The two-tier policing of people’s emotions must stop
Daily Telegraph 08/06/26
There’s a new poster at my local railway station that shows a snake riding a train, looking hypnotically at the viewer, with the words: “Staring at her and making her feel harassed is ABUSE. End violence against women and girls.”
Quite right. Point taken. But here’s the thing: if a snake drops from the ceiling and stares at me, I’m liable to stare back. In fact, I’d probably pull the emergency cord. What I would not do is call the police because it’s 2/1, they’d take the snake’s side against mine, leading to my arrest, trial and Stella Creasy chaining herself to the reptile enclosure at London Zoo.
I’m embarrassed at being a man, ashamed of being white. I know I am responsible for every evil since time began. I watched the events to mark D-Day this weekend and thought: “Why did we even bother?” given that the British Empire “lasted longer” and “did more damage” than the Nazis (according to academic Kehinde Andrews). Happily, the English, with their castles and plantations, ceased to exist in 1945, when we became a multicultural kingdom of good manners – always putting others first.
When many saw Henry Nowak struggling to breathe, they would not have thought “that could be my son” but rather, “I hope this won’t harm community relations”.
We retain, despite our obliteration of historical identity, a stiff upper lip. The Prime Minister, whose very soul is starched, reminded us after the killing that “we don’t do rage”. Indeed, it might be helpful if the Government sent a leaflet to every home in Britain suggesting how we should feel when we see a dying child being handcuffed, ranging from anxious to irritated to mildly annoyed, along with healthy physical alternatives to a riot. Go jogging. Put up a shelf. I’m campaigning for outdoor zones to be established for those who insist on being angry, much as we do for smoking. That way, Nigel Farage can vent to himself outside the office, drenched in rain.
On the whole, then, I’m pretty serene. Still taking the tablets! But as I try to go to sleep, counting the many ways diversity has made me stronger, it’s the contradictions that keep me awake. I understand that we’re all equal now, and I’m thrilled about that, but why do the reactions to some deaths seem more equal than others?
JD Vance has been told he mustn’t comment on British policing, yet when George Floyd died in the United States in 2020, Keir Starmer not only expressed “shock and anger”, he told the Government to communicate our national “abhorrence” to Donald Trump. The Tories refused. Lisa Nandy called them “weak and wrong”.
Police chiefs were also “appalled and horrified”, promising “justice and accountability”. A structural review of the Met concluded that “neutrality” in policing was a “false ideal” when the “norm” was “whiteness”. Britain thus rewrote its approach to policing in response to the death of an American, as coppers and MPs fell to their knees like ninepins. David Lammy says he wouldn’t use the gesture today.
Henry’s death led to just one riot in Southampton. Within one week, Floyd’s death had triggered protests in around 140 US cities. Most were peaceful, but property was destroyed, and thousands were arrested.
Looting, argued an article in the Harvard Political Review, can be “a challenge to the violence of racial capitalism” and “an alternative and accelerated path to justice”.
The British defied lockdown rules to stage their own protests and tossed a racist statue into the sea – a crime for which a jury refused to convict and which led to a debate about public art so paranoid that a statue of Baden-Powell required 24-hour security.
In Canada, a nation so nice it had to dig very deep to find a reason to hate itself, when horrific radar evidence of mass graves of indigenous people under church land prompted similar claims of historical trauma. Churches were mysteriously vandalised and burned down, and though Justin Trudeau, the then prime minister, denounced the arson, he described anger towards the Catholic Church as “understandable”.
Anger over what happened in the US or Canada is cast as legitimate, which it is, and channelled into services, commissions, school curricula, yet for Henry, we must be reason personified, a test of national sang-froid.
As I say, I want to be a good liberal, but the rules change so fast they’re hard to follow, and I can’t see why, when one group riots, the demonstration is complex but basically sympathetic (“they’re probably right”), yet when another group gathers outside Southampton police station, they are just a bunch of thugs. For them, no empathy. They’ve read too much Elon Musk.
Lines of causation are drawn between Nigel Farage articulating “pure, cold rage” and grifters throwing bins – a butterfly lights a Benson and Japan burns – and, because one does not want Tommy Robinson on one’s hands, Middle England is persuaded to go quiet. We’ll let this one pass.
After all, didn’t Henry’s father make a plea against “division, hatred or tension”? True... but he said some other things, too.
Liberals claim rising crime is a right-wing fantasy. Mark Nowak called knife crime a “national emergency”. Officials have stressed the complexity of the crime scene. Mr Nowak said, “The truth is much simpler”, that while his son was “degraded... his murderer was afforded decency”.
In other words, a double standard was applied – now tripled, I’d wager, by the attempt to suppress the same anguish about Henry that was encouraged about Floyd. It’s the two-tier policing of people’s emotions.
What I truly don’t understand is that I found Floyd’s death revolting, too. That crime scene was also “complicated” – he had taken fentanyl – but nothing excuses a cop kneeling on a man’s neck for more than nine minutes, and the context was a history of police brutality in a country rife with discrimination. African-Americans are 13 per cent of the population, yet account for over one-third of the US prison population.
To fix that, goes the argument, we have to handle non-white suspects differently – OK. But this creates the paradox of equal ends being pursued by unequal means, and it risks alienating a majority population tired of being spoken of like psychotics, oppressors, would-be harassers, products of a racist original sin squatting in the Garden of England and hissing anyone who doesn’t fit in.
Treat people like this, and there’s a greater likelihood they’ll act like it. It is the attempt to elide the grim facts of the Nowak case that is ultimately divisive, not the honest expression of rage.
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