The brutal murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak by 23-year-old Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh, is being used to advance the far-right agenda of Reform UK and smaller far-right groups. Workers must reject attempts to use this killing to drag them behind their class enemies.

Nowak’s death is being used to promote the bogus right-wing “two-tier policing” narrative, claiming whites are penalised because of “woke” attitudes and “political correctness”.

On December 3, 2025, after a verbal altercation with Digwa filmed by Nowak, Digwa grabbed the younger man’s phone and then stabbed him five times with a 21-centimetre ceremonial blade—in the legs, chest and face. Digwa then filmed Nowak trying to get away. Digwa’s brother, Gurpreet, called the police and falsely claimed that Nowak had committed a racial assault.

When police arrived, Vickrum Digwa repeated the lie. The knife he used in his attack had been given to his mother to hide.

Nowak, lying on the floor, told police at least seven times across multiple minutes that he had been stabbed and could not breathe. One officer responded, “Don’t think you have mate.” Nowak was handcuffed, placed under arrest and read his rights. He became unresponsive before any call was made for medical attention. He was declared dead at the scene when a doctor arrived.

At trial it was revealed that Digwa was “a man with a weapon obsession,” in the words of the prosecutor, who had been banned from the Sikh Gurdwara Khalsa Darbar in Southampton after stealing ceremonial knives. His family kept more than 20 weapons in the house, including, according to the BBC, “a flick knife, an extendable baton, knuckledusters, a machete, swords and kusaris.” His brother and father are on weapons charges.

This week, Digwa received a life sentence with a minimum of 21 years for the murder of Nowak. Police bodycam footage, made available to the media, has gone viral and the story has led newspapers and sites for days.

Millions are appalled at the callous negligence of the police, of which every working-class community has some experience. There is also great sympathy with Nowak’s family, who have said they “do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tensions.”

In contrast, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and the gang of far-right thugs and provocateurs orbiting around the party saw a young man’s death at the hands of a criminal family and a stupid, sneering police force as an opportunity to claim anti-white prejudice and paint all “non-whites” as a potential threat.

In what he described as “Emergency Address”, “to the nation”, Farage seized on the event to “suggest” in a video message that people respond with “pure, cold rage”, warning that “Britain’s historic way of life is being thrown away.”

Every fascist leader in Britain heeded the call and travelled to Southampton where Nowak’s murder took place to speak at what rapidly became a violent protest of a few hundred people. Farage’s clear intention was to recreate the far-right riots of July 2024, when mobs attacked buildings accommodating asylum seekers after the murder of three children in Southport.

Right-wing provocateurs claimed a Muslim asylum seeker carried out that attack—in fact committed by a British citizen with Christian Rwandan parents, Axel Rudakubana, who had a history of violent behaviour. Farage stoked these rumours by posting a video asking, “whether the truth is being withheld from us”. He described rioters as “concerned British citizens”.

In Southampton this week, fascist Tommy Robinson told the crowd “As white people we are treated like second-rate citizens by our own government.” Former British National Party member and current Britain First leader Paul Golding urged the crowd to “take your anger and turn it into political action” against “the real criminals who are turning Britain into a foreign country”.

Oswald Mosley fan Luke Jahn, of the National Rebirth Party, fought with police, posted “Anglo Saxon England” and reposted “White people rise NOW”. UK Independence Party leader Nick Tenconi repeated his pledges to “begin mass deportations” and “reinstate Christianity back into the heart of government”. He described Digwa as “representative of perhaps millions of non-whites across the world who have been indoctrinated to this left-wing terrorism.”

These thugs want to stoke race riots in which they can put themselves forward as the champions of white Britons. Farage wants the violence to erupt so he can position himself as the prime minister able to bring order by cracking down on and deporting the migrants and Muslims he will declare responsible.

