The stabbing death of an 18-year-old college student in an English port city has become the latest flashpoint in a debate over policing, racism and Britain’s deteriorating relationship with the United States.
Vice President JD Vance claimed in a social media post on Friday that the murder of Henry Nowak last year by Vickrum Digwa, 23, was evidence that “European elites” had failed to oppose the “politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants.”
Mr. Digwa, who is Sikh and was described by prosecutors as “weapons obsessed,” was convicted of stabbing Mr. Nowak in Southampton five times on Dec. 3, 2025, with a religious knife he was carrying.
When the police arrived, Mr. Digwa lied repeatedly, claiming he had been the victim of a racist attack by Mr. Nowak. Police officers handcuffed Mr. Nowak for about a minute, even as he told them he could not breathe and had been stabbed, before they realized he was severely injured and began administering first aid.
Mr. Vance’s intervention has been met with a fierce response by British government officials, who noted that Mr. Digwawas not an immigrant. A spokesman for Prime Minister Keir Starmer accused Mr. Vance of trying to “interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets.”
The episode is the latest sign of the Trump administration’s broader critique of Europe, including its support of right-wing parties in France, Germany and elsewhere. Mr. Trump’s latest National Security Strategy pledged to push “Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”
Over the weekend, David Lammy, the deputy prime minister, who has in the past talked of a friendship with Mr. Vance over their shared Christian faith, said he had called the vice president to express his disagreement.
“I told him he was wrong: This has got nothing to do with mass migration,” Mr. Lammy said on the BBC’s Sunday morning program. “The young man who perpetrated this crime was a Brit, born and raised in this country.”
The stabbing case exploded into public view last week when Mr. Digwa was sentenced to life in prison for Mr. Nowak’s murder, with a minimum term of 21 years. After footage was released of officers handcuffing Mr. Nowak, Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing populist Reform U.K. Party, said that British people should respond with “pure cold rage.”
That night, violent demonstrators gathered in Southampton and threw rocks, flares and garbage cans at the police, wounding 11 officers.
Mark Nowak, the victim’s father, criticized the police’s initial response to his son in a statement after the sentencing but also said the family did “not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension.”
Nevertheless, the murder has become the latest in a series of increasingly nasty diplomatic clashes between the governments of the two longstanding allies.
Mr. Vance, in particular, has been the leader inside the Trump administration for assailing what he has repeatedly called the decline of Western civilization in Europe. The vice president has taken special aim at Britain, where he argues that successive governments have abridged the free speech rights of right-wing voices and flung open the island to waves of illegal migrants.
“Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit,” Mr. Vance wrote social media. “His murder is as tragic as it is enraging.”
Most political leaders in Britain agree on the tragedy, if not the rage. In remarks to Parliament last week, Mr. Starmer said that “as a dad of a 17-year-old boy, I felt sick. I can only imagine how devastated his family are. It is extremely moving. Henry’s life has been stolen.”
But Mr. Starmer and his aides strongly reject what they say is unwarranted interference by the Trump administration into Britain’s political life. In his remarks on the case last week, the prime minister castigated right-wing politicians in Britain for knowingly misrepresenting the details of Mr. Nowak’s stabbing.
At Mr. Digwa’s sentencing, Judge William Mousley said, citing a pathologist’s assessment, that even if the police had begun first aid sooner, they could not have saved Mr. Nowak given the nature of the wound.
Mr. Starmer cited the call for unity from Mr. Nowak’s father, saying: “I think those words have resonated with people across the country. We must not allow this tragedy to be hijacked by anyone who seeks to divide us.”
Inside Britain, politicians across the political spectrum have debated the police’s handling of the case.
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, said in a lengthy statement that the country’s leaders needed to confront uncomfortable questions about whether police training or guidance encouraged officers to treat people differently based on the color of their skin.
“I don’t want to blame the police officers,” Ms. Badenoch, who is Black, said in the statement. “It’s clear the situation was confusing, not least because the murderer pretended he was a victim. But why were they so easily convinced?”
Other politicians in Britain have seized on the case to criticize Mr. Starmer and the previous Conservative government. In his video last week, Mr. Farage linked the stabbing to Britain’s migration policies, even though neither the victim nor the attacker were immigrants.
“We’ve been subjected to mass immigration on a scale that is truly unbelievable,” Mr. Farage said, claiming that it had left “many of our cities almost culturally unrecognizable from what they’ve always been.”
Reform U.K. has become a powerful force in British politics, in part because of Mr. Farage’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. In his statement, he blamed the police’s actions on a “D.E.I. agenda” that he claimed had created a “two-tier” system of policing that was biased against white people.
“The biggest fear a police officer now has going about his or her duty on the street is the fear of being reported for having acted in a way that was racially biased,” he said. “That fear is now greater than dealing with a dying man lying on the ground.”
Mr. Starmer and others condemned Mr. Farage’s comments as divisive and misleading, and accused him of ignoring the wishes of Mr. Nowak’s family.
“Exploiting this tragedy to create grievance and division would be wrong in any circumstances,” Mr. Starmer told lawmakers. “But to do it when the family is expressly saying please do not is unforgivable.”
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