We are heading to a dark place

The exploitation of a hideous murder is a wake up call

“We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension,” said the grieving father of Henry Nowak. “We want his story to make our streets safer for everyone.”

Nowak, of course, was brutally murdered by Vickrum Digwa, who falsely claimed to be the victim of a racist attack by Nowak, leading police officers to handcuff the dying 18-year-old.

Shortly afterwards, Nigel Farage declared - in some sort of contrived address to the nation: “Henry’s family have responded to this in just the most extraordinarily dignified way, but I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage.”

Later that evening, far-right extremists rioted in the streets of Southampton. They threw rubbish bins, traffic cones and bricks, bared their backsides, performed Nazi salutes. They included members of outright neo-Nazi organisations.

We are heading to a dark place. As I wrote in the Guardian this week, Reform are committed to sweeping authoritarianism, and it would be much easier to establish a tyranny on British shores than in the federal, constitutional United States.

Racists are emboldened by many things: the ongoing social and economic crises, a disastrous government and its failure to address a broken social order, and the ascent of the far-right across the West and beyond.

There is no cordon sanitaire anymore which keeps the far-right out of legitimate, respectable politics. Indeed there is no longer any consensus on what constitutes unacceptably extreme right-wing politics.

Reform is being outflanked by Restore, founded by one of its former MPs, the millionaire Rupert Lowe, which has positioned itself in an even more extreme position. Reform thus adopts more extreme position to stop itself from bleeding support to its new competitor. The Tories then do the same with Reform. Labour then does the same with the Tories. We are trapped in a right-wing ratchet.

It is striking how racists go through a list of targets. The likes of far-right criminal Tommy Robinson long claimed to champion Sikhs, in a sort of divide-and-rule attack on British Muslims.

Yet despite some far-right activists portraying them as loyal subjects, Sikhs have been repeatedly attacked by racists who think they’re Muslims. In one recent hideous case a Sikh woman was raped by a man who screamed that she was a ‘fucking Muslim bitch’ during the attack.

But now British Sikhs find themselves under attack. The far-right will come for all minorities - and anyone deemed subversive - eventually.

Indeed it should be noted that Henry Nowak was British-Polish. For a period, British Poles were in the firing line.

One study in 2008 found that crime was one of the main topics that came up in British newspapers when Polish migrants were discussed.

In that same year, the Federation of Poles in Great Britain said of media coverage:

In our view, the worst examples linked Poles with words and phrases like ‘feckless’, ‘chancers’, ‘race riots’, ‘swamp the NHS’, ‘fears for schools’, ‘cut-price treatment’, ‘push British graduates to back of the jobs queue’, ‘killers, drug smugglers and rapist’. We consider that this has made Poles living in the UK feel vulnerable and persecuted.

We need to unite people of different minorities under a common banner. That is: unity of the majority - irrespective of ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation and identity - against the elites.

The far right exist to deflect fury away from those elites. Right now, the wind is in their sails. We need to focus our minds on the present danger.