Henry Nowak, racial justice, and the Church of England

The columns of our newspapers and our feeds on social media have been filled with the debate about the political issues raised by the tragic murder of Southampton student Henry Nowak. Nowak was stabbed five times by Vickrum Digwa in December 2025, and Digwa was convicted this week. The case has raised emotive issues—but before reflecting on those, we need to pause to remember his family, their loss, and the terrible way that knife crime both takes and breaks lives.

Before you read on, please pause to pray for Henry Nowak’s family in their loss, and in the reminder of that loss again this week.

But we do indeed need to reflect on the issues that this murder and trial has raised, not least to understand the political issues around it. Dom Helda Camara, the South American Catholic bishop, once said ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.’ In other words, good understanding is actually part of exercising compassion.

The pertinent events are as follows. There was some sort of altercation between Digwa and Nowak in Belmont Road in the Portswood area of Southampton, which is not far from the university (I lived in St Mary’s, slightly further away, when doing my MSc at the university). In the course of the altercation, Digwa stabbed Nowak five times in the fact and chest with an eight-inch blade, which he held illegally (this was nothing to do with the small symbolic kirpan that Sikhs are allowed by law to carry).

As Nowak lay dying, Digwa’s brother, Gurpreet Digwa, called the police on 999. Reports of the call and subsequent court proceedings state that Gurpreet told the operator that he and his brother had been the victims of a racial attack. According to Hampshire Police, the caller reported an assault on Vickrum Digwa, but did not disclose that Henry Nowak had been stabbed and denied that weapons had been used. He claimed that they had been victims of a racist assault.

We’re Sikhs, and we wear turbans, and he has attacked my brother.

The police arrived believing they were responding to an assault rather than a stabbing. (I thought I read somewhere that another person had made a 999 call, reporting a stabbing, but cannot now find that.) Vickrum Digwa himself then spoke to police officers at the scene, repeating allegations that Henry Nowak had racially abused and assaulted him. (Those claims were rejected by the jury when it convicted him of murder.)

You can watch what then happened because the body cam footage of one of the officers has been published. Be warned: it is deeply traumatic to watch. I found it very upsetting.

Nowak is on the ground, immobile, behind a car. The police have to pull him out from behind the car in order to handcuff him. As they do so, he manages to say ‘I’ve been stabbed.’ After a cursory glance, the police officer replies ‘I don’t think you have mate.’ At the same time, Digwa tries to show the police a supposed bruise above his eye as evidence of his claim of assault.

Soon afterwards, the police realise that there is a problem with Nowak; they unhandcuff him, and give CPR, but Nowak dies soon afterwards.

Even from the short video, I found what was going on quite shocking. Why would the police handcuff someone who was on the ground, clearly in distress, and posing no threat? You might argue that, on occasion, the police have to make split-second decisions, and in the heat of the moment, they can get it wrong. But there was no urgency here; this was not in the middle of an ongoing dispute.

I asked a former police officer friend for his view, and he commented:

When I was in, no way you handcuff anyone until
1) they have been arrested (because you’ve established the facts & it needs to happen to deprive someone of their liberty is not to be taken lightly)
2 ) they are then posing a threat to you themselves or others & you can’t otherwise restrain them
This is the result of bad training and (it appears) presumption of who was the victim and who was the perpetrator.

And other (former) police offers have commented online (in a police-interest group):

I served as police officer for some years the inexcusable action here was to cuff the person without first checking properly for knife wounds, whether victim as in this case or offender they should gave checked for his injuries, there appeared to be enough officers in attendance.

“Any application of handcuffs must be strictly lawful, necessary, and proportionate. Officers must have objective grounds to believe the person will escape, harm themselves, or harm others. Handcuffing cannot be used as a matter of routine”

I’m ex police. I do struggle with the fact that, regardless of what was being said by people at the scene, the first thing would have been checking the welfare of the man on the ground, taking personal safety into consideration, but establishing his condition would be a priority. He may have been faking illness or drunk, but in checking that, it would have revealed his injuries, which would then have turned the tables on the accuser, and although it would probably not have saved Henrys life, it would have diminished the immense grief and stress that this case has brought.

One also cited what I think is a police training manual:

Legal Justification
The Law: Handcuffing is legally considered a form of assault unless it is justified. Officers rely on powers like Section 3 of the Criminal Law Act 1967 and Section 117 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) to justify the force.

