The day after the riots, Simon Dorrington traveled from his home in Eastleigh, a small Hampshire town, to the place where Henry Nowak died. He would have been at the protest himself, but with a prosthetic leg he felt physically disabled. As he stood alone with his mobility scooter by his side and his bouquet of flowers freshly placed by a tree, tears welled up in his eyes. The case had clouded him. When he first saw the police body camera footage of Nowak lying on the ground, he told me he felt sick. As we talked about the murder, he tried not to cry.
Six months ago, on the street where Dorrington and I stood, Nowak had collapsed. He was, we now know, on the run from Vickrum Digwa, who had repeatedly stabbed him with a Sikh ceremonial knife, after a brief scuffle that broke out as Nowak walked from the bar to his university accommodation. As he lay dying, Digwa filmed him and told him he was not hurt. He then called the police and told them he had been attacked by Nowak. When officers arrived, they handcuffed and arrested the injured student after he told them he wasn’t breathing. When he said he had been stabbed, a policeman replied: “I don’t think you have a friend.”
For many, the incident crystallized years of grievances. A police service they believe is warped by anti-racist ideology, prioritizing charges of bigotry over violent crime. A sectarian exception to the law that allows a minority to bear arms. A white man was killed in what they see as a racially motivated attack.
For Dorricott, Nowak’s death has changed his understanding of policing, perhaps irreparably. “I hate them,” he told me. “A couple of officers walked by and I called them a racist.” Before he did not resent the authorities, but now he feels that they are “anti-white”. He had come to honor the dead 18-year-old but also to kick against the decline of his nation. “You let people in on dinghies, but there are places we can’t go. They get gas, electricity, but we’re struggling to pay. Why?”
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The government’s failure to protect Nowak seemed to be mixed with a deeper resentment. Fifteen years earlier, struggling with his mental health, Dorricott jumped from a railway bridge, breaking his leg but not dying. Maddened by the pain and unable to persuade the NHS to amputate, he took a chainsaw to his ankle last year. When I expressed my shock at how someone could do this, he pulled up a photo on his phone of a deep, bloody jagged wound on his limb. After that, the NHS did what he had asked.
Outrage had grown over Nowak’s killing as details of it emerged throughout Digwa’s trial. On Sunday, days after the 23-year-old was sentenced, members of White Vanguard, a neo-Nazi cell that has sought to profit from anti-asylum protests across Britain, laid flowers outside Portswood police station, a brick building near the scene of the murder. On Wednesday, banners featuring Nowak’s face emblazoned with the band’s logo were still there, propped up in the pouring rain. Next to them sat bouquets of flowers, posters demanding ‘Remigration Now’ and a sign from Stand Up Basingstoke, which has flown British flags across the Hampshire town, reading: ‘Safety is a right not a privilege’.
On Tuesday evening, demonstrators gathered outside Southampton Central Police Station to demonstrate. The event appears to have been largely organized by the Southampton Patriots, who have led regular rallies against a local hotel housing asylum seekers. “There is clear evidence of two-tiered policing,” read a poster advertising the flash protest. “They were quick to handcuff that poor boy, justice and truth were not a second thought.
In attendance was Tommy Robinson, who has steered clear of many localized anti-asylum protests despite the widespread support he is able to command among those present. Amorphous and basic, they do not depend on the imprimatur of Robinson or any other national figure. According to a review by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Safety and Fire and Rescue Service (HMICFRS) found in the wake of the 2024 riots, there is no evidence that Britain’s wave of urban disorder is being coordinated from the centre. Most of those who participated that year were local and acted spontaneously. Likewise, the Southampton fire seemed to mix residents with a core of traveling professional activists.
Nowak’s death represents a new horizon for this coalition. Robinson, who emerged as the leader of street protests from Luton’s multi-racial football firm Men In Gear, has always insisted his animosity is with Muslims, not ethnic minorities in general. He has long had Sikh associates, such as Guramit Singh, a convicted robber who took part in May’s Unite The Kingdom protest. The English Defense League had a Sikh division. Now, his opponents on the right are making hay with these associations. “These must be those Sikhs who integrate so well according to Tommy Robinson,” UNN, a hard-line conspiracy platform, wrote on Digwa’s Telegram in the middle of his trial.
Meanwhile, a decade after Brexit, any animosity against Eastern European immigrants seems forgotten. While Nowak was a Polish Briton, those who protested his memory seem to be treating him no differently than any slain son of the soil. With Nigel Farage speaking out about “anti-white bias”, it seems British politics is moving towards a more racialized divide. Sikhs, integrated or not, are the Other. White Europeans are not.
After the protest ended, many of the demonstrators marched through Southampton to where Nowak died. As they passed under Patricia Cravvaro’s window, she began filming footage that would later go viral on TikTok. Pushing a stroller with her baby the next day, she told me she hadn’t felt disturbed by the rally.
While a Portuguese immigrant herself, she sympathizes with nativist demands. “Of course I will agree (with the protesters),” she said. “I have no words to describe how I felt when I saw the video (of Nowak’s death). I think the British are right. The police must protect the British first.” As an immigrant, she said, she did not want to be “the top of everything”. The balance looked lopsided and she worried about the future of her two children who held British passports.
I met Maureen Brett driving her tartan cart to the shops to buy milk. She hadn’t expected to need more, she said, but late last night a man knocked on her front door with burning eyes. Standing over her kitchen sink, with his daughter by his side, he poured an entire can into his face to ease the pain caused by the tear gas and pepper spray deployed by Hampshire Police. Brett, 87, didn’t know a protest was taking place but felt a neighborly obligation to help. “I thought, ‘Oh my god,'” she said. “Just when you think this place is okay, something happens.”
What will happen next to this country is an open question. Britain now stands on the brink of a third long and hot summer of urban disorder in a row. The HMICFRS review was serious about threats to peace posed by online disinformation, but in the case of Nowak’s murder it is : INFORMATION – released by the courts and publicized by the mainstream media – this has sparked outrage. Farage has crossed a rhetorical Maginot line in response. For the authorities, this is a much more pressing problem to fix.
In every anti-immigrant protest I’ve covered, anger has been directed at the police. In Epping, after a teenage girl was sexually assaulted by an Eritrean man recently docked in the UK on a small boat, the men blocked officers in a frenzy, demanding they return and deal with the asylum seekers living in the Bell Hotel. For many, individual police officers are representative of a British state that is not just implementing the wrong policies, but has become a foreign and hostile power.
Activists are now preparing for a sustained confrontation. Writing on Facebook after attending the Southampton demonstration, Tommy Robinson’s top lieutenant Danny Thomas argued that future protests should be driven by “determination, not recklessness”. “We must channel this energy into something they cannot discard or bury,” he wrote. “We need to connect, organize and put thousands of boots on the ground, not just a few hundred in one city, but organized and disciplined numbers in towns and cities across the country.” In recent days, he has claimed that he is building an organization – the Patriot Platform – that will realize such a vision.
At the next election, Dorricott will vote for UK Reform, he told me. He is not tempted by more right-wing options, believing that Farage will save Britain. But, he said, he believes that urban disorder will only increase. “I think this is just the beginning,” he said. “We must stand up for our country and stand for what is ours, not theirs.” If she’s right, Maureen Brett may not be the only person this summer making unexpected discoveries about the effects of tear gas.
(Further reading: This is not what Henry Nowak’s family wanted)
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