This is what fascism looks like.
And note the similarity in the call for rage to what Farage has demanded.
This is the challenge we face. The promotion of hate in this way is the toxicity we are really facing:
Henry Nowak was murdered. Every murder is a tragedy, but it was not, as far as we know, a race crime. Even if it was, the crime was that of an individual. That cannot be extrapolated into a systemic failing
The police might have made mistakes, but they were given credible but deeply misleading information, and that is what contributed to Henry Nowak's death.
To promote hatred on the basis of this is what fascism, evil and the deliberate undermining of democracy looks like.
And I should add, Vice President J D Vance defended the killing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE operatives in Minneapolis earlier this year. He is a man whose judgment is already open to serious doubt.
And he is seeking to promote racial division in the UK.
It is our job to resist it.
The "othering" and clear racism in this tweet is reprehensible and rightly deserves to be described as fascist, because that is what it is, in my opinion.
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This is so out of order. It’s not his country, he doesn’t know the facts and the poor family requested that the murder should not be used to fuel racial hatred or for political purposes. The proper response is compassion for a family who lost an innocent person in the most horrible circumstances and want to be left in peace. It’s thankfully a rare occurrence in our country and whilst there are clear lessons to be learnt for our police service that is where it should end. Along with Farage and co, he is showing what a truly despicable person he is and my hope is that it will make people drawn to far right populasim realise what it really is.
I believe Amartya Sen, who you’ve mentioned today, said something along the lines that if you have politics based on fear, then you don’t have democracy, however you count the votes.
Agreed
The murder of Nowak & the events surrounding it are useful for the likes of Vice-Pres Bed-bug (vance is German for bed-bug) and Fart-rage, because they divert attention from other developments in the increasingly septic isle.
One such was profiled by Monbiot: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/05/child-care-councils-private-equity-companies
What he describes is depraved, markets red in tooth and claw (the victims in this case thousands of children), but you won’t see bed-bug or fart-rage getting hot & bothered about that, rather exploit a tragic (& avoidable – carry a small blunt knife?) events for political gain, lapped up by assorted UK imbecilic serfs.
(in one case a 15 year old girl “at risk of sexual exploitation” in the view of a council was moved into a home where…. she was drugged and raped by two people running it – but you won’t see fart-rage and Deform imbeciles getting excited about that – or indeed the Tory/LINO-Wezzie types who implemented all this (& kept it going) – and remember Greene of yesterday – she is all in favour of “market-based solutions” & govs with “balanced budgets”. Meanwhile in Manchester Burnt-ham is going through the Starmer repetoire of promises he won’t keep when he is elevated to prime mincer (ref Ridley Walker). The UK & it media outlets sicken me.
Rant over.
Mike
I pride myself on being able to translate your posts – they make complete sense to me BTW. Satire is the reasonable defence of the rational man.
When one accepts Fascism, it is the first step in embracing Death as a way of life, because it is the negation of the other. Hobbes’ was right about the human death wish. Fascism and its violence allows some of us to super-impose our own death or fear of death onto someone else as if it protects us. Neo-liberalism does the same with monopolising money. Neither saves anyone from death. We are all going the same way, so what is the point? Why not make the life journey more joyous, collaborative and fair with each generation of peoples building for life? All this destruction – is it in the pursuit of some wanting to live for ever, to prevent death? And in the process, expending the lives of others to do so? Where is the morality in that? What sort of epitaph is that? In my role as development officer, you begin at the end of a project and work back to how you get there with Gantt charts. That is because you accept that there is ‘an end’ and then you set about trying to do the right things to get that end. Some of us (Fascists, Neo-libs) need to come to terms with our own death so that others might live? Is that asking too much?
What a shame that we are dominated by nihilism and fear.
Thanks PSR,
I’m practising/in training with a view to writing the 21st century version of Ulysses. Perhaps shifting the scene to Scunthorpe, main protagonist yet to be decided. Obvs it will need some sort of translation/explanation. 🙂
More seriously I struggle translating what is clear internally to me into something communicable. I’m glad you got the general gist & I agree with the points you make .
Good luck 🙂
Thank you, Mike.
Mum has worse horror stories than that.
Ministers, councillors and officials are not interested. The only instruction is for the investment firms that act as intermediaries and / or own GP practices be paid on time, in full and no questions asked.
The unregulated part is a concern, but most who work in care do so because they want to help – pay is not great, and most expensive packages involve patients that are challenging to work with.
Most packages are tendered, margins are not usually high as the lowest bid often wins.
Pricing goes much higher are where packages are handed back by a provider due to due risk or harm, or admission they cannot prevent harm to the patient within the contract value.
