On Monday, British police released body camera footage of their arrest of eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak. Video of Nowak’s last moments after he was stabbed by Vickrum Digwa in Southampton, England, on December 3 show the university student lying on the floor telling officers that he has been stabbed. As Mark Nowak, Henry’s father, said on the steps outside of Southampton’s Crown Court, “Instead of being treated as a dying victim, [the] police formally arrested Henry for assault and read him his rights. That was the last thing he heard. Henry did not die with dignity. He did not die with the care he deserved. He lost consciousness before anyone believed him.”

The images provoked shock and outrage across the UK, but that sentiment soon spread. Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch described the incident as a Stephen Lawrence moment, referring to the racially motivated murder of an eighteen-year-old black British man that went unsolved for decades. Nowak’s killer has been convicted and will be serving a life sentence in prison. This has not stopped the global far right from rallying around the murder. The incident is part of a long history of unlawful action on the part of Britain’s police. In recent memory, these go back to the death of ninety-seven Liverpool FC fans in a stadium crush in 1989 for which police and the media blamed fans; the fatal shooting of unarmed man Mark Duggan in London, which sparked a wave of riots in 2011; and the kidnapping, murder, and rape of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzens, a police officer who was known affectionately as “the rapist” by colleagues, in 2021.

Despite this long history, the British media as well as publications in the United States that have picked up this story have chosen to focus on the race and the religion of the killer, Digwa, who was a British-born Sikh. Jacobin spoke to Daniel Trilling, one of the UK’s leading experts on the politics of the Right and the author of Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right, Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe, and If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable, which came out this April.