Dear Subscribers,
It is often not obvious if one is living through a revolutionary moment until after the fact. Yet the murder and police bodycam footage of Henry Nowak is far more forceful than Starmerian constipation or Mandelsonian duplicity that has previously moved public feeling. Many will by now be familiar with the circumstances of Nowak’s murder and the policemen and -women who cuffed him and presided over his death. (For an impassioned and emotional description, see Madeline Grant on The Spectator’s Quite right! podcast.) The officers’ disbelief (‘I’ve been stabbed’ – ‘I don’t think you have, mate’) of a white victim is the natural consequence of police training since the Macpherson report of 1999, as Charles Moore points out.
How have our political leaders responded? Farage said that while on a personal level Nowak’s family must grieve, we, on a political level, should respond with ‘pure, cold rage’ at such a striking example of two-tier injustice. All other responses have to be seen in light of this remark: at PMQs Starmer denied that there is two-tier policing and that Farage is ‘exploiting this tragedy to create grievance and division’; Badenoch refuted Farage by saying that he is ‘grandstanding’ and that he ‘is taking sides. I’m not taking sides’; ditto Ed Davey, who refuted Farage by pleading for ‘a politics where we come together to solve these problems and not use them as a political football.’ It of course does not occur to Starmer or to Davey that people remember how hot rage was deemed the only appropriate response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020; or to Conservatives that the institutionalisation of DEI racism in public institutions occurred under their administration.
To be sure, it is a testimony to our political class that they cannot understand that the majority of the country will be outraged by Nowak’s murder: for if not this, then what should demand rage? (Rhiannon Whyte? Wayne Broadhurst?) It is a democratic cliché to call a political elite ‘out of touch’; but this is normally meant in a material or cultural sense; the response to watching the Nowak bodycam footage is not so abstract, and the natural reaction should be rage at what was an avoidable evil.
On Monday the 1,500 pages of the ‘Mandelson files’ were published by the Cabinet Office. Of note is Mandelson’s promise in a hand-written letter to David Lammy that, ‘If you were minded to appoint me I would make sure you never regret it.’ Pat McFadden (Minister for Work and Pensions) has emerged out of the files as a sensibly conservative critic of the Labour party’s class resentments: ‘Every meeting I have is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others’.’ Moreover, Darren Jones (Chief Sec. to the PM), who denied ‘transacting government business’ with Mandelson over WhatsApp, has been exposed by The Spectator’s Tim Shipman for doing exactly that. They include doubts about Rachel Reeves and the government’s socialism, as well as a warm deference to Mandelson (which could also be said of Streeting).
Lastly, the latest development in the Makerfield by-election took the form of a Question Time special. It made for insightful though tiresome viewing. Burnham had obviously rehearsed his lines, and had a lot of them, to the delight of the nodding heads of most of the women in the audience. Reform’s plumber Kenyon came across as straightforward, perhaps too much so, although his straightforwardness exposed Green stupidity about the pressure of mass immigration on housing demand. The Lib Dem candidate was forgettable; the most likeable figure was the Conservative candidate, Michael Winstanley. The problem with Question Time is its format: Question Time – like Have I got News for You – is made for the performance of the university-educated consensus politics of the 2000s-10s, in which various public figures duel for the most virtuous slogans and soundbites to a predictable audience of nodding heads and clapping hands of the cranky and the clueless. Conservative positions are usually on the ropes, except for the occasional uppercut by Peter Hitchens or David Starkey. Kenyon was slightly too earnest, whereas Burnham excelled in bumbling (it is a format suited to northern condescension). But it is doubtful whether this will have any impact on the outcome of the by-election: it just exposes two radically different political styles that points to our future.
Media
Henry Nowak and the return of clan justice: Politicians can’t ignore public concern by Samuel Rubinstein for UnHerd
The lessons from Henry Nowak’s murder by Douglas Murray in The Spectator
Key Points
Court vs. Country
Farage’s question about two-tier policing at PMQs aroused universal moans, scoffs and scorn from across the Commons. The failure of the political class, from right to left, to grasp the significance of this moment has been both divine – for its revelatory quality – and devastating – for the manifest failure to respond as intelligent human beings to the nature of Nowak’s death.
The bias against rage is a strange matter. Everyone who hates Farage accused him of inciting violence. But they chose not to listen carefully enough: ‘cold rage’, like cold war, ie, contained and controlled; the BBC, in a fit of (un)conscious bias, misquoted Farage as saying ‘white cold rage’, perhaps like the white heat of Harold Wilson, perhaps like the anti-whiteness of DEI.
For centuries anger was seen as connected to virtue: Aristotle and Aquinas, for instance, both argued that it was necessary for achieving justice. They distinguished anger from hatred, since anger applies to particular instances, hatred to universal categories (eg, I can hate all thieves, but I cannot be angry with an entire class of thieves). Yet in our politics anger has been reserved – indeed, accommodated – for a revolutionary cultural politics that undermines our history and traditions; it has marched through the schools, universities, judiciary, broadcasting – in fact, the entirety of British public life over the past two or three generations.
When anger is used against them, the same political class choose to conflate it with hatred to discredit their opposition. Thus, the anger of the white plebs who voted for Brexit is unintelligent; it does not count as an intelligent response to an intelligible or real problem. It is appropriate, then, that they – Starmer, Badenoch, Davey et al. – have reduced Nowak’s death to something outside of politics – a position which is far more cynical than that of Farage, as Samuel Rubinstein shows (see Media above). It is a position that reveals a desperate political establishment – since when was it the function of a politician to legislate the feelings of their electors? Nowak’s death is nothing if not a political issue: and it is only through politics that such rage can be intelligently worked through, not ignored or repressed to uphold a political establishment.
Historians of 18th-century England are fond of the word ‘oligarchy’ to describe the political regime of Robert Walpole. The main division in the oligarchic politics of those days was between court and country. Well! for all that is said about England in the 21st century being modern and democratic, never has such an old-fashioned distinction seemed so apposite.
