakistani men never happened, and ignored by the police, social services and councillors is just a right wing myth Alex ?