Henry Nowak: The murder that exposed Britain’s broken two-tier justice system

0:02The Telegraph.

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1:14The footage is harrowing. The outrage is understandable. What does the murder of Henry Novak tell us about justice in two-tier Britain? We speak to the former top cop who says the obsession with anti-racism training means bobbies are no longer fully prepared for the beat. And we discuss the unfolding row between Kemi Badenok and Nigel Farage on the murder. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tominy.

1:54Tim, this extremely harrowing footage which we have headlined I Can't Breathe, Dying Henry Novak, pleads with police during arrest, is fast becoming one of the most commented upon articles in Telegraph history. Yes, it's the footage which people can see, which is very distressing, really cuts you to the soul. And I think the response that I most identified with was that of Kemi Badenok, who said this. I listened to his father and it was absolutely heartbreaking. And this morning I watched that body cam footage and I just kept thinking, what if that was my boy? That his last moments, his last moments were spent in handcuffs.

2:40He knew he was dying and he could see the confusion, his attacker claiming that he had been a racist. it's an awful awful way for anyone to die i'm a man and i know that things can happen between men and i know men can find themselves uh in difficult situations particularly young men who are head strong yes and maybe who have had a drink a lot of this does not apply to henry novak by the way because he had had some drink but not enough to be intoxicated and so there's always a part of me that sort of looks at them and thinks there but for the grace of god go i or someone in my family So the scene of him lying on the floor saying, I can't breathe, which has echoes of George Floyd in America, and the response of the policeman to it, someone saying, when he said, I've been stabbed, I don't think you have, mate, upset me so greatly because I can just immediately put myself or someone else in that situation.

3:34Well, as a mum, I can put my son there. I like Kemi Babenock. I look at this. I had the same reaction to the murder of Barnaby Webber in Nottingham, along with Grace O'Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates. This is a university kid out for the night. Yeah. That could be any of our sons. Yeah. So on the one hand, I'm desperately upset at this young man, watching this young man bleed out and die. I'm also furious. I'm so angry. With the behaviour of the police. Because that scene to me encapsulates everything wrong with modern policing. Why do they wear these plastic blue gloves as if they don't even like to touch us?

4:16Why do they call us mate as though we're their friends? They should be calling us sir. Why do they have this cynical, almost adolescent air as they all mingle around telling him, no, you've not really been stabbed? Yes, the female police officer on the scene, you can hear on the footage. When someone says, when one of the Diggler family says he's not been stabbed, she said, yeah, we know, but we've got to check. Like they're going through motions. As though it's all tick box. Yes. Right. There's something about the juxtaposition of someone's last moments and what looks to me like bureaucratic almost disinterest in it that I found really very, very distressing.

5:06And I think actually the reaction of everyone watching the footage is best summarised by Henry Novak's father who spoke outside court yesterday. Instead of being treated as a dying victim, police formally arrested Henry for assault and read him his rights. That was the last thing he heard. Henry did not die with dignity. He did not die with the care he deserved. He lost consciousness before anyone believed him. Let me be absolutely clear. We hold Vikram Digwar solely and 100 % responsible for the brutal murder of our son. but Henry should not have died on the streets of Southampton in police custody.

5:56The way he was treated was inhumane and degrading. His murder, however, was afforded decency. He was believed. He was not handcuffed when arrested. He was not handcuffed when transported to the police station. As far as we understand, he was never handcuffed at all. You're angry with the police. I'm so angry with the indignance of this murderer, Digwar, whose sentence of 21 years is now being looked at. The Attorney General, Lord Hermer, has said he's concerned it's unduly lenient. Digwar is a cold-blooded killer. That needs to be made absolutely clear. What I can't come to terms with, Tim, is for this man's ego, for his supposed honour, he and family members appear to be standing around conspiring to conceal the fact that he has been responsible for an 18 year old student on the floor bleeding out.

7:01and at no point do they think to say to the police, it's a perfect storm of absolutely reprehensible behaviour. The digwas standing there pretending to be the victim, not pointing out that a lad has been stabbed and is bleeding out on the floor, not telling the police, the police then believing that the criminal is the victim and not the victim himself. As you say, the sort of slightly pseudo-adolescent, amateur approach of the officers on the scene in the face of such a human tragedy. And then to hear his father speak so eloquently, and to be fair to Mr Novak and the wider family, the scale of their loss is well described by the judge in this case.

