Two-Tier Tears: Don’t Politicise the Grief of Henry Nowak’s Parents, Warns Starmer – Whilst Politicising the Grief of Henry Nowak’s Parents

In Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Etranger, the main character, a white Frenchman named Mersault, is famously convicted of the senseless murder of an Arab on a beach, after witnesses come forward to accuse him of not even crying at the funeral of his own mother, thus prejudicing the authorities into thinking him a cold-hearted sociopath. Off the page, upon the real-life shores of the United Kingdom, ‘acceptable’ expressions of grief and mourning by the recently bereaved are now policed equally as ruthlessly by agents of the state, up to and including the Prime Minister.

Following the death of 18 year-old student Henry Nowak, and the subsequently released bodycam footage showing how he was handcuffed by credulous officers at the scene of his own stabbing after his Sikh assailant, Vickrum Digwa, pretended Henry had called him racist names, angry scenes of riots, unrest and dissent spread across the country. Determined as always to confront the real issue at hand, PM Sir Keir Starmer promptly leapt up in the House of Commons and condemned the true villains here – not the killer, nor the DEI-brainwashed cops who had automatically believed his lies, but the allegedly ‘far-Right’ politicians who had dared suggest the case revealed there was something very slightly amiss in the British justice system. In particular, Keir singled out Reform UK leader Nigel Farage for observing how Nowak’s death demonstrated, once again, two-tier racial standards of policing at work across the nation, something Nigel urged be tackled with “cold rage”, as in rational, logical, legislative action, as opposed to the ‘hot rage’ of any more riots.

Slightly more soothing, and thus more helpful to the PM, were the sentiments of Nowak’s own family. Outside the courtroom following the trial of his son’s killer, Henry’s father had pleaded that:

We want to use Henry’s heartbreaking story to make change for the better. We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension. We want his story to make our streets safer for everyone.

Starmer used these words to try and paint Farage as cruelly going against the direct wishes of a bereaved parent in his hour of greatest emotional vulnerability:

A grieving family have asked us not to respond in the way that the leader of Reform has responded. My response… has focused on the lessons to be learned, so we can deliver justice. His response has been to appeal for rage. Rage – that’s his response to a father who’s lost his son and asked for that not to happen. Exploiting this tragedy to create grievance and division would be wrong in any circumstances. But to do it when the family are expressly saying ‘please don’t’ is unforgivable. It shows exactly who he is.

Which, of course, is all just another way of “exploiting this tragedy to create grievance and division” upon Starmer’s own behalf, isn’t it?

The parent trap

Starmer was not the only Left-winger to apply such double-standards to his own conduct. Former First Minister of Scotland Humza Yusuf had this to say:

Shame on Nigel Farage and his henchmen for dishonouring the memory of Henry Nowak. Henry was brutally murdered, and failed by the police, who have admitted mistakes were made. Mark Nowak, Henry’s father, called for people not to use Henry’s murder to further divisions. Yet, there are sick individuals like Nigel Farage… who ignore the family’s wishes in order to further their own hateful ideology. Let’s hope the vast majority respect the family’s wishes. I hope the Nowak family get justice for Henry that they deserve. My prayers are with them.

For a professional politician to begin calling opponents with whom he happens to disagree “sick individuals”, and describe them as possessing “henchmen” as though they were organised criminals or terrorists, also seems to directly go against Nowak’s father’s wish “for people not to use Henry’s murder to further divisions” upon Yusuf’s own behalf, though, doesn’t it?

Here’s another classic example of this ‘do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do’ attitude at work, from newspaper columnist and former Blairite Labour Party activist Dan Hodges:

A “number of people” (How many? One?) were “asking me to comment” on Nowak’s death, Dan says, but, being such a morally superior political being, Hodges quite naturally refused to publicly respond to the case at all. Except by publicly responding to it in the very same tweet in which he simultaneously claims not to be publicly responding to it. For Hodges to do otherwise would only be for him to callously disrespect Nowak’s father’s wishes by aiming to “create further division, hatred or tension”, something Hodges definitely doesn’t then perform by calling anyone who disagrees with him “scum”. Extraordinarily, this tweet does not appear to have been a piece of satire.

Saying ‘don’t politicise this’ is simply another way of the Left telling angry white voters: ‘Your politics doesn’t matter to us. Shut up about your inconvenient dead children, with your inconvenient grief and inconvenient desire to go against our open-borders, DEI, anti-white agenda.’ Lines like those of Starmer, Yusuf and Hodges are nothing more than a crude and transparent way of guilt-tripping people into keeping quiet and compliantly burying their dead.

In fact, if Starmer had looked at Nowak’s courtroom speech in its entirety, as opposed to only picking little favoured bits out from it, he would have seen that, whilst certainly not desiring any riots, he did in fact back up Nigel Farage’s wider assertion that his son’s death demonstrated two-tier racial policing at work, and that he would rather like this to be stopped:

Henry did not die with dignity. He did not die with the care he deserved. He lost consciousness before anyone believed him. … The way he was treated was inhumane and degrading. His murderer, however, was afforded decency, he was believed… and as Vickrum Digwa himself told the court, while under arrest for Henry’s murder, police even took him to the kitchen, so he could choose his food.

The only reason the PM and his ilk urge opponents so fervently to listen to the views of the bereaved parents in this particular instance is because – at least if you only quote their words selectively – they all appear to happen to already agree with each other, whether they actually do or not. If such parents actively and openly  opposed the state on such matters, then the Government’s response would be quite, quite different.     

Whyte Lives Matter

Consider the case of Siobhan Whyte (pronounced Shivaune, for those unfamiliar with Irish spellings), mother of 27 year-old Rhiannon Whyte, who was stabbed to death with a screwdriver by illegal Sudanese ‘refugee’ Deng Chol Majek at the asylum hostel where she worked, for no apparent reason whatsoever (unless you consider his reputed grievance she had once served him some broken biscuits to be a legitimate reason for killing another human being).

