I see that the people who took the knee and tore down statues after a man was killed 4,000 miles away from Britain are now yelping ‘Don’t politicise Henry Nowak’s death’. The same leftists who poured onto the streets to rage over the death of George Floyd are barking at the rest of us not to rage over the death of young Henry.
Got that? Fury over Floyd – good. Rage over Nowak – don’t even think about it
‘Don’t stir up tensions’, says an activist class which in that heady summer of 2020 happily hurled missiles at British cops and danced like Taliban-lite loons on a monument to a slave trader they’d just toppled.
What a festival of cant we have endured since the conviction of Vickrum Digwa for his savage slaying of Nowak. It reached its peak on Tuesday during the eruption of working-class fury at Southampton Police Station. Angry men and women gathered to roar ‘I CAN’T BREATHE’ – Henry’s last words. How crass, said snooty leftists all over social media. But you did the same thing, lads. You marched to the US Embassy in London in May 2020 crying ‘I can’t breathe’, which were Floyd’s last words too.
There’s more than hypocrisy at play here. We are witnessing the drawing of a line between the well-informed, righteous fury of the middle classes and the apparently low-information rage of the lower orders. If you are from leafy London, have a university degree and use phrases like ‘structural racism’, you’re allowed to vent your fury. If you read a tabloid newspaper, have never darkened a university door and say ‘Nigel Farage is the dog’s b*llocks’, you are not. This is a campaign to pathologise working-class anger.
Fear of the masses is in the air. You can almost smell the establishment dread that the wrong sort of people are about to hit the streets – not graduate leftists in keffiyehs but gammon-hued blokes in white t-shirts. The front page of Wednesday’s Independent is a classic of this fretful genre. ‘Family’s plea for calm ignored’, wails the headline over a photo of the protest in Southampton. But the people in the pic are perfectly calm. It’s just rows of mournful folk carrying the England flag. Are you okay, Independent?
The Guardian, too, seems consumed by foreboding. It says there are ‘fears’ that ‘the populist right’ will ‘whip up racist resentment’. Demagoguery is always the chief dread of the bourgeois left, given their view of the little people as a coiled spring of bovine fury that might be unsprung at any minute. The Guardian blasts Farage for calling for ‘pure, cold rage’ in response to Nowak’s death. It’s a complaint that would carry more weight if the Guardian hadn’t published pieces in the wake of Floyd’s death saying ‘We need the rage that abolished slavery’.
So it’s okay to ‘rage’ over the tragic demise of a career criminal a whole ocean away but not over the horrendous death of a sweet kid right here in Britain? The theatrical gasping over Farage’s use of that r-word is absurd. Leftists love a ‘rage against Israel’ or a ‘rage against the Tories’ or, indeed, a ‘rage against the police’. Yet the minute Farage-supporting oiks propose a new ‘rage’ against Southampton’s sloppy cops, the left is dashing for the fainting couch. Their rage is noble, you see, while yours is scary.
The media angst over Farage’s ‘rage’ was superbly exposed by Zia Yusuf in his clash with Cathy Newman on Sky News. She badgered him about Reform’s stirring up of anger over Nowak’s death. But he’d done his homework. He reminded her she once wrote a column on the ‘fury’ of 2020. It’s fab, she wrote, to see ‘the fury over Floyd’s death’ being transported to ‘all four corners of the globe’. Got that? Fury over Floyd – good. Rage over Nowak – don’t even think about it.
Some are putting this down to the fact that Floyd was black, and thus sympathetic, while Nowak was white, and thus ‘privileged’. I think it’s more to do with the different social make-up of those who are ‘raging’. In 2020, it was primarily bourgeois leftists who broke out of lockdown to mourn Floyd. It became mandatory in polite society to join their orgy of performative virtue. ‘Silence is violence!’, they yelled at any sinful mortal who refused to bend the knee in the fashion of the liberal establishment.
Now it’s mostly working-class non-Londoners who are fuming about what was done to poor Henry. Some are even wrapped in the St George’s flag, and nothing is more alarming to our betters than a swarm of patriots. The elitism is rank. It feels as though some people are more unnerved by the growing rumble of working-class anger than they are by what happened to Henry. You can feel the wheels of the discussion turning, away from that horror in Southampton and towards the supposed horror of ordinary people saying: ‘We’ve had enough.’
Yes, there were ugly scenes in Southampton on Tuesday night. A breakaway mob threw bins at police officers. I have no doubt that the decent mourners for Henry gathered at the police station would condemn such behaviour. And you know what? Their condemnation counts for a hell of a lot more than the hypocritical bluster of leftists who whooped when their mates threw bottles at cops after a man died in Minneapolis.