Those contracts may then only have a single provider willing to bid. The choice is between trying to do things cheaply with likely harm to the service user or others, or paying to get one of the few complex care specialists. They will have a somewhat higher margin, but that is to allow paying danger money to staff, pay for repairs, treat staff fairly when expected made-up complaints are filed, to closely manage care, AND to provide a higher level of staffing cover.
They are expensive, but they know there will still be packages that prove not profitable and want to be in a position to consider keeping that package with patient safety first, staff safety 2nd, public safety 3rd, and financial impact to be held behind those.
There are bad providers who abuse the system and compromise on care, but those could face criminal charges over neglect or fraud already.
The article also misdirects rage to some extent, tarring a group of companies where most are good. Farage turning to those might not help either.
The point is that generally we have laws which do cover these things, both for the murder and the neglect. We need attention on the specific bad operators with unnecessary generalisation, and to use the powers we have more effectively.
Extract from Monbiot article: “The average charge to the state by a private provider for a child in “care” is now £384,020 a year, That’s six times what Eton charges.”
You were saying David. Did you even bother to read Monbiot’s article before writing your apologia for private greed? It sounds like you have knowledge of the sector, if that is the case – show us that Monbiot is wrong (thing is – he is a good researcher & usually gets his numbers right).
David
I remember when the local council provided most care for children, the disabled and the elderly, through their own employees in facilities that they owned. They occasionally used a private provider for specialist care, but that was the exception. Yes there were problems then, sadly similar to some of those experienced by those in need of care now. But there was no profit requirement, so the provision was greatly cheaper than anything provided now. It is high time that Local Authorities took back the provision of care, not just the responsibility for paying for it.
I agree
To Mike, the article singularly fails to acknowledge the staffing ratios required and therefore compares apples to oranges.
A school has one member of staff to multiple pupils. A care package may be the reverse – there are 4:1 and 5:1 packages where 4 or 5 members of staff are required per patient or higher, 24/7. Those very high staff ratio packages (‘complex’ in their article meaning the patient is likely to have multiple physical and mental health issues which require specialist care of multiple types concurrently) are the ones that can hit £3m.
I know people at multiple private providers. Staff can be at risk of assault, and dozens of training modules are required to cover all the equipment, safe restraint, evaluation of capacity and more. Those complex cases cannot be safely done ‘on the cheap’. Roughly, a 24/7 1:1 package might be around what Monbiot outlined, and if escalated to 2:1 or higher staffing then you can multiply that figure by the staffing ratio required.
The figures look high when just comparing to something not comparable, but these aren’t highly paid staff. It works out just over £40/hour to cover staff rate, holiday pay, pensions, employer’s national insurance, management overheads, training, office overheads, etc to get around a £30k margin. A clinical lead may be monitoring 5 or so packages because of review and monitoring requirements, so those indirect staff requirements add up.
Domiciliary care cannot share carers between patients when 24/7 cover is required. Care homes might be able to have elements that are less than 1:1 and should not necessarily hit those figures.
As I said, some providers may be ripping off local authorities and not providing the claimed level of cover, but some complex packages genuinely do cost that much to do properly.
Thank you
Well said, Richard.
We are seeing the cultivation of a story of Islamic threat made worse by ‘race traitors’ and that is being used a justification for sweeping away our civil liberties and in its place a ‘strong’ govt. It will be a creature of vested interest and huge private wealth but sadly too many are taken in by it. Self righteousness is weaponised and intelligent discourse spurned.
On the anniversary of D-day we have to watch the watch history repeating itself.
The murderer was a Sikh.
Bizarrely, Vance is married to a woman of Indian ethnic origin.
Fascists don’t care about inconvenient facts. They get in the way of the rage they’re desperate to whip up against non-white people.
What a very odd post by JD Vance. His statements about “the West” in particular. “We love the West” – well, I suppose I love some things about the West, but I am deeply embarrassed by many other things. “We want to preserve it”? Many of us want it reformed rather than just preserved. And what about those of us who come from other cultures? Do they also not love their civilization, their country, their children?
And remember that Jesus of Nazareth was not from “the West” and was flogged and crucified by (Western) Roman imperial force.
Much to agree with
Yes Richard ‘it is our job to resist it'<p>
But what is BBC radio 4’s job? Is it as they did on Today between 7 and 9 to repeat on six occasions lengthy quotes from the Vance polemic ‘mass invasion of the migrants’ etc etc , and at least two 10 to 15 minute ‘debates ‘ around it which only served to ensure the whole Vance narrative was fully embedded in listeners consciousness.<p>
Yes he had to be mentioned – but they were doing a Ministry of Truth job – and this is where the BBC ‘balance’/’impartiality’ leads. They don’t do journalism in the sense of a search for the truth – they end up being a megaphone for fascists.
The BBC is now full on fascist as far as I can work out. I find it almost impossible to listen to. Their role in amplifying hate this week has been truly appalling.