Reasonable Grounds: An officer must have an objective basis for handcuffing. This usually requires proof of a real risk of violence or escape, or the need to prevent the destruction of evidence.

An additional layer of the puzzle is this: Digwa was known to the police, since he had been arrested in 2023 on suspicion of stealing a cache of illegal knives. The question arises, why did the police here act so far out of line with not only police training but also basic common sense? And what role did the claim of a racist attack play in this scenario?

Commentator Konstantin Kisin believes he knows the answer:

The answer, if you’re willing to look at it honestly, is this: a new form of racism. A bureaucratic racism. An actually institutionalised racism. A racism so thoroughly laundered through the language of progress and inclusion that the people enforcing it genuinely believe they are on the right side of history.

What else do you call a system in which a dying teenager’s word counts for less than his killer’s because of the colour of their skin?

The reason that he says that is because of the Police Anti-Racism Commitment that they put in place, partly in response to the McPherson report of 1999 following the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, but more recently in response to the Black Lives Matter campaign following the killing of George Floyd in the States.

The key part of the document says this:

Our commitment to racial equity means

Producing equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups by responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences, with understanding that these will be racialised and with the aim of reducing harm.

It does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind’ (racial equality).

I had an interesting discussion about this online with a friend who is a suffragan bishop. He had posted that he supported Keir Starmer’s rebuke to Nigel Farage about making this a political issue. The curious thing here is that Starmer was indeed himself making it a political issue in rebuking Farage! And Starmer had no hesitation in making political capital after George Floyd’s death, posting pictures of himself ‘taking the knee’ with other Labour leaders. What was also interesting is that this bishop had posted on the politics of this without actually doing the homework to understand the issue. When I commented that all Farage was doing was pointing out the problem with police policy, which creates a ‘two-tier’ system for dealing with different ethnic groups, he asked me for the evidence, and I posted the quotation above from the PARC.

In the further discussion, the question arose as to what this statement (read in context) actually means. The bishop concerned claimed it simply meant taking cultural context into account. But that is clearly not the case.

For one, the comment is explicit: we will not treat all people the same, regardless of ethnicity (‘race’). We will actually treat people differently on the basis of their ethnicity. That is what Farage means by ‘two-tier policing’ and the police document is quite explicit about that. This is what the police have now said explicitly that this policy document must be changed.

And it goes further in explaining what that means. They seek to produce ‘equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups’ and this is expanded with a subheading lower down the document.

Our commitment calls for overall improvements in policing outcomes alongside an end to racial disparities in those outcomes, however seemingly impossible both may be…

• The likelihood of people being criminalised by the police

One of the features of our criminal justice system is that different ethnic groups are convicted of crimes at different rates—I was struck by the fact that the initial BBC report on the conviction of Digwa actually mentioned this differential upfront as part of their report. The goal of the police anti-racism policy here is explicitly to see few people from ethnic minorities convicted—by means of differential treatment of the groups.

I read this policy out to a friend who is an experienced barrister, and he had two responses. First, he had never heard of this—and indeed, the document has not been publicised widely at all. Secondly, he said that this was, in all likelihood, illegal, since it displaces the core principle of law that all are treated with equality, not with ‘equity’. Equality means that the same process is applied to all; equity means that you adjust the processes you apply in order to create the same outcome.

In other words, the goal here is not that different groups should be policed so that the crime rates are equal, but the justice process should be adjusted so conviction rates become equal. What is remarkable is that this approach very nearly led to a proposal to introduce different sentencing guidelines for different ethnic groups—until Shabana Mahmoud stepped in to block it.

So where has this approach come from? Allister Heath calls this ‘anti-white racism’, and connects it directly with the ideology of Critical Race Theory. He first notes that it is a direct contradiction of the famous dictum of Martin Luther King:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

The PARC specifically rejects this by saying that they will not be ‘colour blind’.

Labour and Tories alike were adopting the nostrums of critical race theory (CRT), a far-Left, anti-white, post-modern ideology incompatible with Western civilisation.

Often dubbed “wokery”, CRT rejects the existence of objective reality (racism is in the eye of the beholder), of rationalism (evidence and proof are not required), of universalism (race is essentialised) and of any possibility of progress.

Western societies are deemed racist by definition, hotbeds of power imbalances and exploitation, even if nobody is actually racist. Intent is irrelevant: non-white minorities are inevitably oppressed by the white majority (which also includes Jews and other “white-adjacent” groups). The “power dynamics” are rigged.

