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This is an examination of Nigel Farage’s incendiary rhetoric, the law of incitement and why establishment figures bleating about “two-tier justice” may be both its greatest beneficiaries and biggest hypocrites.
The Phrase that preceded a riot
On 2 June 2026, Nigel Farage, a millionaire former public schoolboy and establishment insider, now Reform UK leader, and Member of Parliament for Clacton, posted a video to social media calling on the British public to respond to the death of Henry Nowak with “pure cold rage.” Within hours, hundreds of people rioted in Southampton. Riot police were pelted with bricks, rocks, flares and chairs. Eleven officers were injured. Neo-Nazis openly gave the Hitler salute in the streets of an English city.
Farage was not arrested. He has not been interviewed by police. No public statement from the Crown Prosecution Service indicated that his language was under examination. He appeared in Parliament the following day.
Compare that to what happened to Lucy Connolly.
Compare and contrast
In July 2024, following the Southport stabbings, Connolly (a 41-year-old childminder from Northampton) posted on X calling for “mass deportations” and for hotels housing asylum seekers to be “set on fire.” Her post was viewed 310,000 times before she deleted it. Connolly was arrested within days, charged, pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred, and was sentenced to 31 months in prison. Her appeal was dismissed. The Court of Appeal found there was “no arguable basis” for reducing her sentence. Reform supporters (including party hierarchy) have claimed she was unfairly treated for freely expressing her views.
Or consider Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan. In August 2011, during the England riots, the two young men from Cheshire created Facebook pages calling on people to riot in their home towns. Not one person actually showed up. No violence of any kind occurred. Yet police turned up and arrested Blackshaw at the McDonald’s where his “event” was meant to take place. Both he and Sutcliffe-Keenan pleaded guilty under Sections 44 and 46 of the Serious Crime Act 2007 (for) intentionally encouraging the commission of criminal offences, and were jailed for four years each. Their appeals were dismissed. The Lord Chief Justice stated their actions were “sinister,” that technology had “almost certainly assisted rioters in other places,” and that deterrent sentences were fully justified.
These three cases, and the glaring absence of any comparable scrutiny of Farage, are the true story of two-tier justice in Britain today. Not the story Farage is telling.
What the Law actually says
To understand why this matters legally, it is necessary to understand that the old common law offence of “incitement” was abolished in 2008 and replaced by a cleaner, broader framework under the Serious Crime Act 2007. That framework created three offences:
- Section 44 makes it a criminal offence to do an act capable of encouraging or assisting the commission of a crime, where the person intends to encourage it. The Act is explicit that mere foreseeability of consequences is not sufficient – actual intent must be proved.
- Section 45 covers situations where the person believed the offence would be committed and that their act would encourage or assist it.
- Section 46 is wider still: covering situations where a person acts believing one or more of a number of offences will be committed, without needing to specify which.
Under all three provisions, the offence is complete when the encouragement occurs. The crime does not need to actually take place. Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan were convicted and jailed even though nobody rioted. The law requires only the act, the capability, and the mental element.
Separately, the Public Order Act 1986 makes it an offence to use threatening, abusive or insulting words likely to stir up racial hatred. The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 extended this to religion. These are the provisions under which Connolly was convicted.
Neither framework contains an exemption for elected politicians. Neither contains a carve-out for social media posts. Neither requires that the person whose words preceded violence was holding a burning torch rather than a smartphone.
The “Pure Cold Rage” Problem
Faragists offer a coherent-sounding argument: he was not calling for violence. He was expressing legitimate political anger about a genuine injustice – the death of a young white man who was handcuffed by police while dying, his cries ignored, after his killer falsely accused him of racial abuse. The police failure in the Nowak case was real. The bodycam footage is shocking. The questions it raises about policing culture are legitimate.
But that argument, however it sounds in the abstract, collapses when measured against three specific facts.
First, he had watched this happen before. After Southport in 2024, Farage posted a video questioning whether “the truth is being withheld from us” and implying the killer was an Islamic extremist. Those claims were false. Riots followed. 1,280 people were arrested. A former counter-terrorism police chief stated publicly that Farage’s comments gave rioters “a false basis for attacks on the police.” Farage was not prosecuted, in fact, he was barely even challenged. He offered no apology. He did the same thing again with full knowledge of what his platform, his rhetoric and a primed political atmosphere can produce.
Second, Henry Nowak’s own father explicitly asked that his son’s death not be used to “create further division, hatred or tension.” Farage proceeded regardless, within hours of that request being made public. Whatever the sincerity of his stated concern for Henry Nowak, he chose to override the explicit wishes of the grieving father in favour of generating political momentum.
Third, he doubled down after the riot. When eleven police officers lay injured, Farage released a second video and pre-empted criticism by saying: “You will get political commentators saying that I’ve stirred up this problem. Well, of course, they always do that.” This is not the language of a man who had inadvertently misjudged the moment. It is the language of a man who understood exactly what he was doing and had prepared his defence in advance.
