How the myth of ‘two-tier policing’ took hold

0:00Joe Mulhall:This is The Guardian.

0:07Hugh Muir:Today, the myth of two-tier policing.

0:18Hugh Muir:This week, one phrase, once only heard on the fringes of the far right, has been everywhere.

0:25Joe Mulhall:That's two-tier policing. Two-tier policing.

0:28Hugh Muir:A two-tier policing system. You must be blind in this country if you do not think that there is any form of two-tier policing. It's been parroted in Parliament by Nigel Farage, on social media by Elon Musk, and on the ground by far-right figures such as Tommy Robinson, as violent anti-police protests erupted around them in Southampton.

0:57Hugh Muir:It's come after the tragedy of the death of 18-year-old Henry Novak who was stabbed by Vikram Digwa and then arrested as he lay dying. Terrible mistakes were made by the police.

1:09Joe Mulhall:Henry did not die with dignity. He did not die with the care he deserved. He lost consciousness before anyone believed him.

1:18Hugh Muir:To his family, Henry's death is a warning about the dangers of knife crime. Yet, since Digwa's conviction, their son's death has been shaped into something very different, with claims that it is proof, because Henry was white and his assailant Asian, that white people are treated unfairly and discriminated against by the police. The government has now rushed to push back, with Keir Starmer meeting with Henry's family. But is it already too late to dispel the two-tier policing myth?

1:57Joe Mulhall:It feels a little bit like the genie's out of the bottle, partly because many of the individuals that passionately believe this haven't necessarily rationalised themselves into it. It's very hard to rationalise them out of it with evidence or statistics or facts. It's just a feeling, it's a sense. And so once people are into these spaces, it becomes really, really hard to get them out of them.

2:14Hugh Muir:From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, how a far-right policing conspiracy took root in the UK.

2:29Hugh Muir:Hugh Muir, your executive editor in opinion at The Guardian. You have reported on race and policing extensively over the decades. This week, we've seen protests on the streets of Southampton following the conviction of Vikram Digwar for the killing of Henry Novak. Tell us what happened.

2:48Joe Mulhall:Annie, the most dreadful case, you have Henry Novak. He's a young man, he's 18. He's from the Trafford 100 in Essex. And he's gone to university in Southampton to study accountancy. And he's basically doing what you expect undergrads to do. He's having a good time, he's making friends. And on the night in question, he was playing football with his friends and he was walking home. And in ways we don't completely understand, And he had an encounter with Vikram Diggra, a tussle for a phone. But what we do know is that at some point, Vikram Diggra's brother called the police, said his brother had been racially abused.

3:21Joe Mulhall:The police came. And then they had a choice about what to do about that situation because they had Vikram Diggra and his brother there. But also they had Henry Novak, who was lying on the ground and saying quite clearly that he had been stabbed and that he was in a bad way. And the choice was what to prioritise in that situation. There's a video of it, really, really distressing. What's your name, mate? Huh? Because you can clearly hear Henry Nowak saying, I have been stabbed. Right, let's get you out of there, shall we? And in an echo of that terrible case in America, he's also saying, I can't breathe.

4:01Joe Mulhall:Grab his other arm. The police officer says, I do not believe you. You've been stabbed? Whereabouts? I don't think you have, mate.

4:13Hugh Muir:I mean, and the video is so distressing, isn't it? It's so young, only 18 years old. Just such a tragedy.

4:20Joe Mulhall:Oh, absolutely. As I say, anyone who sent a child away to university will really feel that.

4:27Hugh Muir:And as you said, you know, the death has been very swiftly co-opted by the far right and reform against the very express wishes of his family as well.

4:38Joe Mulhall:That's exactly right. You have to absolutely start there. Immediately after the sentencing on Monday, Henry's father, Mark, said the family will carry the grief of this for every single day. And of course, that must be true. But then he also said, and this was extraordinary of him, we do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension. We want his story to make our streets safer for everyone. That is why we are calling on the government to treat knife crime as the national emergency that it is. And then what happened was his death was used exactly for that reason. If you look at the comments that followed immediately afterwards, Nigel Farage, he talked about a two-tier culture where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities.

5:28Joe Mulhall:And he called for a reaction of what he, his words, pure cold rage. And of course, what we know is happening in politics at the moment is this kind of battle for supremacy between Nigel Farage's reform and Rupert Lowe's restore. And they seem to be trying to outdo each other in terms of the toxicity of their response to this. So whereas Farage called for pure cold road, Rupert Lowe's called for Digwa to be perhaps put to death. He's called back for the return of the death penalty. And he says, quote, keeping this savage alive serves nobody. And he's called for Digwa's family to be deported. And so here you almost see that there's almost an arms race in terms of those two parties on the right of the spectrum, each of them trying to gain currency and to gain advantage from what all the rest of us must see as just being an awful, awful tragedy.

6:26Joe Mulhall:One that obviously needs some level of investigation, but an awful tragedy.

6:31Hugh Muir:And so frightening to hear that language as well come into Prime Minister's question time this week. Not something that I think would have happened even a year ago.

6:40Joe Mulhall:And these things have repercussions. You can't make a direct link between what people say and what happens. But of course, what we do know is on the streets of Southampton, not so long after, there was disorder on the streets. There were police officers attacked. There was what one would normally just describe as rioting. and you then have to have a discussion about the political responsibility that people have when that sort of thing has happened. The MP for Southampton test, Satvir Khan, she was the first woman Sikh to become a government minister and she's received death threats. It really tells you why you depend on politicians to lead responsibly because there is at least a chance that their word will have real world repercussions and there's at least a chance that's what's happened this week.

