Nigel Farage calls for ‘pure cold rage’ in response to Southampton murder

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has called on the British public to respond with “pure cold rage” to the murder of an 18-year-old student, claiming that it was the result of white lives being treated as less important than those of ethnic minorities.

“This is wrong. All the values and standards of living in a free country where everybody is judged equally before the law, have been trashed and thrown away,” Farage said in a video address on Tuesday morning, following the sentencing on Monday of the perpetrator for the murder of Henry Nowak in Southampton last year.

Vickrum Digwa, 23, was sentenced to life in prison — with a minimum of 21 years — for using a 21cm blade he said he carried as part of his Sikh faith to stab Nowak.

Digwa had lied to police, claiming that he was the victim of a racist attack and officers responded by arresting and handcuffing Nowak as he lay dying on the ground.

“Henry’s family have responded to this in just the most extraordinarily dignified way, but I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage,” Farage said.

Farage called for a full Independent Office for Police Conduct investigation. He added that he would write to the attorney-general on Tuesday to ask him to review the sentence handed down, which Farage claimed was lower than the recommended minimum for a “sustained, aggressive, murderous assault”.

“The fish rots from the head down,” Farage said. “It is up to government and police chiefs to change this culture and to start that process today.”

Farage contrasted the “silence” that he said had followed Nowak’s murder with the public reaction to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, from which the Black Lives Matter movement “exploded”.

Farage linked Nowak’s murder to what he claimed was a wider phenomenon in which racial slurs were treated “more seriously than an act of murder”.