The family of the murdered teenager Henry Nowak may have appealed for their son’s tragic and appalling murder not to be used to stoke further division and hatred, but it was clear from Nigel Farage’s intervention that it has fallen on deaf ears.
As he stood up in the Commons chamber during Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) to rail against what he claims is a “two-tier justice system”, the Reform UK leader may well have had one place in the UK in his mind as he complained that anti-racism measures were responsible for the 18-year-old’s dreadful treatment by police who handcuffed him as he lay dying.
But it was not Southampton, where a protest outside the police headquarters on Tuesday night descended into violence, with missiles thrown at police, resulting in 11 officers and a police dog being injured – but Makerfield in the northwest of England, where possibly the most crucial by-election in the last 50 years is taking place.
The constituency in the Wigan area is 96.7 per cent white working class. It voted heavily for Leave during the Brexit referendum a decade ago and is classic of the left-behind-overlooked-places which voted in anger to remove the country from the EU.
Unlike Gorton and Denton down the road, where another recent by-election was won by the Greens, Makerfield has a tiny Asian population of a mere 1.2 per cent of the constituency.
Reform’s scores of activists working the streets in Makerfield has seized upon the Henry Nowak case, and are even now actively raising it with people they meet on the doorstep.
It is one of the things making Labour MPs nervous about Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham winning the by-election, after many thinking he had the contest in the bag last week on an apparently unstoppable march to Downing Street to take over from Keir Starmer as PM.
Polling expert Lord Hayward told The Independent they were right to be concerned: “Labour MPs are right to be nervous, this by-election is going to be very tight. The Nowak case will certainly have an impact.”
The whole scenario has echoes of a decade ago when most commentators and politicians were smugly declaring the Remain campaign would win the EU referendum and had somehow ignored the latent anger in the country.
Mr Farage knows about that latent anger almost better than anyone else and is again proving to be the arch manipulator of it with a never-mind-the-consequences attitude. It is the most naked example of political opportunism.
He refused to condemn the violence seen at the protest in Southampton on Tuesday night, even though the protest was attended by far right activist Tommy Robinson.
Instead he gave licence to more of those protests warning that there will be others. Mr Farage has form on these issues – he also did not condemn the riots after the Southport stabbings or the Epping violence over the anger about migrant hotels.
Anger and division for populists on both the right and left are weapons to exploit. Tragedies are events to be weaponised.
But in a way, to win Makerfield he has to be the Mr Angry of the situation. Reform’s biggest threat in the by-election is the potential split of its vote with the even more right-wing Restore Britain, led by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe.
Mr Farage needs to galvanise his party’s core vote of around 25 to 30 per cent to all come out and support his candidate Robert Kenyon, a man who has taken a beating in the press over his colourful social media history, that appear to include posts about misogyny, Covid conspiracies and transgender slurs.
Given the circumstances, Mr Farage will have been delighted at the catcalls he got in the chamber at his question. He will have revelled in Sir Keir’s obvious disgust at him even though the prime minister’s allegation of “pretending” to care about the Nowak family cut through.
Reform has been leading a highly misleading social media campaign against Tory leader Kemi Badenoch on the back of the Nowak case and Sir Keir publicly thanking her in the Commons during PMQs for her “measured approach” was another gift for Mr Farage.
The sad lesson of events such as these is that reasonable words and measured thoughts often fail to make much of an impression and sometimes make things worse when the “cold fury” Mr Farage encouraged earlier this week is the gut feeling so many millions of people have.
