Henry was handcuffed by police as he lay dying. If he’d been black, there would be protests across Britain – with Starmer leading calls for ‘justice’: MERCY MUROKI

Nothing ruins a person’s life faster than calling them a racist. And Vickrum Digwa knew this better than anyone.

The man who stabbed 18-year-old business student Henry Nowak five times in a frenzied attack on an evening in Southampton last December lied to police, claiming Henry had racially abused him and ‘dropped his turban’.

Digwa then watched as officers arrested and handcuffed young Henry and dragged his bleeding body across the gravel, where he lost consciousness and died.

As prosecutors put it at his trial, which concluded this week, Digwa knew racism was his “trump card”: magic words that would make the authorities give him preferential treatment, a strange reversal of victim and villain.

As Henry tried to escape, he was stabbed in the face, the back of his legs and fatally stabbed in the chest with Digwa’s 8-inch ‘ceremonial’ knife. The young man told the police that he had been stabbed and that he could not breathe.

Maybe it was hard to make out his wounds in the dark, but it was still there. The mere suspicion that he had said something racist was enough for officers to make a snap decision.

The case has sparked headlines around the world, with tech billionaire Elon Musk proposing to launch a special investigation against Hampshire Constabulary, demands for officers to be suspended and increasingly loud calls for the release of relevant body camera footage. (And I see no reason why this wouldn’t happen anyway, other than to hide the culpability of the three officers involved.)

But Henry’s death raises another, more important point: the extent to which the doctrine of “anti-racism” has permeated our society, from public institutions such as the police, schools, civil service and universities, to business, cultural institutions and almost everyone in between.

Digwa was found guilty at Southampton Crown Court in December 2025 of murdering Nowak, whom he stabbed to death with a Sikh kirpan ceremonial knife.

As a black woman who has long warned about the modern tendency to see everything through the lens of race, I have witnessed far too many people exploiting this issue to discredit their opponents and play the victim; This was a cowardly tactic that reached its nadir in Digwa.

The truth is that the false accusation of racism is another kind of weapon.

The fear of being branded racist or otherwise prejudiced has become a huge national concern since Sir William Macpherson famously found the Met ‘institutionally racist’ in 1999 in a report following the horrific murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence by a group of white thugs in south-east London six years ago.

But the noble and understandable desire to eliminate racism from our public life has now reached pathological proportions.

And we have all seen the consequences of this over and over again. In a landmark report last year, Baroness Casey revealed that police and councils across Britain had for decades avoided putting an end to the industrial rape of British girls – mostly by men of Pakistani origin – in countless towns and cities for fear of appearing racist.

We also saw a terrible example of this at Manchester Arena in 2017; A young security guard later admitted he had a “bad feeling” when he saw a “fidgety and sweating” North African man walking through the venue carrying a large, heavy backpack.

The guard later said, “I didn’t want people to think I was stereotyping him because of his race.”

‘I was afraid of being labeled a racist and getting in trouble.’ Minutes later, 22-year-old Salman Abedi detonated a bomb filled with 3,000 bolts and nuts, killing 22 people and injuring more than 1,000.

Digwa, 23, used racism as ‘trump card’ by accusing Mr Nowak (photo taken shortly before his death) of racial abuse when police officers arrived to arrest the wrong man – a ‘bad lie about a dying man’

We saw this again in the case of paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane, who mental health professionals decided not to detain after being concerned about the ‘overrepresentation of young black men in detention’.

Calocane stabbed three people to death, including two young students, and seriously injured three others in Nottingham in 2023.

And we saw this with Axel Rudakubana, who was sentenced to 52 years in prison for the sadistic murders of three little girls in Southport in 2024.

This monster’s former headteacher told the public inquiry into his crimes that, despite having repeatedly brought a gun to school “to use”, he felt “shut down” and “professionally shut down” when health workers ordered him to address concerns about him by accusing him of racially profiling a “black boy with a knife”.

Some of its victims might still be alive if the obsession with anti-racism had not been so successfully instilled in everyone from young security guards to healthcare workers to council officials: it was not just the imperative not to be racist, but also the imperative to suspend reason in the name of anti-racism, whatever the cost.

Even though it is well-intentioned, this movement now has a lot of blood on its hands.

As a phenomenon, of course, this was further amplified in 2020 when George Floyd, a convicted criminal and drug addict suffering from heart disease, died by ingesting the ultra-potent opioid fentanyl while being restrained during his arrest in Minnesota.

Digwa’s mother, Kiran Kaur, was found guilty of assisting an offender by removing the gun at the scene of Mr Nowak’s murder.

In the midst of the Covid pandemic, with half the world indoors staring at social media (with all its propensity for anger and rage), Floyd’s death galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement.

Their final words, ‘I can’t breathe’, became a rallying cry as tens of millions of people took to the streets to protest against ‘systemic racism’, including riots and looting in some places, according to a study by the Harvard Kennedy School in America.

Politicians almost literally ‘kneeled’ in a sign of self-deprecation, showing that they too oppose racism – including opposition leader Keir Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner.

Henry Nowak’s last words were ‘I can’t breathe’, but there will be fewer marches in his name; At the time of his death, our current Prime Minister and often chatty Rayner said absolutely nothing.

Surprisingly, given the kind of man he actually was, George Floyd’s name was mentioned 19 times in the British Parliament – almost always in sanctified terms – while Henry’s name was mentioned only once by Reformation’s treasury spokesman, Robert Jenrick.

Yet we must all continue to remember his name, because Henry Nowak’s death must be a turning point.

We must end the practice of two-tier policing in Britain, and the widespread notion that some racial minorities have extended courtesy and exemptions (including the legal right to carry deadly ‘ceremonial’ knives) that are not granted to everyone else, and can weaponize accusations of racism.

(The Crown Prosecution Service’s decision yesterday not to prosecute the third hearing of brothers accused of assaulting a police officer at Manchester Airport, despite shocking CCTV footage of the incident, does little to allay these concerns about the unequal application of the law.)

Mercy Muroki is a broadcaster, columnist and former advisor to Kemi Badenoch.

Yes, racism and prejudice still exist in Britain; I experienced these myself. In 2023, I was stalked by a Nazi-obsessed, far-right activist; This man was later sentenced to 22 years in prison for attempting to murder an asylum seeker.

But if Henry Nowak had been a black man handcuffed by police on his deathbed, we would now be seeing protests on an unprecedented scale in Britain, with Keir Starmer leading calls for ‘justice’.

Nothing can bring Henry back, of course, but his death may still teach some lessons.

Just as the murder of Stephen Lawrence exposed the rotten, racist heart of the Metropolitan Police, the tragedy of Henry Nowak now reveals in the most dazzling terms the terrible dangers of our obsession with anti-racism and the terrible places it can take us.

Mercy Muroki is a columnist and former advisor to Kemi Badenoch.