7:48And I would urge people, we have put the full judge's statement on the Telegraph website. I do urge you to read it from start to finish. Henry Novak is from a blended family. We've got tributes from his parents, tributes from his step parents, his sister Olivia, with whom he was inseparable. Sometimes we cover these cases and you've got to go back to the human emotion at the heart of this and what this entire family has lost. And Mr Novak, to be fair to him, can still bring himself to say that he would like to thank the officer that actually did fully investigate this case and bring Diguar to justice.

8:25He would also like to thank the family liaison officer who has helped them through this atrocity. So there is such compassion, isn't there, in the Novak family? And we now hear more charges are going to be brought against the Diguar family for holding offensive weapons. Diguar's own mother is still in prison because she helped to conceal the weapon. His father did attempt to help Henry Novak. That was acknowledged in the judge's remarks. But as I said, Vikram Singh Digwar is a cold-blooded murderer and a liar. He lied about the altercation. We can reasonably assume that he lied about Henry having been racist.

9:10There's no evidence of that and that would conflict with Henry's known behavior. It was not an act of self-defense. He stabbed this boy several times. He then watched him as he tried to climb over a fence to get away. He didn't just watch him, he filmed him. He filmed him as he did that. It's a lie to say that the particular dagger he was carrying is one that Sikhs have to carry. It's not at all. Most Sikhs carry a very small dagger on a necklace, which is like a form of jewellery. He was carrying an enormous one. In addition, he had one of those small necklaces, but he was carrying an enormous one in addition to that.

9:49Other members of his family didn't carry that. No. And he was also someone who collected weapons. Yes, as the judge pointed out, this wasn't typical. The outfit he was wearing in this ostentatious, almost threatening brandishing of a huge knife. When his brother and his father came out, they weren't dressed the same. No, no. So this man was making himself conspicuous. Yeah, and Sikhs carry the kirpan actually to demonstrate their willingness to defend the weak, the poor and freedom and liberty. And it is never in that community used violently at all. And indeed, since the 1988 Act came into force, which defined which knives can and cannot be carried in public, I believe it's not being used in a single murder.

10:35Which does call into question some of these calls for kerpans and other knives to be banned. Zia Yusuf has said that they ought to be banned. I mean, one might argue that the very dangerous knives already are banned. I mean, you have to have a very good religious reason for carrying one of them. It's not something you should be wandering around with. Certainly, it's not something that would be carried for any kind of self-defense or offensive reason. And the judge, in his verdict added some years onto Digwa's conviction on the basis of the damage that he had done to the reputation of the Sikh community and that he will now very probably endanger their lives too.

11:18Now, I mentioned Zia Yusuf, Nigel Farage put out this statement. He was actually treated in a way that meant an accusation of a racial slur was treated more seriously than an act of murder. What does he say? I can't breathe. Familiar words? Remember career criminal George Floyd, who died in appalling circumstances in Midwest America a few years ago. Remember the reaction to that and the way the police behaved. Within a few days, Keir Starmer was taking my knee, Black Lives Matter has exploded all over the country. Churchill's statue was defaced. The cenotaph was vandalised. And yet, what has the public reaction been from our leaders and politicians?

12:08And indeed, to be frank, much of the media did this. Silence. Absolute silence. Proof, if ever there was any, that we're living in a two-tier culture in this country where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities. Farage there trying to make a white lives matter point. Interestingly, the black woman that leads the Conservative Party, who we heard from earlier, has said that Farage is wrong in his reaction to Henry Novak's murder. What Nigel Farage is doing is reinforcing the difference. I have said that we need to find what we have in common, not what separates us.

12:50I don't want to hear about black lives matter. I don't want to hear about white lives matter. We all matter. Enough of this nonsense where we keep separating everybody and splitting people into different groups. We are descending into tribalism. I do not want that. I almost don't want to get into the politics of this, but here is a subtle partisan difference between reform and the conservatives. Reform is trying to speak up for what many white people feel is an overlooked and even persecuted majority who are now the victims of a double standard. The Conservatives, who come from a slightly different philosophical tradition, are trying to stand up for the principle of justice is blind, that we shouldn't be talking about one sort of life matters.

13:33We should be talking about all lives matter, as Kemi Baden-Ock said. She's saying that Reform UK are guilty of tribalism and that they are reinforcing differences with Farage's statement on the case. And he would reply that he's not. It's the police who reinforced a difference. And he's merely trying to rebalance it because the alternative is not. And he would say that it is the police who enforced difference, the police who are operating as if we lived in a tribal system, and he's just trying to rebalance things. Keir Starmer has issued a statement. I say at last. I'm not saying that to be unfairly pejorative towards the Prime Minister, but let's be honest.

