Dr Sarah Ingham is the author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain.
A glimpse of the lonely death of handcuffed Henry Nowak bleeding out on a street in Southampton has been shared with the world. Few who watched slept well afterwards.
The killer, and apparently his family, played the race card. Their successful distraction of Police officers at the scene was enabled by the post-George Floyd structural anti-racism that is currently gripping Britain’s Police Forces.
The circumstances around Henry Nowak’s death suggest that the Police’s current anti-racist agenda is, paradoxically, racist. An impression has been given of bias – unconscious or otherwise – against Britain’s majority population.
In 2022, after the Black Lives Matter protests, the National Police Chiefs Council and the College of Policing developed a Police Race Action Plan.
England and Wales’ 43 individual Forces were to have their own local Plans. The format of each is different, but much of the language is shared. People from ethnic minorities are “over-policed, under-protected and under-represented”.
In Dorset’s Plan, the Chief Constable is concerned about unconscious biases against minorities. February and March 2025, workshops “enabled colleagues to feel more informed about institutional racism”.
The 2021 Census said that Dorset has a 94 per cent white British population. Exploring the county’s diversity, Dorset Council states that, of the remaining 6 per cent who are from an “ethnic minority”, 40 per cent are white other (e.g. from Poland) and 8 per cent are Irish. People of Black British/African/Caribbean heritage are 5 per cent – or 0.3 per cent of the overall total.
The Council’s bizarre methodology implies reluctance to spell out that Dorset is, to quote a former BBC Director General Greg Dyke in a different context, “hideously white”. Worth Matravers is unlikely to be twinned with Minneapolis anytime soon.
National leaders in the Police and local forces are keen to dwell on acts of historic malfeasance. Like embittered exes unable to let go of a past relationship, neither Police officers nor people from ethnic minorities are allowed to move on from misconduct committed by others, often decades ago.
The Police Race Action Plan cites “the overt racism many of the Windrush generation experienced including policing.” (The first Empire Windrush passengers arrived in 1948.) Also mentioned is the Scarman Report (1981), the death of Stephen Lawrence (1993) and the linked Macpherson Report (1998), with its verdict of “institutional racism”.
The Plan’s progress has been assessed by the Independent Scrutiny & Oversight Board. Its most recent Report, states that “the lack of trust between Black communities and UK policing is longstanding.” Unexplained deaths in custody, decades of discriminatory practices and harassment have contributed to this. ISOB explains: “Understanding this history is essential for anyone engaging in anti-racism.”
Senior Police commanders expect subordinates to learn about the past – even if the history lessons are bunk. In a Mail on Sunday interview, former counter-terrorism officer Paul Birch said a Metropolitan Police-organised workshop was told that “Caribbean migrants had been forcibly rounded up and marched aboard the Empire Windrush.” This is false, and a slavery-related dog whistle.
This seemingly one-sided raking over of the past to guilt-trip today’s serving Police officers perpetuates the grievance industry. Britain in 2026 is a different country from Britain in the 1990s, 1980s or 1940s. But the constant message is that, in the context of policing and minorities, history is an indelible stain, tainting the present.
Do British people from minority communities enjoy the role cast for them as being little more than victims of historic injustice?
Perhaps it’s time for the grievance-mongers to woman up (rather than man up).
In recent decades women have fought for, and won, equality. Some of the bad old ways still linger – highlighted by Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism Project and Caroline Criado Perez’ Invisible Women – for the most part, millennia of misogyny and inequality have been triumphantly overcome.
While today’s women can acknowledge that their fore-mothers had to deal with discrimination, they can’t change it. Often unpalatable, the patriarchal past is also immutable.
Today’s women have not stayed mired in victimhood, forever nursing grievances about the days before the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act or the 1977 police proposal that they should put themselves under curfew, which led to the Reclaim the Night marches.
Britain’s Police Forces can, in part, make reparation to the Nowak family by letting historic wounds heal. All sides need to move on from decades-old misconduct by committed by a minority of officers.
Let’s never forget police officers did not end the lives of Henry Nowak or Stephen Lawrence. Too many have lost their own lives in the line of duty, including PC Keith Blakelock.
On Monday, there was, apparently, an attempted beheading in Belfast.
Today’s powder-keg Britain demands focus on resolving today’s problems. Social conditions in 1948 are irrelevant. The public wants to be on the side of Police officers. For the country’s sake, the Police need to stay present.