Britain’s Censorship Regime Was Always Going To Get People Like Henry Nowak Killed
Elle Purnell Visit on Twitter@_ellepurnell
The U.K.’s censorship regime indulges the idea that people who hold certain beliefs do not deserve to live freely — or at all.
Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old Briton who died in police custody in December, got a death sentence for a thoughtcrime he never committed.
Newly released bodycam footage of Nowak’s arrest shows police arriving at a residential driveway to find Nowak bleeding on the ground. A Sikh man named Vickrum Digwa, who would eventually be convicted of fatally stabbing Nowak with a blade that only Sikhs are allowed to carry in Britain, falsely claimed to police that Nowak had treated him with racial animus. Evidently believing Digwa’s accusations but not Nowak’s cries for help, the police rolled Nowak’s limp body over and placed handcuffs on his wrists. In response to his repeated pleas for treatment of his stab wounds, police can be heard telling him, “I don’t think you have [been stabbed], mate.” He died moments after police read him his rights as an accused criminal.
Digwa was convicted of murder and was sentenced on Monday. He can be eligible for parole in as few as 21 years. During the trial, the judge concluded “that Nowak had not said anything racist to the Sikh man who killed him,” according to the BBC.
The finding came too late to help Nowak, of course. In his final moments, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced in the minds of the state actors who refused him aid. For years, the British police state has been more concerned with restraining the speech of its citizens than with restraining the disproportionate number of new arrivals who murder and rape them. In December, the officers who responded to Nowak’s slaying made the same calculus.
While British law enforcement turned a blind eye to imported scandals like the now-infamous rape gangs, in which predominantly Pakistani Muslim men abused young British girls for decades with protection from local officials, they cracked down on native Britons for beliefs expressed on the internet, and even those held silently.
The U.K. censorship regime is deadly, and not just because it leaves police with fewer resources to prosecute actual crimes. It’s deadly because it indulges the idea that people who hold certain beliefs do not deserve to live freely — or at all. As an accused racist, Henry Nowak was deemed unworthy of timely and potentially life-saving care, and he was sentenced to bleed out in handcuffs on the street.