KEMI BADENOCH: Why are they not kneeling now for poor Henry Nowak?
The murder of Henry Nowak has profoundly disturbed me for so many reasons.
First, there is the cruelty and callousness of the
crime itself – completely unprovoked, utterly unwarranted. An example of the nihilism that has crept into our society, particularly among young people desensitised to the violence they see glorified on social media.
Then there is the shocking behaviour of the murderer's family. Killer Vickrum Digwa's mother Kiran Kaur, 53, showed a total lack of humanity in covering up a horrific crime by hiding the weapon – a separate offence for which she has rightly been convicted.
Third, the police response, too, exposed devastating failures. I understand how difficult and confusing the situation must have been. But the attending officers showed an unforgivable lack of common sense that meant Henry's final moments were unimaginably harrowing.
Normally I avoid watching any videos on social media that show the death of an individual. But this time I forced myself to watch Henry's final moments. Only by seeing it in full can one truly grasp the horror and understand how serious were the failures: Innocent Henry, handcuffed by the police as he lay dying, while his murderer calls him a 'racist' and officers read him his rights. It is three minutes I will never be able to scrub from my memory.
Henry's murder and the police's botched response must be a seminal moment for Britain on a par with the murder of
Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager killed in 1993, which precipitated the Macpherson Report six years later, which found the
Metropolitan Police to be 'institutionally racist'.
Stephen's murder forced the country to confront the intolerable and say: 'This is not who we are.' Indeed, many battles have been won in making our society better and fairer since then.
Yet now we are going backwards – because of a pernicious identity politics amplified in 2020 by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minnesota while being restrained by a white police officer.
I remember watching Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner take the knee in what is now my office and asking myself: 'What on earth are you doing? Kneeling for an incident that occurred in another country about which you know little?'
Why are they not kneeling now for Henry Nowak?
The murder of Henry Nowak has disturbed me for so many reasons. First, there is the cruelty and callousness of the crime itself. Then there is the shocking behaviour of the murderer's family...
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