King is viewed as a victim of Marxist false consciousness, a useful idiot for the “white supremacist” camp (anybody that disagrees with wokery), a traitor even. His colour-blind ideal is dismissed as a tool to perpetuate “systemic inequity”. Any “disparate impact” from any policy – such as laws against shoplifting – on different racial groups is deemed proof of discrimination. All differential outcomes are bad.

CRT rejects equality for “equity”, which must be imposed through re-education and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes.

The result? Instead of arguing that race should be irrelevant, our companies, schools and police have become more race conscious. We were told that real justice required differential treatment. Rather than requiring immigrants to join British society, the UK’s deficiencies were highlighted. Instead of promoting on merit, there was a push for “reverse” discrimination.

What is fascinating here is to trace not only the language of rejecting being ‘colour blind’ but also the language of ‘institutional racism’ back to this ideology.

But while well-intentioned, correct about prejudice within the police and useful in many ways, Macpherson made two fatal concessions to CRT that continue to plague policing today.

It described the police not as infected by a racist culture, which it was, but as “institutionally racist”, a woke technical term coined by Stokely Carmichael (aka, Kwame Ture) and Charles Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. The term implies acceptance of CRT’s nonsense, including that racism against whites is impossible; Carmichael was a rabid anti-Semite (“The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist,” he said) and a racial separatist.

The second error was to adopt the view that a racist incident was “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. Yes, this meant police could no longer ignore prejudice, but that wasn’t the right way of achieving such a necessary change.

You can see the direct impact of this in the Digwa-Nowak case: the behaviour of the police here appears to have been completely frame by their absolute belief in the claim of Digwa, because he has mention the R word. As Kisin comments:

I want to be precise here, because precision matters. I am not saying that the officers who attended the scene that night are bad people, or that they set out to let Henry Nowak die. I believe, in fact, the opposite: that they were following the spirit of their training, and of the culture that had been built around them, in good faith, over years. The problem is not the individuals. The problem is the system that produced them — a system that taught them, in effect, that an allegation of racism is a trump card that overrides normal investigative procedure, normal medical common sense, and normal human judgement.

And this has been painfully evident in other prominent cases, involving both the police and the social services.

Mental health professionals decided not to detain the Nottingham triple killer Valdo Calocane despite a violent incident in 2020, after they considered research that addressed the over-representation of young black men in custody, a public inquiry has been told.

And the same has been true in education.

Axel Rudakubana’s head teacher was accused of racially stereotyping him by pointing out the risk he posed, and the risk assessment was then watered down. Rudakubana went on to stab and kill three young girls.

Racist anti-racism has distorted judgement and, tragically, cost lives.

What does all this have to do with the Church of England? Two brief things.

First, wouldn’t be wonderful if we could speak convincingly into all this, without having a political axe to ground—but offering the good news that all humanity is created in the image of God, and the central hope of the gospel is that God shows no partiality? The problem is that we cannot, with credibility, because we have not lived this out. Instead of being able to speak to this, we are hamstrung—because we have walked down exactly the same path as the police have done, only not as effectively.

I remember where I was sitting in General Synod when Justin Welby stood up and claimed (on the basis of no evidence whatsoever) that the Church was ‘institutionally racist’. Instead of drawing on the good news of God’s impartial love for all, he decided to buy into this racist anti-racism of CRT just as the police have done. The only saving grace here is that no-one is likely to die as a result.

Secondly, as I and others have pointed out repeatedly on this blog, the Church’s approach to issues of race is simply going to exacerbate the problems, increase frustration, and continue to create divisions. Even now, we have dioceses spending money that is not needed and is not based on evidence. And it all sprang from a report, From Lament to Action, which includes absurd quotas, poorly researched proposals, and makes the extraordinary claim that the ‘theological foundations of the Church of England’ are racist.

Until we get our own house in order, then as a Church we are going to have little to say to the crisis of racist anti-racism in our culture. And we appear to be a long way off even beginning to do that.

(Dear reader, I had intended to write something of quite a different shape, exploring the issues in the Church of England more fully—and also noting that racial discrimination is a serious issue, but that racist anti-racism is completely the wrong way to address this. But I have found I needed to take more time to explore the details of the case. I look forward to intelligent, objective, and respectful debate in the comments…!)