14:23He absolutely was one of the first out of the traps to condemn the murder of George Floyd, who at the end of the day is a US citizen, not one of his own voters. 15 days after the killing of George Floyd, Keir Starmer took the knee. We're now 175 days since the killing of Henry Novak. This is what he has written on X. This is an awful, shocking case. Henry's loved ones have gone through the trauma of a long trial and endured Henry's killer, making up appalling claims about their son who was thoughtful, kind and deeply loved. It is right that the IOPC, which is the body that investigates the police force, is investigating the police's response to this senseless murder and we must end the cycle of tragedy by tackling the horror of knife crime.

15:08Henry's family, friends, his university and the city of Southampton will continue to feel his loss and our thoughts will always be with them. Now, some could say that the Prime Minister has held off from releasing the statement because we had a trial and proceedings were active. However, you remember that that didn't stop him from condemning those who rioted following the Southport killing. So again, there's a degree of inconsistency at play here with this idea that on one hand, one is quick to rudge to judgment if people of colour are involved in altercations with the police. And yet another, there's a holding back.

15:44And can I just say as well, broadcasters in this country have not really touched this case until now. They've touched the case because we've had Mr Novak's very moving statement outside court. And we've now got the Reform UK leader and others giving their own reaction. The only channel that actually covered this in full last week was GB News. And people are pointing at that channel and indeed its presenters, myself included, saying racists and bigots. Of course, we're talking about it. Yes. Yeah. Like we're trying to stoke up hatred, but we've got the facts now. I mean, we knew quite a lot of them before anyway.

16:17But I think that coverage has probably been vindicated of asking very, very serious questions, not just of the police, Tim, but of society on the whole, of where we have got to, that we've now got criminals making themselves the victims and the police believing them. I mean, how can you have trust in the force? Yes. If that kind of grotesque inversion takes hold before our very eyes because we have the footage showing how it played out. Maybe that's a factor, too, by the way. The fact that we can now see video and body cam and iPhone footage of all of this. I mean, I think the other consequence, by the way, is it desensitizes us to violence.

17:03That's very true. We see this playing out and we just think you spoke earlier about the male experience. And I am uncomfortable about watching someone die. I mean, that was a very uncomfortable thing to do. But I think in this instance, it was necessary, as it was with George Floyd, because I think you need to see what's happening. But the right, like GB News, did not invent identity politics. The right did not go around saying to people, you must see everything through the prism of race. Well, if after, say, a decade that's been applied to ethnic minorities who've been encouraged to see everything that happens in their life as a reflection of where they sit in a sort of racial pyramid of oppression.

17:43Why does it surprise people that white people are now doing the same? I don't want to live by that standard. But if you're going to make everything a competition over resources, a competition over grievance, a competition over power, then why did you think white people wouldn't eventually play that game too? And maybe Nigel Farage is doing that. I don't like it, but I can tell you there will be some votes in it. The other thing that Mr Farage referred to was our colleague Alison Pearson, who herself has been under police investigation for so-called non-crime hate incidents that have now been stopped.

18:21The police are no longer investigating sort of hurty words, but she's spoken to a number of different officers who have actively told her that they are being told to police, for instance, Muslim suspects in a different way to others. So we've got first-hand testimony from whistleblowers saying, I was told to behave in this particular way with ethnic minority suspects compared to white suspects. And another top cop who said, I was driven out of my policing role in Bradford for, quote, offending Muslims. So the background to all this is quite a lot of reporting suggesting that the police themselves feel compromised.

19:00Well, coming up after the break, let's speak to somebody who used to work in a very senior role at the Met. Former Detective Chief Inspector David Spencer will join us.

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19:58We're now joined by David Spencer, former Chief Detective Inspector at The Met and now Head of Crime and Justice for Policy Exchange. David Spencer, tell us, do you think this was an isolated incident? The answer is probably no. the case itself in terms of the awful outcomes probably is isolated so it is it's actually very rare for someone to lose their life in this sort of way and it is utterly devastating but the things that ran up to it probably are not isolated and there's a few things going on here so first of all I think there are real questions to be asked in terms of what the officers did when they arrived at the scene.

