LONDON — 'Please, brother, I can't breathe.' Those were the last words Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old student at the University of Southampton, uttered before he died. Nowak was returning from a night out when he encountered Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh man, who murdered him with a 21-centimeter-long ceremonial dagger in December 2025. Digwa stabbed Nowak five times as he attempted to flee, including a fatal blow to the chest, which punctured a lung and an artery. This violence appears to have been Digwa's response to Nowak 'cheekily,' as the judge put it, asking him if he was 'a bad man.'
False Claims of Racism
Digwa falsely claimed, as has now been established in court, that Nowak had racially abused him. He clearly felt that alleging racism, the holiest of incantations that mobilizes the British state like nothing else, would help him get away with murder. Events would show that Digwa understood Britain's institutions all too well, and that he was almost correct. Digwa's family arrived at the scene and, instead of calling an ambulance for the dying teenager, his brother, Gurpreet, called the police, alleging his brother had been racially attacked by 'some white person.' Meanwhile, Digwa's mother, Kiran Kaur, took the dagger from her son and hid it.
Police Response
When the police arrived, Digwa's father, Moga Singh, was propping Nowak up and told officers he had a 'mouthful of blood,' which Digwa put down to him having fallen from a fence he had attempted to jump over. Then Nowak slumped prostrate on the ground. He told the officers no fewer than nine times that he had been stabbed, to which one officer responded, 'I don't think you have, mate.' That officer took hold of Nowak and placed him in handcuffs. Nowak then began wheezing, choking on his own blood while still asking for help, as the Digwas continued to lie about him and the police read him his rights. Those were the last sounds Nowak heard before losing consciousness.
Institutional Failures
It seems the police were more concerned with an accusation of racism — to which they responded, in the final minutes of Nowak's life, more or less uncritically — than the life of a dying teenager. What amount of clear medical distress it would have taken to reverse this calculation is a question the police have, so far, declined to clarify. Yet how they might have arrived at such a calculation is not a mystery. So-called 'anti-racism,' by which I mean the privileging of minority groups over majorities, and the prioritization of combating racism, real or imagined, over almost everything else, has in recent decades become the governing ideology of British institutions.
What began as a series of compensations to accommodate Britain's demographic transformation morphed into the creed undergirding every facet of the state. While not limited to front-line services like policing, its consequences in this area are often the most egregious. Days after Vickrum Digwa was found guilty of murder on May 28, a senior police officer told Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson: 'What you have to understand is most chief constables would rather mess up a major murder inquiry than be accused of being racist.'