Several times, Whyte has directly contacted Keir Starmer’s office, requesting one simple thing from him: a face-to-face meeting to discuss the circumstances of the death of her daughter. At no point did she receive the courtesy even of a response – until she happened to mention this fact to the Daily Telegraph in an interview, whereupon one of Starmer’s henchmen (the word is more accurately used here) from the Home Office suddenly got back to tell Whyte his own door was “always open”. Yet the Prime Minister’s door itself, the one Siobhan specifically wanted open to her, was not. Why? Probably because of what she would tell him when she got inside there, which would have been rather different to the (apparent) emollient bromides of Henry Nowak’s parents.

Last month, Siobhan Whyte was one of the star turns at the anti-immigration Unite the Kingdom rally held in London, whose attendees and speakers were openly and contemptuously labelled by Starmer as “peddling hatred and division” by “spouting vile divisive views”, such as selfishly objecting to your daughter being stabbed to death with a screwdriver by a random African. Swaying the crowd, Whyte called the PM an “abhorrent excuse of a leader” and a “disgusting excuse of a man”, before going on to make some very specific policy demands of him nonetheless:

This sham of a Government needs to start looking after the British citizens of this country. … We don’t need any more of these illegal invaders. Shut the borders, detain them, and send them back to whichever country they are from. Stop giving them a home in a hotel… on benefit money.

So, is Keir Starmer now going to immediately address these policy demands and do precisely as Whyte says? Because, to judge by his own recent arguments in the House of Commons, Sir Keir explicitly thinks that to go against the wishes of bereaved parents under such tragic circumstances is profoundly morally wrong, the act only of an obvious cynical cad like Nigel Farage. Except, in April, Whyte also gave another public speech, at a Reform UK press conference, sitting directly alongside Nigel Farage. Asked whom she blamed for her daughter’s death, her answer was immediate:

Starmer and the Government. … Stop them [illegal immigrants] coming in. If you let them in, do not let them out onto our streets, until we know who they are, what diseases they carry, what criminal background they have, because we don’t know. … [Starmer’s Government is] more worried about the people dying on the boats than the people of our own country. So either stop them, send them straight back, or if they have to come in, vet them, do not let them out, do not let them walk our streets until we know that they’re not going to commit some kind of crime.

Listening to her requests, Farage agreed such measures would indeed be his broad policy if Reform UK ever came to power. Was Farage exploiting Whyte’s grief politically here too, just as Starmer later accused him of doing with the Nowak family’s grief? If so, she was quite happy to be handled in such a fashion. To Siobhan, being ‘exploited’ simply meant actually being listened to for once, rather than fobbed off, turned away and treated with contempt.

Two-tier tears

With Mark Nowak and Siobhan Whyte we have one bereaved parent who does want her child’s death to be politicised, and one who doesn’t. Only one of these responses is deemed legitimate by Starmer, whereas the other is condemned as being ‘far-Right’ and ignored. In the land of Two-Tier Keir, as well as two-tier justice, two-tier policing and two-tier ‘anti-racism’, we now have two-tier grief too.

In any case, politicians listening to bereaved parents is all well and good, but what if they end up wanting mad things? It is conceivable the parents of someone who died in a plane-crash might want all plane-travel to be banned, for everyone, forever, for instance. Should they be listened to and obeyed? What if Charlie Kirk’s bereaved parents started campaigning for all transgenderists (as Charlie’s alleged killer reportedly was) to be locked away safely in mental asylums for the wider protection of everyone normal? Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe wants to use Henry Nowak’s death as a platform for bringing back hanging. If he meets Henry’s parents and manages to persuade them to agree, will Starmer bow down to them on that too, and begin monstering anyone who dissents?

Bereaved family-members in tragedies like Nowak’s will always tend to gravitate towards one end of the political spectrum or other in search of solutions. When Doreen Lawrence started hysterically campaigning to ruin the British police force by denouncing it in its entirety as ‘institutionally racist’ in the name of her own stabbed black son – thereby, 30 years later, herself helping cause the racist death of Mr and Mrs Nowak’s own stabbed white son – Leftists like Starmer were all too eager to listen to her. But when Emma Webber, the mother of one of the Nottingham stabbing victims killed by lunatic black knifeman Valdo Calocane, who was kept out of a mental home by woke NHS medics who thought too many black men were being institutionalised, demands a meeting with the PM to tell him that, as she told GB News following Henry Nowak’s murder, “political correctness is costing lives”, and that her child’s murder would have been treated as racist if victim and perpetrator’s skin colours had been reversed, will he listen to her? No, because such beliefs go against the very core of Starmer’s sick, anti-white being. Nigel Farage should stand up in Parliament and condemn Keir as ignoring the express political wishes – nay, direct political commands – of a mourning mother here. 

When a child’s death raises what are demonstrably political issues, then, even if their family don’t want these same issues to be publicly discussed, I’m afraid that, sad though it may be, their wishes in the end will have to be ignored in the name of the greater public good. The only way possible ‘not to politicise’ Henry Nowak’s death is simply not to address it at all – which is what Starmer himself wants, ultimately. And, if politicians do that, what will the British Government end up creating? Yet more future grieving family members. Who, if it doesn’t like the precise form their grief takes, the present Government will then cynically condemn as being ‘far-Right’ social undesirables like Siobhan Whyte.

When imagining his tragic figure of Mersault, it turns out Albert Camus wasn’t writing fiction at all, but predicting Europe’s future. He just got the respective races of the victim and the killer the wrong way around, that’s all. But then, so did the two-tier UK police force with Henry Nowak.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.