Growing sections of the super-rich oligarchy, donating millions to Reform UK, want him to succeed because while the working class is fighting itself it cannot fight the ultra-privatising, free-market programme Farage will implement on their behalf. That is why he, Robinson and Restore UK leader Rupert Lowe are backed by billionaire donors and enjoy the support of the world’s richest man—the soon-to-be-trillionaire Elon Musk—and the aspiring dictator Donald Trump.

Musk reposted to his 240 million followers a message from Robinson saying, “Henry was murdered by racist police policy’s [sic], that target white people”, and from American fascist Matt Walsh declaring, “I stand with the indigenous people of the UK.” Musk played a major role in stoking the 2024 riots, posting “civil war is inevitable”, and has continued his efforts since, including by speaking at Robinson’s far-right rally last September.

Trump’s State Department, headed by Marco Rubio, posted on Nowak’s killing: “Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilisational decline. They must be rejected across the West.” The words tap into Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference this year, where he identified “civilisational decline” with all the struggles for social and democratic rights which took place in the 20th century.

That the far-right was able this week to hang its nationalist, xenophobic campaign on a case where a white man died horribly thanks to the actions of the police is incidental. They rove from one scandal to the next—whether real, embellished or totally unsubstantiated—as fuel for their violently divisive agenda.

Only last month, a far-right mob—led by Daniel Thomas of the British Patriots group—rampaged in Epsom over claims of a gang-rape by asylum seekers. Police reported at the time that there was “no evidence that asylum seekers or immigrants were involved” and have since said no rape took place. In the BBC’s words, “the woman who made the report of rape ‘sustained an accidental head injury’ following a night out and made ‘a confused report’.”

Last November, a 21-year-old woman was stabbed in the stomach in Edinburgh. Robinson jumped to declare the perpetrator a Muslim and claim that three people were injured. This was a lie. Calum Fisher, the attacker, was said by the judge to have been using drugs and alcohol to “self medicate” mental health problems.

In another stabbing incident in Scotland, which apparently was carried out by a migrant, Mustafa Kokoneh, Robinson falsely claimed he had tried to enter a nursery and take hostages.

The appalling conditions of social crisis in Britain provide a steady stream of crimes, many by mentally ill individuals, which can be selectively seized upon by right-wing agitators. They serve the super-rich and their politicians not only by sowing divisions among the working class, but by turning attention away from the underlying causes of social inequality and gutted social services.

Nowak’s killing is no more proof of the ludicrous claim that the police are anti-white than the attack for which Kokoneh is being tried is proof that only migrants commit crimes. In fact, the police force involved in Nowak’s death is nearly five times more likely to stop and search black rather than white people—higher than the national average disparity of just under four times more likely. Blacks are also seven times more likely to die following restraint by police than whites.

This is a result of the police’s primary function in intimidating the working class, and particularly its poorest layers, and of the racism which is cultivated in its ranks to aid that task.

Labour is trying to distance itself from the right-wing campaign. It has little choice given the leaders are baying for “two-tier Keir” Starmer’s blood. But it bears responsibility for it, nonetheless.

Starmer’s party has spent years adopting Farage’s talking points on asylum seekers, migration and protests against the imperialist wars and the Gaza genocide in the Middle East, tailing him ever further to the right.

It has cheered record deportations and restrictions on migration and arrested thousands of protesters branded with the mark of terrorism, antisemitism and Islamic fundamentalist sympathies. It is not coincidental that one of the leaders of the Stop the War Coalition, Salma Yaqoob, had a car set on fire on her driveway in Birmingham on Wednesday.

In all these ways, the Labour government is paving the way for Farage—whose government, the WSWS wrote after the May local elections:

would ramp up the oppression of migrants, scapegoating of ethnic minorities, and repression of political opposition.

It would embolden the fascist thugs of UKIP, Britain First—whose leader Paul Golding also attended the march [of the far-right in London in May]—and others. There will be more attempted racially motivated murders, more St George’s Crosses raised above migrant communities and more far-right marches through those streets under police protection.

This would be coupled with attacks on protests against the Gaza genocide and the war in the Middle East, left-wing political meetings and strike pickets.