The Section 45 test. Did he believe that criminal disorder would result? It is not an abstract question. It is very nearly answered by his own words.
The “I’m protecting white people” defence and why it simply doesn’t fly
There is a further argument available to Farage that is worth examining, because it is more legally sophisticated. The racial hatred provisions of the Public Order Act are harder to apply to his conduct than they were to Connolly’s, because his framing was ostensibly defensive. He was supposedly highlighting perceived injustice against white people, not attacking minority groups. Calling for hotels full of asylum seekers to be burned is an attack. Calling for “equal treatment before the law” is, in form, a demand for equality.
But several things need to be said about this distinction.
It is substantially dishonest. Farage framed the Nowak case as evidence of “anti-white prejudice” and demanded “an end to DEI and positive discrimination.” The Race Action Plans he attacked were themselves responses to documented, systemic disparity. Black people in England and Wales being stopped and searched at seven times the rate of white people, subjected to use of force at five times the rate. The reforms were not arbitrary racial favouritism.
They were an institutional response to an institutional problem. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary’s own Race Action Plan explicitly states that the murder of George Floyd in 2020 was “a pivotal moment for policing in the UK, driving the need for real change.” To present the solution as the cause of the Nowak tragedy, without acknowledging the problem the solution was addressing, is not political commentary. It is deliberate misdirection.
It also fails the Serious Crime Act test entirely. Sections 44 to 46 are racially indifferent. They do not ask whether the encouraged criminal conduct targeted a particular group. They ask whether an act was capable of encouraging crime and whether the mental element was present. “Pure cold rage” directed at a politically primed audience of millions, by a man who had watched this pattern play out before, is capable of encouraging criminal disorder regardless of how Farage chooses to characterise his motivation.
The analogy is instructive: a person who shouts “kill him” at a crowd while claiming they were merely expressing passionate political disagreement does not escape criminal liability by citing their good intentions.
The Structural Hypocrisy
What makes this situation particularly acute is that Farage has constructed a rhetorical trap. Within the terms of his own argument, any scrutiny of his conduct becomes evidence of the bias he is alleging. Hold him to the same standard as Connolly, Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan, and you are (in the most ironic terms) “suppressing white grievance.” Fail to hold him to that standard, and you are actually, genuinely operating a two-tier system. The loop is closed by design.
But there is a way out of the trap, and it lies in looking at what is actually different between Farage and the three individuals who were prosecuted.
Connolly was a private citizen. Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan were young men with small social networks and no political platform. Their posts reached hundreds, perhaps thousands.
They had no prior experience watching their words precede riots. They had no strategic communications advisers. They had no understanding of the political ecosystem they were operating in.
Farage is a millionaire with decades of professional political experience, a seat in Parliament, millions of social media followers, and, crucially: direct, recent, personal experience of watching his rhetoric precede disorder.
If the law’s test of “belief that an offence would be committed” is harder to prove for a naive young man posting from his bedroom in Warrington, it is considerably easier to assess for a professional politician who has already watched the same film play out once before.
The law does not require greater accountability from the powerful than from the powerless. But the factual elements of the legal test, particularly the belief element, are more readily evidenced in the output of the more knowing and experienced speaker.
The real ‘two-tier’ Justice
It is worth pausing to acknowledge that the concern about differential policing which animated the Nowak case is not invented. The evidence that UK policing has, over many decades, treated minority communities more harshly in certain contexts is well-documented and genuine. Stop and search disproportionality. Deaths in custody. The Macpherson Report’s finding of institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police. These are not fabrications.
But the response to those documented injustices cannot be that we therefore tolerate a different form of inequality. One in which wealthy, established, politically connected figures are free to use the most inflammatory language available, in the full knowledge of what that language produces, while ordinary citizens posting in anger face prosecution, imprisonment and the destruction of their livelihoods.
That is not justice of any tier. It is impunity. And impunity, unlike incitement, does not require intent to cause harm. It merely requires a system too cautious, too deferential, or too politically exposed to apply the law it already has.
What consistency would require
It is not the purpose of this article to call for Farage’s prosecution. That is a decision that belongs to the Crown Prosecution Service, applying the Full Code Test, whether there is sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction, and whether prosecution is in the public interest.
What this article does argue is that consistency requires that question to be asked, seriously and transparently, by the appropriate authorities. Not asked and answered in private without explanation. Not, not asked at all.
The Lord Chief Justice, in upholding the four-year sentences of Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan, said this: “What both these appellants intended was to cause very serious crime. All this was incited at a time of sustained countrywide mayhem. The judge was fully justified in concluding that deterrent sentences were appropriate. These offenders were caught red-handed.”
Those men were caught red-handed on Facebook. A man with millions of followers, who has access to a wider population through national media, with a prior history of rhetoric that preceded riots, and explicit knowledge that his words inflame, as well as a record of doubling down after the violence rather than reflecting on it, made his video for all to see.
If the law applies equally (it definitely should) that at minimum requires an answer to the question of why it has not been examined. Not because Farage is powerful. But because, under the rule of law, power is not a defence.
