Is the government using grieving families to push pro-migration propaganda?

How would you respond if a family member had been seriously injured or murdered in an unprovoked knife attack? Fortunately, most of us will never know the answer to that question. But we could hazard a guess that it might be a combination of shock, grief and rage – all at once, perhaps, and all to an unimaginable degree.

A story from the Mail on Sunday is what has prompted this unpleasant hypothetical question. If its reporting is to be believed, then however the grieving parents, siblings and friends of a victim may actually feel, the public statements issued on their behalf in the wake of a tragedy are likely to have been heavily influenced by the British state.

Citing an anonymous government source, the MoS claims that a covert department in Whitehall called the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) either wrote or heavily influenced the statements released by the families of Henry Nowak and Stephen Ogilvie. They did this, according to the source, ‘to stop [the families] inflaming tensions further with their remarks’ – a reference to the protests and riots that recently engulfed Southampton, where Nowak was murdered, and Belfast, where Ogilvie was allegedly attacked.

Now, you might be thinking, this sounds like the kind of thing a tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist would say. But it is worth turning to the statements and to the circumstances that produced them to see why the Mail on Sunday’s story is at the very least plausible.

Mark Nowak, the father of Henry, was widely praised for the measured address he gave to the media after his son’s murder trial earlier this month. The speech was all the more remarkable given the circumstances. Henry, 18, was stabbed four times by Vickrum Digwa with a large Sikh ceremonial dagger. When police arrived at the driveway in Southampton where Henry lay slumped, he told them he couldn’t breathe and had been stabbed. ‘I don’t think you have, mate’, one of the officers responded, placing Henry in handcuffs and reading him his rights. He died from his injuries shortly after. Henry was subjected to this inhumane treatment because Digwa told police that he had been racially abused, a statement the court found to be a lie.

Mark Nowak certainly had some choice words for the officers who arrested his son. He was particularly critical of the fact that Digwa was never placed in handcuffs, even when he was finally arrested on suspicion of Henry’s murder. The rest of his speech, however, could be said to have possessed an incredible equanimity. ‘We do not want his death to create further division, hatred or tension’, he said. Quoting the KC who prosecuted Digwa, Nowak told the media: ‘This is not a case about Sikhism, this is not a case about racism, this is a case about murder.’

These statements were leapt on by the government in the days that followed. UK prime minister Keir Starmer pilloried Reform UK leader Nigel Farage for stating that the public should respond with ‘pure, cold rage’ to Henry’s treatment by the police. ‘Exploiting this tragedy to create grievance and division would be wrong in any circumstances’, Starmer said in the House of Commons. ‘But to do it when the family are expressly saying “please don’t” is unforgivable.’

This is not to say that Mark Nowak is not a remarkable man, calling as he did for restraint at a time when many of us really would – to borrow Farage’s phrase – be consumed with rage. But there do seem to be parts of his speech that don’t quite scan.

Most curiously, Nowak described his son as ‘inclusive’ – a word more commonly used by DEI-trained bureaucrats than ordinary members of the public. He also referred to Henry as ‘another young life lost to the brutal reality of knife crime in this country’. He said a full inquiry into his son’s death should be established, in order to ‘make our streets safer for everyone’. I can’t be alone in thinking these lines at least sound suspiciously like a government press release.

In Belfast on Monday, Stephen Ogilvie was stabbed in the back, face and neck. Incredibly, he survived, but he remains in hospital in a serious condition. The suspect, Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old asylum seeker from Sudan, has been charged with attempted murder. Within hours of the footage of the attack going viral, Belfast was engulfed by rioting.

As in Henry Nowak’s case, Ogilvie’s family released a statement that was a model of compassion and restraint. They urged the public not to ‘speculate about what happened on social media’ and they condemned the rioting being carried out in Stephen’s name. Then came a more surprising line: ‘We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including from within our healthcare system and hospitality sector, and we depend on them to make our country work. We do not want this tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility.’

Does that sound normal to you? It is hard to believe that, the day after an asylum seeker is alleged to have tried to behead your son, you would be extolling the virtues of immigration for the economy.

The Mail on Sunday claims that RICU played a similar hand after the London Bridge terror attack in 2017, when eight people were killed by Islamists, by placing posters such as ‘#LoveWillWin’ around central London. In 2014, when a British aid worker was beheaded by Islamic State, RICU is said to have placed a prominent picture of a woman in a Union Jack niqab in the British press.

If the MoS is correct, then we have a government that is not only trying to manipulate public sentiment, but is using distraught families to do so, too. Worse still, the aim seems to be to silence debate on some of the key problems of our present era, from illegal immigration and two-tier policing to Islamic extremism.

The government has serious questions to answer about RICU’s activity. If it really is treating grieving families as a propaganda tool to silence dissent, then it must come clean. The public deserves to know the unvarnished truth.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.