20:45And from the footage that I've seen that's been released so far, it doesn't look like they did any. They put handcuffs on pretty quickly without having checked straight away to see whether there are any injuries. and that sort of initial survey and first aid and the handcuffing, I suspect that is not as unusual as we would hope it is. In terms of isolation, though, the broader question is the broader sort of policy questions that come up from this sort of case. And the big policy question for me is, is the fear of wrongly being called a racist now so embedded in the minds of frontline police officers to such a degree that it trumps everything else.

21:32Because when I speak to my former colleagues in the police who are still serving the police, that is the sort of thing that they say. And I think that's really, really troubling. And so when we talk about it being an isolated case and we start to zoom out a bit and we look at the wider policy questions, then I don't think it is isolated. And it's not just about race. There are other questions as well. So recruitment, vetting, the quality of training that police officers receive, the quality of frontline supervision and leadership. So when we're talking about these policy questions, it goes far beyond just one or two officers on the frontline or just one terrible, terrible case.

22:11And they can't be the only people that have questions asked of them. These are questions which need to be asked of police chiefs, ministers, government. That's where a lot of these wider questions need to be asked. We'll get on to the policy, but I just want to pick up on the procedure point. If someone is lying on the ground and barely responsive and has hardly moved, why, whatever they have allegedly done, would you put handcuffs on them? Well, that's what I find so difficult to understand in this case, because from the footage I've seen, what you've just described is the situation. now what you might do is if you turn up to an incident and there's a lot of chaos going on there are people kicking off all over the place there are people threatening one another and to get the get the scene under control and to get the people involved under control you might immediately put handcuffs on someone to enable you to do that but that what I've just described is a very very different scenario to the one that we've seen in the footage which is someone apparently lying, prostate on the floor, barely able to move.

23:23It would seem actually barely able to speak and breathe at that point. Putting handcuffs under those circumstances, I find very, very difficult to understand. And the reality is, we will only know when the officer is asked that question and they give an explanation for why they did what they did. But I find it very difficult to understand. The inference that the public is making, David, is that as soon as somebody cries racism, policing becomes subjective, not objective. And the response to the cry of racism was to automatically see the victim as the perpetrator. So when you talk about something endemic in the force and this fear about marginalising communities, which, to be fair, is understandable in the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and findings, But this idea that you will just take as gospel, pardon the pun, the claim of somebody that they're a victim of racism and immediately start to criminalise the person they're accusing when actually they haven't even worked out the most basic of facts of the case does strike me as being very troubling.

24:32I think it's very troubling indeed. But the reality is we've had now years and years and frontline officers have had years and years of training and instruction that essentially, you know, racism is almost the ultimate evil, that it is the thing which you must be alert for at all times. And actually, in terms of individual officers, when we look at misconduct cases or investigations into police officers, as soon as the racism word is mentioned, then you are on a fast track to losing your job as a police officer. If there is an allegation of racism made against you, and every frontline police officer knows that.

25:19so it is the environment and the culture that's been created by those that have led policing by governments over years that has led to this sort of mindset in police officers and police officers thinking so I think it's very you know it's very much in the forefront of officers minds when they turn up to any incident that this could be an occasion where they are afraid of being called racist and actually are they going to lose their job? What is the intensity of that training like? So in much of corporate life, anti-racism training is just tick box every couple of years or so to make sure the company's back is covered.

26:02No comment on what might or might not happen at the Telegraph. What is it like for the police? Well, it's ramped up considerably in recent years. And if we wind ourselves back to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, the McPherson inquiry, you know that is where a lot of this approach began but actually it was probably given rocket boosters five or six years ago following the murder of George Floyd in the United States and then the Black Lives Matter protests and activism and then as a result of that there was something called the Police Race Action Plan which was set up nationally by the National Police Chiefs Council and the College of Policing, with the tacit support of the Home Office, to essentially create what they describe as an anti-racist police service.

26:57And so what we've seen over the recent years is, for example, we now have six police forces in Britain who've publicly said that they are institutionally racist. And we have seen that the training and the supervision on these issues has really been given rocket boosters over the last few years. And so one of the questions here as well is, who is advising the police? Who are the external providers providing this training? Who is auditing and checking this work that is going on? Because certainly when I speak to police officers, what I'm told is that the last few years, the intensity of this training has ramped up considerably.

27:37And one of the issues that comes out of this is well you know there's only so much time in the day or the week or the year for police officers to receive training so every minute every hour that they're in the classroom being trained on DEI or anti-racism issues is an hour or a day where they're not being trained on how to give good first aid how to deal with emergency life support whether to handcuff someone when they turn up to a scene, how they deal with a complex scene. So, you know, there are trade-offs to be met here. And every time you put someone for an hour or a day in the classroom on DEI or on anti-racism, that is an hour or a day that you are not spending on these other critical, life-savingly critical frontline policing roles.

