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“Big up Southampton!”” trills a voice on the livestream as a small band of brave patriots skips down St Denys Road past the big Sainsbury’s. As they approach the gathered throng, a spontaneous chant of “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” goes up, accompanied by a salute of raised beer cans and plastic pint glasses. Indeed, almost everyone on the protest seems to have brought a refreshing beverage of some kind. Nigel Farage has sounded the alarm, and the patriots of southern England have responded with pure cold ales.
One of the most striking elements about last week’s riots in Southampton, watching back the many hours of citizen footage, was just what a brilliant time everyone seemed to be having commemorating the murder of an 18-year-old student. The booze. The laughter. The football songs. The music pumping out of a portable speaker daubed with a “Stop The Boats” sticker. The counter-cultural kink of reclaiming the knee, screaming “I can’t breathe” in the service of making Britain intolerant again. As if this were the birth of a new, groundbreaking social movement. “Hey, what if we did the George Floyd protests … but for the whites this time?”
Even the anger had a licentious, thrill-seeking, lads-on-tour quality to it. Someone is prising a brick from a garden wall to use as a projectile. Someone hurls a recycling bin at the police cordon, and everyone cheers. “I’ve been stabbed!” one guy in the crowd shouts. “You can’t have been stabbed, you’re white!” another responds, to peals of laughter from the assembled mourners.
Perhaps you consider this spontaneous outburst of revelry, role play and indiscriminate lawlessness a nauseatingly inappropriate response to the horrific death of Henry Nowak by people claiming to honour his memory. But then, the true patriots of this country are sick of being told what to feel by an out-of-touch elite. They’re taking their country back. Who says they can’t have some absolutely legendary banter while they’re doing it? And for all the genuine outrage and sadness at Nowak’s murder in the country at large, we also have to recognise that there is a significant part of the British right who are quite frankly enjoying all this far too much. For whom this tragedy is simply a pulpit, a platform, an opportunity to race-bait and slogan-chant and content-capture and lib-own to gleeful excess.
You did not even need to be on the Southampton frontline, with a brick in one hand and a bottle of lager in the other, to glimpse that sense of licentious relish. Witness the haste with which chatshows and news programmes – even on serious mainstream outlets – were able to clear their schedules to make way for provocative Nowak-themed debate. “Are the police anti-white?” asked Sky News. “Is Britain facing civilisational collapse?” asked the gurning host on TalkTV. After all, this was a story that pushed all the right buttons: race, immigration, true crime, moral decay, deep-state conspiracy. These are difficult subjects that we are no longer allowed to discuss, an earnest talking head in sensible clothes will tell us. Nevertheless, we’ll be discussing this in much more detail after the news, weather and travel where you are.
On the internet, meanwhile, Nowak’s life, death and likeness had already been reappropriated and repackaged into banal social media sainthood, to what one can only assume was the unimaginable distress of anyone who genuinely loved him. As of Monday afternoon you could still watch AI-confected content of Nowak at school, beaming down from heaven with Captain Tom alongside him, lifting the World Cup with Harry Kane this summer. To those generating and disseminating this slop there is, of course, no internal contradiction or moral boundary to observe here. The distinctions between the human and the content, the grief and the grift, have long since dissolved into one and the same thing.
Farage may claim to disown these people, but whether he likes it or not they are his foot soldiers, his nameless militia, and he has no path to government without their support. Indeed, part of his enduring talent as a politician has always been to give the nihilists and full-blown nativists to his right just enough of a seemingly tacit smirk without ever needing to embrace them explicitly. Naturally enough, he has refused to condemn the rioters in Southampton.
Much of the response to Nowak’s killing has understandably focused on policy solutions, procedural snags, tangible injustices. But none of it actually feels very relevant in the face of a movement piqued less by specific demands than by a roiling, yowling boredom. There is no retail offering that can realistically be made to a group of people motivated above all by bloodsport and debauchery. No public inquiry will satisfy. No mass deportation will ever be mass enough. Farage can call Black Lives Matter “a new form of the Taliban” and is still handed all the airtime he wants.
By such means does white nationalism embed itself just a little further into our politics, our media, our shared spaces, our lives. And of course not everyone pushing this stuff will be an incorrigible racist. But many will do so anyway, because the sense of momentum and consternation feels exhilarating, because it may make their professional or social lives more comfortable, because “clash of civilisations” and “race war” sound like really cool mobile games.
And so one way we can honour the memory of Henry Nowak is by exposing some of the spiritual voids claiming to speak for him. To point out not just their hypocrisies and double standards, but also their proud ignorance, their joyriding vacuity, their basic cringe. “What happened to Henry should never have happened,” a woman in Southampton tells one of the live-streamers. In the background, a voice can be heard muttering: “Oh, Henry. That’s his name.”
