The day after the riot, Simon Dorrington travelled from his home in Eastleigh, a small Hampshire town, to the spot where Henry Nowak died. He would have been at the protest himself but, with a prosthetic leg, he felt physically unable. As he stood alone with his mobility scooter next to him and his bouquet of flowers freshly laid beside a tree, tears hovered in his eyes. The case had poleaxed him. When he first saw the police body camera footage of Nowak slumped on the ground, he told me, he felt sick. As we spoke about the killing, he struggled not to cry.
Six months earlier, on the driveway by which Dorrington and I stood, Nowak had collapsed. He was, we now know, fleeing Vickrum Digwa, who had stabbed him repeatedly with a ceremonial Sikh knife, after a brief altercation that broke out as Nowak walked from the pub to his university accommodation. While he lay dying, Digwa filmed him and told him he had not been injured. Then, he called the police and told them he had been assaulted by Nowak. When officers arrived, they handcuffed and arrested the wounded student as he told them he could not breathe. When he said he had been stabbed, a policeman replied: “I don’t think you have mate.”
For many, the incident has crystallised years of grievances. A police service they believe to be perverted by anti-racist ideology, prioritising accusations of bigotry over violent crime. A sectarian exemption to the law that allows a minority to bear arms. A white man slain in what they view as a racially motivated attack.
For Dorricott, Nowak’s death has shifted his understanding of the police, perhaps irreparably. “I hate them,” he told me. “A couple of officers walked by and I just called them racist.” Before he had not resented the authorities but he now feels they are “anti-white”. He had come to pay respects to the dead 18-year-old but also to kick against his nation’s decline. “You let people come in with dinghies but there’s places we can’t go. They get gas, electric, but we’re struggling to pay. Why?”
The failure of the government to protect Nowak seemed to blend with a deeper resentment. Fifteen years earlier, struggling with his mental health, Dorricott jumped from a railway bridge, smashing up his leg but failing to die. Driven mad by the pain and unable to convince the NHS to amputate, he took an electric saw to his own ankle last year. When I expressed my shock at how anyone could do this, he pulled up a photo on his phone of a deep, bloody wound jagged into the limb. After that, the NHS did what he had been asking for.
Anger had grown over Nowak’s killing as its details emerged throughout Digwa’s trial. On Sunday, several days after the 23-year-old was convicted, members of White Vanguard, a neo-Nazi cell that has attempted to capitalise on anti-asylum protests across Britain, laid flowers outside Portswood police station, a squat brick building close to the murder scene. On Wednesday, placards displaying Nowak’s face stamped with the group’s logo were still there, propped up in the drizzling rain. Next to them sat bouquets of flowers, posters demanding “Remigration Now” and a sign from Stand Up Basingstoke, which has raised British flags across the Hampshire town, reading: “Safety is a right not a privelege.”
On Tuesday night, demonstrators gathered outside Southampton’s central police station to demonstrate. The event appears to have been organised primarily by Southampton Patriots, which has led regular rallies against a local hotel housing asylum seekers. “There is clear evidence of TWO TIER policing,” a poster advertising the flash protest read. “They were so quick to place the handcuffs on that poor boy, justice and truth was not even an after thought. WE NEED OUTRAGE! WE NEED JUSTICE!”
In attendance was Tommy Robinson, who has steered clear of many localised anti-asylum protests despite the widespread support he is able to command among those present. Amorphous and grassroots, they don’t depend on the imprimatur of Robinson or any other national figure. As a review from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) found in the wake of 2024’s riots, there is no evidence that Britain’s wave of urban disorder is being centrally coordinated. Most of those who took part that year were locals and acting spontaneously. Likewise, Southampton’s conflagration seemed to mix residents with a core of travelling professional activists.
Nowak’s death presents a new horizon for this coalition. Robinson, who emerged as a street protest leader from Luton’s multiracial Men In Gear football firm, has always insisted his enmity is with Muslims, not ethnic minorities in general. He has long had Sikh acolytes, such as Guramit Singh, a convicted robber who attended the May Unite The Kingdom protest. The English Defence League had a Sikh division. Now, his opponents further to the right are making hay with these associations. “This must be those Sikhs that integrate so well according to Tommy Robinson,” wrote UNN, a hardline conspiracy platform, on Telegram of Digwa amid his trial.
A decade on from Brexit, meanwhile, any enmity against Eastern European migrants seems forgotten. While Nowak was a Polish Brit, those protesting in his memory appear to be treating him no differently than they would any slain son of the soil. With Nigel Farage speaking openly of “anti-white prejudice”, it seems British politics is shifting to a more bluntly racialised divide. Sikhs, integrated or not, are the Other. White Europeans are not.
After the protest finished, many of the demonstrators marched across Southampton to the site where Nowak died. As they passed below Patricia Cravvaro’s window, she began shooting footage that would later go viral on TikTok. Pushing a pram with her toddler the next day, she told me she had not felt worried by the rally.
While a Portuguese migrant herself, she sympathises with nativist demands. “Of course I’m going to agree [with the protesters],” she said. “I don’t have the words to describe how I felt when I saw the video [of Nowak dying]. I think British people are right. The police need to protect first British people.” As an immigrant, she said, she did not want to be “top of everything”. The balance seemed skewed, and she worried for the future of her two children who hold British passports.
I met Maureen Brett as she was wheeling her tartan trolley to the shops to buy milk. She had not expected to need more so quickly, she said, but late last night a man had knocked on her front door with burning eyes. Standing over her kitchen sink, his daughter by his side, he poured an entire carton down his face to lessen the pain caused by the tear gas and pepper spray deployed by Hampshire Police. Brett, 87, had not known a protest was taking place but felt a neighbourly compulsion to assist. “I thought, ‘Oh god’,” she said. “Just when you think this country’s alright something happens.”
What happens to this country next is an open question. Britain now stands on the brink of its third long, hot summer of urban disorder in a row. HMICFRS’s review went heavy on the threats to the peace posed by online disinformation, but in the case of Nowak’s killing it is information – released by the courts and published by mainstream media outlets – that has sparked fury. Farage has crossed a rhetorical Maginot line in response. For the authorities, that is a far thornier problem to fix.
At each anti-migrant protest I have covered, anger has been directed at the police. In Epping, after a teenage girl was sexually assaulted by an Eritrean man recently deposited in the UK by small boat, men bollocked officers furiously, demanding they turn around and tackle the asylum seekers living in the Bell Hotel. For many, individual cops are representative of a British state that is not merely implementing the wrong policies but has become an alien, hostile power.
Activists are now preparing for a sustained confrontation. Writing on Facebook after he attended the Southampton demonstration, key Tommy Robinson lieutenant Danny Thomas argued that future protests must be guided by “determination, not recklessness”. “We need to channel this energy into something they cannot dismiss or bury,” he wrote. “We must connect, organise and put thousands of boots on the ground, not just a few hundred in one city but organised, disciplined numbers in towns and cities across the country.” In recent days, he has claimed that he is building an organisation – The Patriot Platform – that will effect such a vision.
At the next election, Dorricott will vote for Reform UK, he told me. He is not tempted by options further to the right, trusting instead that Farage will rescue Britain. But, he said, he believes urban disorder will only grow. “I think this is just the beginning,” he said. “We need to stand up for our country and stick up for what is ours, not theirs.” If he is 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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