28:25On training in general, we've spoken to other top cops or former top cops on the Daily Tea. And almost all of them have pointed to the closing down or the reducing of Hendon as a training facility. And we've run stories in The Telegraph talking about how the quality of police officer and the recruitment of police officers has been hampered and that actually standards have fallen. We even did a story once suggesting that some coppers were being recruited who were barely literate or numerate. what part has that played in everything David? Well I don't know the link to this isolated case but certainly in terms of the broader situation we find ourselves in policing these are absolutely issues that are on point so the lack of the loss of almost entirely residential training which has saved of course a huge amount of money has had a huge loss to policing because the reality is so when I did my training a long time ago you spent 18 weeks residential at Hendon the move to just doing everything in an eight-hour classroom training environment means that you have less facility to keep an eye on what people are doing whether they're appropriate to be police officers so I think the loss of residential training to save money is a big loss but then more generally just the quality of police training and supervision in particular the quality of training for supervisors is and the level of experience for supervisors in particular has fallen off a cliff over the last 10 to 15 years or so you know when I joined the police and I joined a response team in central London the sergeants that were overseeing and responsible leading my team you know some of them had 25 28 years of frontline police experience like not even close to that now.

30:16You're talking about sergeants that have a handful of years, a few years. And, you know, to go from being a novice practitioner, a novice police officer, to being an expert, you don't do that in the classroom. Like you do it through thousands and thousands of policing interactions with the public, some cooperative, some not. And so losing that experience from policing, which is what we've seen over the last 10 to 20 years, has been absolutely devastating. What do you think the average Bobby thinks about the anti-racist drive. Are they people who just go along with it because they have to? Or are there ideologues now on the force?

30:53Well, I'm sure it's a mixture. I'm sure there are people at both ends of the scale. What's the average copper think? I think they probably think that, you know, yes, police officers shouldn't be racist. But this has all gone far too far. Why are we spending yet more time and energy on this rather than learning how to deal with actually the complexity of a frontline incident you might turn up to? You know, I hear every week from police officers who are being given yet more training in this area and they just think this has all gone far too far. And, you know, actually what they want to be doing is more training on the first aid, more training on how to deal with complex incidents, more training on how to better investigate for supervisors, how to actually turn my team of police officers into the best frontline crime fighters I can find.

31:48And the reality is that's not what's happening. So I think they just the average police officer thinks it's all gone far too far. Is there some irony that pre-McPherson, many ethnic minorities justifiably did not trust the police because they thought they were biased against them? And now post-McPherson, many white people do not trust the police because they think they are biased against them. Well, when we look at the data, actually, levels of trust in the police are relatively high, actually. The sort of proportions when you ask people, do you trust the police, yes or no? then often you get data of 70 80 percent but when you ask the question do you have confidence that the police are any good then the numbers start to really crater and that's what we've seen in recent years and I think the issue there is do we have a police force that is led by people who are in a position to be able to do that focusing particularly on the fight against crime and my concern is that we don't.

32:54And so the issue is actually less about trust often. It's about are the police any good? And far too often the answer comes back from the public, no, they're not. David Spencer, thank you very much indeed for joining us on today's Daily Tea. Thanks very much. Obviously, Tim, racism is evil, but it's not the ultimate evil compared to actual murder. This is the discrepancy, isn't it? This idea as well that the police have spent far too much time policing people's thoughts and words instead of their deeds. That's what's at stake here. And we saw it with our colleague Alison Pearson. We've done stories on it.

33:30We've done stories about families living in leafy Hertfordshire having six police officers knock on the door because they've posted something on social media. Yes, we can have a debate about what people should or shouldn't be posting on social media, Lucy Connolly, and all the rest of it. But then it's juxtaposed with an absolutely sort of depressingly lenient approach to other criminals. So say if we take, and there's not a direct equivalence, but it's still an example. The public is even more irate about this in light of, for instance, the judge letting off the rapist teenagers who film themselves degrading their teenage victims.

34:08And comparatively, the way that those criminals, in inverted commas, were treated, the idea that Digwa, in this case, is taken off to the police station and according to Henry Novak's father, given a meal. This absolutely disproportionate... When we say two-tier, it could be that people are saying, okay, two-tier with regard to dealing with people of race and dealing with white people. It was used to describe the pro-Palestinian marches, the police's approach to brown people versus Jews. That's one debate. But doesn't two-tier also suggest a degree of inconsistency in approach? Yes, and that's contrary to the principle that justice is blind, that it treats everyone equally.

