BRENDAN O’NEILL: The merciless mistreatment of Henry Nowak.
For me, the most chilling thing in the bodycam footage of Henry Nowak’s last moments of life is the cops’ cruel presumption that he is lying. As he writhes in terror and agony and cries out ‘I’ve been stabbed!’, a voice in the background – presumably that of the lowlife who murdered him, Vickrum Digwa – says: ‘He hasn’t been stabbed.’ A female officer responds. ‘I know’, she says. ‘But we have to check, don’t we?’
I know. It is delivered with dry, bureaucratic indifference. Henry is heard moaning, begging, ‘I can’t breathe’, yet here is a representative of the state seeming to agree with his knife-wielding tormentor that he is making it up. That cold, cavalier utterance – I know – will have cemented dying Henry’s great dread: that the police were taking the side of his killer rather than him. As his young, precious life came to an end, he heard himself being disbelieved, distrusted, icily written off as a fabulist. His murderer, meanwhile, was afforded respect. The state blindly bowed to his filthy lies.
The bodycam footage of the arrest of 18-year-old Henry Nowak after he was stabbed in Southampton in December last year is horrifying beyond belief. It is one of the most harrowing two minutes of video I have ever watched. Henry can be seen sprawled in agony in a stranger’s driveway, the place he sought sanctuary after being knifed four times by Digwa. His failing voice is thick with pain and fear. What he wanted in that moment – what he needed – was to be believed. The belief of others was the only thing that might have delivered him from his terror-stricken state. But it never came. He said ‘I can’t breathe’ nine times. He said ‘I’ve been stabbed’ four times. ‘I don’t think you have, mate’, said an officer with chirpy, inhumane derision.
Read the whole thing, and then watch Zia Yusuf of Reform UK reminding Cathy Newman of Sky News of her George Floyd-era rhetoric and the Hampshire police’s ‘race action plan’ that O’Neill mentions in the above Spiked essay. “I am not impugning the intention of people who created all this,” Yusuf tells Newman, but what is crystal clear is that we saw in a harrowing, distressing and tragic body cam footage is directly downstream… and what it makes crystal clear is that reaction of the police proves that the burden of proof for a man making an accusation of racism was zero. Henry was arrested pretty much immediately even as he [was] bleeding to death yet the burden of proof in saying repeatedly ‘I have been stabbed’ was such that the police responded as he [was] bleeding to death by handcuffing him and saying ‘I don’t think you have.'”
You have GOT to watch this! This is easily one of the most skilful and satisfying interviews I have EVER seen.
Cathy Newman tries a cheap gotcha and @ZiaYusufUK BEAUTIFULLY turns the tables and exposes her hypocrisy
She refused to say white lives matter too
Incredible to watch pic.twitter.com/VK1Q3rHa30— Lee Harris (@LeeHarris) June 2, 2026
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
We really have reached Soviet levels of gaslighting.
A man is murdered, and somehow, the real problem is that people are angry about it.
Children are gang raped, and somehow the real problem is that people keep mentioning it and “dividing communities.”
This is moral inversion.… https://t.co/9CwJPrhXUO
— Carl Wilkinson (@Wilbaforce12) June 2, 2026