7:29Hugh Muir:Yeah, because Digua was Sikh as well. And our colleague Amna Mudin spoke on our latest edition earlier this week, just about how the Sikh community have found themselves targeted in the wake of his conviction. But the anger directed towards the police this week on the streets of Southampton and in the rhetoric of politicians as well has been intense. I mean, I think almost a dozen police officers injured in their first day of protests in Southampton.

7:57Joe Mulhall:Well, this is something that predated the attack of Henry Novak. And it's basically a claim that minorities get preferential treatment in policing. I have to say it's not a claim which minorities that I know, I'm a minority of Black Britain myself, we are not familiar with this situation where we get preferential treatment, quite the opposite. it.

8:21Hugh Muir:You know, as we talked about, it goes without saying, that video is horrifying. When you watched it, what did you make of how the police behaved?

8:30Joe Mulhall:Do you know, it took me back to the discussion we had many years ago, after the death of Stephen Lawrence, how much of this is because officers are treating people differently because of their race, and how much of this is just sheer incompetence, it's bad practice. If you're a police officer and you have someone on the ground saying, I have been stabbed, then you run that to drown, don't you? You find out if someone has been stabbed. Henry Novak said he had been stabbed. He had been stabbed. He'd been stabbed five times. And yet a decision was made by that police officer that that wasn't an urgent situation.

9:07Joe Mulhall:I mean, the fact is, it is not the case that Henry Novak hurled racist abuse at his attacker. But even if it was, it would still be the job of the police officer to make sure that a man lying on the ground who said he had been stabbed had not been stabbed. This is just really, really bad policing.

9:39Hugh Muir:Jo Mulhall, welcome back to Stand Focus. You are head of research at Hope Not Hate, the anti-racist organisation. And we last had you on the podcast in the summer of 2024, reporting on the riots that were sparked by the Southport attacks. When we talked to you back then, you mentioned this far right talking point of two-tier policing, which again, we've seen this week raised in relation to the Henry Novak case. Could you just explain, like, where did this two-tier policing phrase come from? What's the history of it?

10:14Joe Mulhall:It's become far more prominent in the last four or five years where we see figures like Tommy Robinson pushing it. But it goes back further than that. I mean, you would hear similar sort of rhetoric back in the days of the English Defence League in 2009, 10, 11, 12, where there was any sort of far-right protest where there was a counter-protest. The far-right would argue that they were being unfairly policed compared to the counter-protests. And now it's something that's just a key cornerstone of what the far right talk about.

10:39Hugh Muir:And the media also have picked it up, haven't they, and started using it. When do we see that happen?

10:43Joe Mulhall:Yeah, I think last year was really big for that, you know, where I think it wasn't just far right figures, this idea that there was this two-tier Kia thing. Or will he simply step aside and prove he has in fact been two-tier Kia all along? You know, you quite regularly find it in mainstream newspapers. It was the sort of thing you began to hear much more regularly on talk radio. So just finally, what's your sense of the notion of what Nigel Farage talks about when it comes to two-tier policing? Do you think there have been displays of two-tier policing? Yes, I do. You will see this narrative of that the police have gone woke, that they're taking the knee during the Black Lives Matter period, and that they've gone soft, they've kind of been inculcated with this DEI policies that means that they hate white people or that they attack white people more than they do minoritised communities.

11:28Joe Mulhall:I think it's become something that's incorrect, it's become quite widely accepted.

11:32Hugh Muir:And what is it about both the Southport tragedy where little girls were attacked in a dance class and then the awful death of Henry Novak that have allowed the far right to really compellingly push this narrative?

11:47Joe Mulhall:In both cases, I think the examples are that people are really angry at what's happened. And I would argue in both cases, it's acceptable to be really angry at these two horrifying events. What we've seen with Novak, the footage and the content is extremely emotive. It's really, really painful. It's really, really horrible to watch. And I felt angry watching it. The problem then becomes when the far right see people's pain and they see people's anger and they see people's fear. They say, here's an example of all the things we've been saying. We've seen it again in Southampton this week where huge chunks of the far right ran down Southampton as quickly as they could to take that anger and shape it in the direction that they want.

12:24Hugh Muir:You know, it clearly is a seductive idea, this idea of this unfair two-tier policing system that seems to discriminate against white people. You talk about this kind of feeling that is resonating with people outside far-right movements as well, in real life, not online. Where do you think this comes from?

12:48Joe Mulhall:There's this magma chamber of anger under British society, right, where increasingly large numbers of people just feel that the status quo is not working for them. You know, they feel like we've gone from one crisis to another. They're struggling. They feel a cost of living crisis. And all of this is building into a completely understandable sense that our politics and that our authorities and our elites aren't meeting the material needs of our communities. And when that happens, people become really distrustful of any sorts of authorities.

13:17Hugh Muir:And it's not just in the UK, is it, where this kind of idea of a two-tier policing system operating here is being amplified. We've seen people outside the UK, Elon Musk.

13:28Joe Mulhall:Musk, again, has been interfering in our politics in the last few days, trying to whip up division. That is not who we are in Britain. In Britain, we are reasonable, tolerant people. When we have a terrible case like Henry's case, Henry Novak, we react calmly, as his family have done.

13:46Hugh Muir:How are far-right groups elsewhere using this story to push a narrative that's also convenient to them?

13:54Joe Mulhall:Britain plays quite an interesting role in the international far-right sea. Unlike when you listen to lots of international far-right figures that go around, they're nationalists, they go around telling the world how great their country is. The British far-right, generally speaking, go around the world saying how awful Britain is. And their argument is that Britain has fallen, that we've been conquered, and that it is an example to the rest of the world that if you don't stop immigration now, Now, if you don't reverse Islamisation now, if you don't stop communists like Keir Starmer in their language from running your country, this is what's coming to you next.