A dangerous escalation in the Middle East, a growing Ebola outbreak in central Africa, Russia’s ongoing offensive in Ukraine, and the kickoff of the 2026 FIFA World Cup across North America. But as I write this the BBC news website is still leading with the Vance vomit.
I’m a life-long dyed-in-the-wool listener to BBC radio (4 and 3) and even I’m getting quite disturbed by what I call the ‘framing’ they have adopted. There is only one permitted ‘establishment’ interpretation of news of any sort, whether political, economic or anything else. No-one gets challenged very much in interviews, not even extreme MAGA commentators. It gives me a very distinct feeling of being propagandised and gaslighted all the time. It actually distresses me, because the BBC has been much better than this in the past, and I am very much habituated to having the radio on all the time in my house. I have stuck up for the BBC here in the past, on the grounds that the it has been suborned and coerced by governments since 2012, when a concerted assault on it was started by George Osborne (he removed the Treasury funding for free licences for the over-75s). I still point this out here, along with other defunding and Tory/RW/Zionist place-men being installed in places of influence in the Corporation, but just to record it, and not as an argument. O tempora! O mores!
What would Brian Redhead be doing now?
The BBC is now on a par with GB news!
Appalling, absolutely appalling by Vance. Who writes his words? Farage?
John Mearsheimer ( much seen on youtube) says Vance is very ‘smart’.
As Trump’s war disintegrates there will be a search for a new leader. Vance was not to the fore in supporting this war. He could be the heir to Trump.
Who writes his words?
I suspect AI wrote this piece. Apart from the tub-thumping em-dashes (supposedly an AI giveaway), the prose is just too mechanically perfect. You can almost see the rhetorical template behind it – the three successively shorter paragraphs, the three “We love our…” in the final one, and so on. To me it reads as transparently soulless and calculating, but then I’m not part of the intended audience.
I imagine they put out this sort of thing as a kind of “intellectual” counterweight to Trump’s incoherent drivellings.
Who wrote it ? My guess is Stephen Miller.
Trump’s defence of national sovereignty? Hard to see that in his lukewarm support for NATO or for Ukraine defend its own territory, or his threatens to annex sovereign territory of his allies in Canada or Greenland, or his abduction of the head of state of Venezuela, or threats to Cuba, or repeated illegal bombings of Iran. Is it only US sovereignty that matters? Less a defence of sovereignty and more the rule of the jungle. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Sorry to comment yet again. Trump and his family have made $4Bn from his Presidency. All his presidential pronouncements and activities are merely a cover for personal greed on a massive scale. Incoherence and talking bollocks are of no concern to him.
@ Alex Beveridge
Talking of Farage, there was a very good Guardian article yesterday comparing Farage’s response to this murder and to two other previous murders.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/05/nigel-farage-speak-for-the-nation-jo-cox-sarah-everard-henry-nowak
Also, I wonder if the same amount of outrage and rioting could’ve/would’ve been summoned if the murder victim happened to be from another minority background instead? I somehow think not.
The ruthlessness and hypocrisy on the part of Farage & Vance, etc is truly sickening and frightening too as they seem to be getting away with it.
Thank you
I will write to Mike and Richard privately. Bit busy with guests at home this week-end. Plus the Derby later.
Just one comment for this community to ponder: It’s getting more difficult for the City to exploit the former colonies and countries that have never been colonies, e.g. Iran and Russia. Therefore, the City’s attention has turned to the internal colonies. This is why I’m mystified why the Scots and Welsh don’t get out.
Agreed
Colonel Smithers says “…I’m mystified why the Scots and Welsh don’t get out”. Well, it’s because the English Westminster Parliament treats the devolved nations as colonies and has passed laws enabling it to overturn perfectly legitimate intra-vires laws passed by the devolved nations’ parliaments. In addition the devolution settlements were designed to fail politically and economically, with the outcome being that funding is geared to England’s internal expenditure and relative population sizes, not the needs of the devolved nations.
Successive PMs will not consider discussing Scottish Independence, given the close-run 2014 Scottish Independence referendum, despite the recent Holyrood Election which, had it been run as FPTP rather than the convoluted d’Hondt system, would have resulted in 78% majority for the SNP. Starmer has already said “no” without discussion. Meantime a very recent poll on reunification of Ireland has shown 68% in favour in N Ireland and 59% in the Republic, so will the Home Secretary also refuse an Irish referendum, thereby breaching the Good Friday Agreement?
Next stage civic disobedience?
Thanks Ken
Vance understands the power of words to stir up his supporters and provoke reaction from his opponents. He firmly believes might makes right. He doesn’t believe the meaning of the words he has written. He has previously defended the caring of weapons and killing people with weapons. He previously called it manly virtue.
