Politics: unreality

By Richard North - May 30, 2026

The ultimate purpose of this blog is to make sense of things. Even if I had no readers at all, writing a daily blogpost would still make sense as the very process of writing about an issue usually serves to clarify and order events, making them easier to understand.

That, at least, is the theory. Increasingly though, one is confronted by events (and responses to them) that simply do not make sense, challenging the very idea that sustains my writing and making it harder to keep up the daily output.

No more pertinent an example can be given than that exemplified by the Daily Mail article (see picture above), which details the extraordinary events following the failure of a jury to reach verdicts in the cases of Mohammed Fahir Amaaz and Muhammad Amaad who were charged with causing actual bodily harm to PC Zachary Marsden.

Predictably, the Mail goes to town on the story, with an additional report, pointing to the estimated cost of £2 million for the trials, with much of it going to the two teams of highly paid barristers for either side – six in total including two eminent KCs. The figure, it is noted, doesn’t include all the police time and resources devoted to the investigation.

In the main report, the account starts with the statement that “Reform UK have branded Britain’s justice system ‘broken’ after prosecutors announced that two brothers accused of assaulting an armed policeman at Manchester Airport would not face a third trial”.

Nigel Farage’s party’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf, we are told, “slammed the decision as ‘a shocking disgrace’, adding: ‘It is a huge miscarriage of justice and they only ever seem to go in one direction’”.

Adding fuel to the fire, Yusuf is now claiming that the presiding judge, Neil Flewitt, tried to have Farage prosecuted (for contempt of court) “for pointing out the obvious two-tier justice in the sickening attack”.

If one had a mind to indulge in bizarre conspiracy theories, it might be possible to believe that the “establishment” (however you choose to define it) has a death wish, deliberately engineering situations which provoke outrage from the “online Right” and play into the hands of Reform.

With such responses, it doesn’t matter how dire the party is, all it has to do is sit back and milk the flow of headlines that would support its general thesis that “Britain is broken” – a stance that has become almost impossible to refute.

Still current, for instance, is the ongoing controversy about the murder of 18-year-old student, Henry Nowak, slaughtered by “knife-obsessed” Sikh, Vickrum Digwa, who stabbed him multiple times with a ceremonial “Kirpan” dagger which, under British law, Sikhs are permitted to carry in public on “religious grounds”.

But what marks this appalling incident out as truly exceptional was the response of the Hampshire police who had been called to the scene by a 999 call from Digwa’s brother, to be met by the perpetrator telling a “wicked lie” to the officers, claiming Nowak had shouted racist abuse, punched him and knocked off his turban.

Faced with an accusation of “racism” – without apparently carrying out any further investigation, the officers promptly arrested and handcuffed the fatally injured student, who collapsed in the street moments later, drowning in his own blood. His final words were: “Please, brother, I can’t breathe”, reminiscent of the death of career criminal George Floyd in 2020, who uttered similar last words.

The situation is not improved by the tone-deaf apology from the Hampshire constabulary, who effectively stated that Nowak was so badly injured that his arrest and handcuffing wouldn’t have made any difference to his survival.

Noticeably, Starmer – who “took the knee” with the dreadful Angela Rayner on the day of Floyd’s funeral – has yet to make any statement (or gesture) about Nowak, nor indeed on the deaths of Rhiannon Skye Whyte and Wayne Broadhurst, both murdered by illegal immigrants.

His silence on such matters has been noticed, not least because of the contrast with Floyd and, more recently, his gushing statement of “deep solidarity” with the victims and “the wider Muslim community” after an attack on a mosque in San Diego on 19 May, over five thousand miles from London.

Even Starmer, though, was impelled to comment over the case of the three Romani Gypsy teenagers convicted of knife-point rape and other serious sexual offences against two teenage girls.

Despite the seriousness of their crimes, and their filming of the rape, judge Nicholas Rowland, who presided over the trial and sentencing at Southampton Crown Court, declared after the trial, “None of you need to go to prison today”.

Explaining his sentence, he said he wanted to support the boys’ reintegration into society, adding: “I should avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily”
Although he stressed the “seriousness” of the boys’ crimes and said their filming of the attacks made them even “more serious”, he added that he needed to remember the boys were “very young”, had low intelligence, a “limited understanding of consent” and “peer pressure played a large part in what went on”.

“I think of you as very young and none of you have been in any big trouble before”, he said, going on to commend their behaviour during the trial, saying: “You have all done very well with the restrictions put in place throughout the trial”.

Following “slap on the wrist” sentences of youth rehabilitation orders, Starmer announced that the sentencing would be reviewed by the court of appeal, stating that the courage of the girls coming forward was “humbling”, but “distressing”.

It later transpired, though, that other teenage rapists had been let off lightly, some being given fines of just £26 – a quarter of the rate of a parking ticket.

From this, it emerges that the judges have been following the 2013 sexual offences guidelines, which explicitly allows community orders for some child sex offences. Starmer sat on the sentencing council which produced those guidelines.

Furthermore, although Labour’s 2024 manifesto prioritises fast-tracking rape cases and specialist courts to address prosecution backlogs, it omits any proposals for tougher sentencing guidelines or mandatory minimums on sexual offences. The recent Sentencing Bill focuses on early releases to ease prison overcrowding.

These episodes, though, are just a few samples of the growing unreality of our public life, our policing and the justice system. There is no sense to be made of them, because there is no sense in them – where people who tweet “hurty words” get stiffer penalties than rapists.

The worst of it all is that, no matter how intense the outrage, and how many excoriating pieces are written about these episodes, it won’t make a blind bit of difference. The system grinds on regardless.