34:59So what we all suspect happened is the police came to a scene where they thought there had been some kind of violent altercation. and the way they read that scene was changed by the accusation of racism. That what mattered now, most of all, was intervening to arrest and detain the person accused of being a racist before they had even ascertained if that was correct. Yeah, somebody offending a Sikh was considered worse than somebody being stabbed. Yeah. Now, we all believe racism is wrong and evil. It is not as bad, however, as stabbing someone to death. No, nothing's as bad as that. Even if Henry Novak had been racist...

35:44Which the judge said he had no evidence of and that the man, Henry Novak, had no history of using racist language. This is the thing, is we feel we have to insist he wasn't. Even if he had been, it wouldn't matter because he was stabbed to death. Yes. What matters is the stabbing. Now, what concerns me is it feels like, and Kimi Baden-Ock has said this, we're tiptoeing away from being a multiracial democracy, which is one where we all have different color skin, different sexualities, different genders. We're all treated the same. It doesn't matter. And we all broadly share one culture with its values, underpinned by the laws, which the police are there to enforce.

36:27towards becoming a multicultural democracy where we have different communities with different values which are at risk of rubbing up against each other and causing disorder. And in that scenario, the role of the police is no longer to blindly enforce the law or the courts to blindly enforce justice. It is in both cases to try to maintain peace between the communities. And that might mean in the case of policing, emphasizing racism over murder, or it might mean policing different people in different ways. In the case of the courts, it might mean letting some people off. The juries, of course, make that decision perhaps more so than judges, but in the case of the statue being tossed into the river, right, what matters there is it was a racist statue rather than damage to property.

37:14We've had this kind of sectarian democracy for a long time in Northern Ireland where there are different rules applied to different communities. You can march here, you can't march there. You can teach your own language in your own school. Yes. But that is in order to keep the peace in a desperately sad and always potentially violent situation. You don't actually want that in the mainland. No. That is not a model for community policing that we want to move towards. Well, also just in terms of the justice system, we don't want to move towards sectarian juries. No. We don't want to have people of colour who are banged to rights being let off because other people of colour are showing solidarity with them rather than objectively assessing whether they have committed the crime.

37:59Then you create a situation where some people see themselves as above the law and able to cloak themselves in the defence of their race. Yes. And we saw that with Digwar. Digwar is in the back of the police car speaking in Punjabi to his brother thinking the police can't understand them, saying, I can't claim self-defence. We're going to have to make up a series of lies here. Correct. As you had pointed out earlier in the podcast, everything's being filmed. And of course, the police can then take those tapes, give them to somebody to translate them and find out that they're both trying to stitch the whole situation up.

38:35But just the arrogance of that. And yeah, people, particularly those who are inclined to commit crimes, know how to play a society against itself. Yes. And if they know that the word racism will immediately change the way that the police or the court system approaches a case. Yeah, make a victim of a criminal, basically. They are going to use the word racism. Yes. But I don't think all is lost. And I think that most ethnic minorities, particularly those that have chosen to make their life here, have done so because we were, until recently, a justice is blind kind of society. That's why they chose to be here.

39:16And look at the response of the Sikh community to this. They have come up very strongly and said, this was murder. This was totally unacceptable. This is not reflective of Sikh values. And we are appalled that it happened. And we want to do everything we can do to make sure that it doesn't happen. That is a community that wants to be part of a multiracial democracy, that wishes to share our values. And so often it is not necessarily the ethnic minority that is walking us away from multiracial democracy. It's the white elites. Yes, it's the liberals. It is the morons in charge. Yes, the so-called progressives.

39:55Who look upon their own society as if they were colonial administrators. Yes. In a strange land populated by ethnic minorities and thick racist whites. Yes. Who they have to govern in this very imperial manner. Yes. Choosing between one community or the other and just about maintaining peace. That is the way their mind is working. And the tragedy is that this ideology is remaking reality in its own image. Yes. Because if you treat people that way, well, criminals are going to manipulate it. Yeah. And victims and ordinary citizens are going to feel like a stranger in their own country. We're going to become, to quote one prominent lawyer, an island of strangers.

40:40Well put. The other irony, of course, all of those progressives were the first to take the knee for Black Lives Matter, having not done the research into the fact that the organisation advocated defunding the police, honestly. Right, we will be back tomorrow, 5pm.

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