It’s little wonder many white Britons feel like strangers in their own land

It’s not only the murder of Henry Nowak itself that is horrific – it’s what it reveals about the state of modern Britain

I don’t think you have, mate”. Those six little words. Sickening, but will forever remind us of how far our country has fallen.

A young man lay dying. Four times he told police he had been stabbed. They didn’t believe him. Why? Because he was white. Instead, officers accepted the account of the man who had attacked him because he was Asian.

The horror of this case lies not only in the murder itself, but in what it reveals about the state of modern Britain and the political class who led us to this point. If this can happen to Henry Nowak, a young man with his whole life ahead of him, it can happen to anyone. He was a victim of our country’s perverse discrimination against white British people, now rapidly becoming second-class citizens.

The Prime Minister told us that a two-tier policing doesn’t exist but that is simply not true. Remember the Sentencing Guidance that treated “BAME people” less harshly than their white counterparts? Or the Manchester Arena bombing where a security guard feared being branded as a racist and failed to report the attacker? Or the man who murdered three people in Nottinghamshire not being sectioned because he was black?

Many white people not only feel like strangers in their own land, they feel like this country no longer belongs, or works for them. We have built a country that educates us to hate white people.

For more than two decades, Britain has been moving away from the principle that people should be treated equally as individuals and towards a system that categorises people according to race, ethnicity, sexuality and identity. That shift has not happened by accident. It has been driven by a legal and bureaucratic framework that encourages public bodies to think in group identities rather than individual rights.

The root of the DEI crisis is the Equality Act 2010. Passed in the dying days of the Labour government, the act has become the legal foundation upon which modern DEI culture has been built. The Public Sector Equality Duty, legitimised race-based policymaking and equality impact assessments that dominate public life today all flow from it. What began as an attempt to prevent discrimination against minority groups has evolved into prejudice against the majority. What started as anti-racism has now become racism. All sanctioned by the law. That is why Reform UK believes the act should be scrapped.

Whenever that argument is made, a perfectly reasonable concern follows. What about women? What about disabled people? What about maternity rights? As a working mum, I understand those concerns completely. As attorney general, I became the first cabinet minister in British history to take maternity leave and go back to work afterwards. I know first-hand how important workplace protections are for pregnant women and new mums. Many of these important rights existed before the Equality Act; they will continue after it. They will not only be protected; they should be strengthened.

The same is true for disabled people, gay people or non-white people, who all deserve protection from discrimination. Everyone deserves fair treatment in the workplace: that is what equal protection under the law means. The real question is whether we can do this without embedding identity politics into every corner of public life. I believe we can.

That is why a Reform government would replace the Equality Act with a new framework built around equal treatment, fairness and individual rights. Women, pregnant or not, will be protected from sex discrimination in the workplace. Disabled people, ethnic people and gay people will all continue to have legal rights protecting them from unfair treatment. Protection for workers must remain. No-one is talking about removing any of those legal safeguards.

What would vanish is the sprawling bureaucracy created by the Equality Act: the Public Sector Equality Duty which has allowed anti-white, anti-male recruitment by the RAF, the intelligence services, local councils and many public sector bodies. It would bring an end to the “positive action” sections in the Equality Act which enable discriminatory promotion policies and legitimise prejudice against men and white people. It would bring an end to the DEI “anti-racist” agenda which has distorted fairness and equality, cost the taxpayer billions in “DEI Officers” and allowed people to be treated differently because of race. Reform UK is the only party with a serious plan on how to deal with this.

Britain is at its best when we judge people by their character, their actions and their conduct, not by the colour of their skin or the demographic group to which they belong. That principle helped build the successful and cohesive country I feel a deep privilege to be a part of.

Henry Nowak should still be alive today. Nothing can change that terrible fact, but if his death forces Britain to ask serious questions about identity politics and what fairness means, then perhaps some good can emerge from an otherwise unspeakable tragedy. Because equality should mean equality for everyone.

SUELLA