Might it be that the B. B. C. and the B. o E. have the following significant similarities?
1) Both are presented as serving the interests of a whole society
2) Both lack any form of practical democratic input
3) Both have allowed themselves to be seen to be, and/or be, serving the interests of particular groups in that society
Despite the absolute bilge trotted out by Vance(under orders from who knows?) and the fake consternation from others, most people can see right through this tosh from miles away. I honestly believe if they are bent on fascism, as they undoubtedly are, their optimum strategy is to tone down this sort of tripe.
Whichever ‘coms’ experts they are paying, are stealing their money. This approach is making Vance and others look desperate and can only tickle the tummies of the already irredeemable racists in this country who we know are between 10 and 20% of the general population. It gives their message a negative effect on the rest of us, I believe.
If fascism is to take over from democracy, it can only do so if the electorate are persuaded they will be financially better off- not that they actually would be. This overt racism and encouragement of thuggery is distasteful to the majority.
I don’t disagree, though possibly the percentage of racists is higher. It’s just that I think being open to bribery (wallet-voters) by bigots and thugs is equally despicable. I knew from the start that Thatcherism’s appeal was mainly to those whose only values were selfish and monetary. Sadly, it seems, a reliable majority, even after 40 plus years of seeing how disastrous the consequences have proved to be.
To many who comment here, the danger signs stand out a mile; but can I suggest that, if you break it down phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, it is far easier to see the flashing red warning signs.
But I wonder how many will themselves actually see those warning signs and then react appropriately? Are young and not so young adults provided with the knowledge to understand the full import of what has been written and know enough to reject the thoughts expressed? I also see peer-pressure as an enabler for the spread of these ideas. I also don’t see the leaders (with country-wide recognition) in today’s society who are willing to point out the consequences.
One wouldn’t expect Vance to understand irony; but he might possibly know that all the long-established White population of the USA is descended from immigrants who displaced brutally the indigenous population. Pot, Kettle and Black. JM
Vance’s comments should not be taken or analysed in isolation. They are an integral part of US foreign policy at this point. The whole thrust of the Trump administration’s plan is to destabilise western democracies and install pliable far right kleptocracies that will align with Trump’s perverted world view.
Starmer’s appropriate response isn’t to make vaguely directed statements in parliament or on social media. He should be calling in the US Ambassador and telling him in no uncertain manner that such interference by the US regime in UK politics is damaging to our relationship with the US. He could perhaps suggest that the UK will be consulting with other countries such as France and Germany about forming an association that will be imposing retaliatory sanctions if he goes ahead with his stated intention of replacing the previous round of sanctions struck down by the US courts with some other scam.
It’s way past time to stop playing nice with the Trump regime.
I particularly noted that Vance claimed the problem was due to the failure of ‘the last few generations of European elites’. Very telling.
I don’t listen to the BBC anymore, having emigrated to Australia shortly after Auntie were kind enough to make me redundant in 2004, but they do seem to have gone down hill without me and, somewhat more significantly, the likes of Brian Redhead if the comments here are to be believed.
One aspect of this recent unfortunate case is the distraction about the exemption for knives carried for religious reasons. This murder was not caused by any faults in the police response, or by a Sikh carrying a kirpan, but rather by an aggressive young man with an unhealthy interest in blades. There are sadly too many such people in the UK, particularly in urban gangs, because that is where most people live, who by and large threaten and stab each other. Just as there are frequent cases of US police shot with their own gun. But at least knives have legitimate uses, as any butcher or chef or gardener knows. unlike most firearms, and the specific mention of religion in the criminal law is an extension of the exemptions for lawful and legitimate use of knives. At the end of the day, a pointed stick or a stone can be an offensive weapon in the hands of an angry person determined to cause harm to others.
Much to agree with
There’s no doubt that we have been badly served by governments of both Conservative and Labour over the last 50 years. Thatcher started the decline with the selling off to big business our essentials to life such as water, electricity and gas and also to selling off of affordable rented houses built by local councils. So there is a reason for anger. Demagogues like Mussolini and Hitler were not unique just to Germany and Italy. We had our own in the shape of Oswald Mosley backed up by the Daily Mail. There is always a group, mainly men, but also including a few women, who love a fight. Witness football hooligans who love a pretext for violence even with no connection to politics . They just need someone to stir them up, encourage them to start a brawl in the streets. And along comes Nigel Farage! A man with disgusting views. And he is backed up by some very very rich people. And by the Daily Mail which as ever backs this type of person. Plus of course Elon Musk who with his X/twitter pours poison into many ears.
Mosely began as a Conservative politician and then crossed the house to spend several years on the Labour benches before becoming disillusioned with the lack of change and taking the radical, Fascist view. It appears that many in the UK are following his example.