Why do the right’s Henry Nowak protests look like a party? Distasteful as it is, they’re having fun | Jonathan Liew

Published 9 June 2026 · india

“Big up Southampton!”” trills a voice on the livestream as a small band of brave patriots skips down St Denys Road past the big Sainsbury’s

“Big up Southampton!”” trills a voice on the livestream as a small band of brave patriots skips down St Denys Road past the big Sainsbury’s. As they approach the gathered throng, a spontaneous chant of “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” goes up, accompanied by a salute of raised beer cans and plastic pint glasses. Indeed, almost everyone on the protest seems to have brought a refreshing beverage of some kind. Nigel Farage has sounded the alarm, and the patriots of southern England have responded with pure cold ales. One of the most striking elements about last week’s riots in Southampton, watching back the many hours of citizen footage, was just what a brilliant time everyone seemed to be having commemorating the murder of an 18-year-old student. The booze. The laughter. The football songs. The music pumping out of a portable speaker daubed with a “Stop The Boats” sticker. The counter-cultural kink of reclaiming the knee, screaming “I can’t breathe” in the service of making Britain intolerant again. As if this were the birth of a new, groundbreaking social movement. “Hey, what if we did the George Floyd protests … but for the whites this time?” Even the anger had a licentious, thrill-seeking, lads-on-tour quality to it. Someone is prising a brick from a garden wall to use as a projectile. Someone hurls a recycling bin at the police cordon, and everyone cheers. “I’ve been stabbed!” one guy in the crowd shouts. “You can’t have been stabbed, you’re white!” another responds, to peals of laughter from the assembled mourners.

Perhaps you consider this spontaneous outburst of revelry, role play and indiscriminate lawlessness a nauseatingly inappropriate response to the horrific death of Henry Nowak by people claiming to honour his memory. But then, the true patriots of this country are sick of being told what to feel by an out-of-touch elite. They’re taking their country back. Who says they can’t have some absolutely legendary banter while they’re doing it? And for all the genuine outrage and sadness at Nowak’s murder in the country at large, we also have to recognise that there is a significant part of the British right who are quite frankly enjoying all this far too much. For whom this tragedy is simply a pulpit, a platform, an opportunity to race-bait and slogan-chant and content-capture and lib-own to gleeful excess. You did not even need to be on the Southampton frontline, with a brick in one hand and a bottle of lager in the other, to glimpse that sense of licentious relish. Witness the haste with which chatshows and news programmes – even on serious mainstream outlets – were able to clear their schedules to make way for provocative Nowak-themed debate. “Are the police anti-white?” asked Sky News. “Is Britain facing civilisational collapse?” asked the gurning host on TalkTV. After all, this was a story that pushed all the right buttons: race, immigration, true crime, moral decay, deep-state conspiracy. These are difficult subjects that we are no longer allowed to discuss, an earnest talking head in sensible clothes will tell us.