Readers who may have visited my Facebook timeline will have seen several more items relating to this week’s news herein, one of which is this by Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, in which I emphasise the parts relating to my ‘Endgame’ post:

‘The murder of Henry Nowak is profoundly disturbing on many levels.

The cruelty and callousness of the crime itself – unprovoked, unwarranted and unnecessary. An example of the nihilism that has crept into our society, particularly amongst young people desensitised to the violence they see glorified on social media.
The behaviour of the murderer’s family was also repulsive, showing a total lack of humanity in covering up a horrific crime.

The police response exposed multiple failures. I do understand how difficult and confusing the situation must have been. But they also showed a lack of common sense that meant Henry’s final moments were unbelievably harrowing.

I avoid watching any videos on social media that show the death of an individual. But this time I forced myself to do so. Only by watching it can one fully grasp the horror and understand how deep the failure – innocent Henry, handcuffed by the police as he lay dying, while his murderer calls him a racist. It is a moment I will never forget.

Henry’s murder and the police response must be a seminal moment for Britain on a par with the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager killed in 1993. His murder forced the country to confront something intolerable and say: this is not who we are, and we will not put up with it.

So many battles have been won in making our society better and fairer since then. But we are now going backwards because of a pernicious identity politics amplified in 2020 by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

I remember watching Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner take the knee in what is now my office and asking myself “What on earth are you doing? Kneeling for an incident that occurred in another country about which you know little?”. Why are they not kneeling now for Henry Nowak?

But Starmer and Rayner were not the only ones. The BLM movement exploited the naivety of many foolish politicians, businesses and public institutions.

As the Equalities Minister in 2022, I wrote to every public body about how they were dealing with equalities issues, and I warned them not to do things because of pressure from activists. I was successful in many areas, but not with the police.

I had meetings with the National Police Chiefs’ Council, with the Metropolitan Police, with the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, with the College of Policing.

Each time, I showed them the evidence that the police are not institutionally racist. I told them repeatedly that anti-racism was not the problem that we need to solve, the problems were integration and building faith in our institutions.

Some agreed, but were too scared to say so publicly. The pressure from “community leaders”, well-meaning busybodies, and ignorant do-gooders was too strong for all of them.

They refused to heed my warning. Instead, they talked about operational independence and kept going with diversity training and bringing in activists to advise them on how to manage these issues, advisers who believed in defunding the police.

We have now had half a generation of police ignoring or sidestepping the advice of ministers like me and instead devising their own approach. Now we see the result.

And this will keep happening unless politicians and other leaders in business, public institutions and the rest of society stop being so scared and start to speak up.

But too many are scared. It’s easy to keep your head down and have a quiet life. That has never been my nature.

As a junior minister in 2021, I published a report that said that this country was not institutionally racist. In response, I was called all sorts of names.

One Labour MP shared a post calling me “white supremacy in blackface”. I didn’t care, because I know that once you allow people to start segregating by race on the basis of “anti-racism”, there will be a backlash, and others will start segregating by race until we become a tribal society.

So I kept going. I scrapped unconscious bias training. I scrapped mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting.

At that time there was a false, but huge, outcry that ethnic minorities were getting Covid because of racism. I was the only person prepared to stand up and say this was not true. I felt it was doubly important, as a black person, to do so. I produced research proving it.

I got pilloried for it and I didn’t care because I was telling the truth.

This is why I tell people that the Conservative Party under my leadership is a changed party. I did these things before when I was in government. I will do them again.

I have said that we are going to root out all identity politics from state institutions – from removing diversity requirements from defence procurement, to scrapping preferential sentencing for minorities.

But it can’t end there. No other political party has a plan for integration and assimilation.

That is why I was also disturbed by Nigel Farage’s video yesterday. A lot has gone wrong. A lot needs to be fixed. But Farage was completely wrong to say: “the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities.” This is the language of the Black Lives Matter movement – inflaming tensions, emphasising difference. It is a toxic tribal politics that divides our country whoever is doing it – black or white.

It is the identity politics that the Conservative Party rejects. Every other party – Labour, Reform, the Greens, SNP and others – are pandering to people based on separatism. Anyone bandying around policies that are proudly anti-English, nationalist, anti-white still doesn’t get how dangerous these ideologies are.

I do not want people creating lots of separate communities in our country. If you come to Britain, do not bring the racial and cultural grievances of other places here and turn our country, our home, into the place you were running away from.

Changing things requires politicians who get it. It requires bravery from people in our public institutions, from the police to the NHS, to teachers and education, to say: “No more. We are not doing this.”

We are going to have to sweep out a lot of the historic, incoherent nonsense that has been brought in under the guise of anti-racism. Notions of white privilege and forcing decolonisation narratives down the throats of children are not how we build a cohesive society.

We also need to stop this idea that racism is something that happens only to ethnic minorities and is only perpetrated by white people. This seems to have been the misapprehension of the police in the case of Henry Nowak. Public bodies must understand that racism happens to everybody and an accusation alone is not evidence and is certainly not a bigger crime than being stabbed or murdered.

These are the principles that the Conservative Party believes in: universalism, equality under the law, not treating people differently on the basis of skin colour, and making sure that we always build faith and trust in our institutions, rather than trying to destroy those institutions.

If there is one thing that should come from Henry’s death, it is that we make things better, so that this does not happen to any of our boys again.

That is what I am committed to.

I do not want his death to be in vain.

Let’s do this for Henry. Let’s get this right.’

Today, Kemi writes,

‘Today I have met Lucy, Mark and Katie, Henry Nowak’s mother, father and stepmother. Their courage is extraordinary.

They have endured the most appalling loss, it is a life sentence for them.

They have also faced the agonising decision to release the harrowing body-worn camera footage, knowing how painful it would be and how strongly people would react. They did so because they want truth, accountability and change.

They have asked that we work across political parties and religions to rebuild trust in the police. That trust has been broken because of what happened, and I agree with them on that.

We must also be prepared to examine, carefully and seriously, religious practices or exemptions that permit the carrying of dangerous weapons in public, and other activities that are not conducive to the public good. We also need to examine where the law needs to change.

Henry’s family do not want anger to tear communities apart. They are a family who have friends across faith and race, and so did Henry. His family want his memory to help bring our society together.

Everyone knows I have strong views about how we should deal with equality under the law. What the family agreed with me on is that we need to bring common sense back, and that is what we should all be fighting for.

I promised the family that we will work to ensure there is a positive legacy for Henry out of this tragedy.

That is my focus now.’