Was whiteness relevant to Ann Widdecombe’s murder?

There is something grimly absurd about the fact that it is Ann Widdecombe, out of all of the possible targets, who became the victim of the most brutal assassination in modern British history. We might have hoped that she would have been accorded some of the dignity she was denied in death in the public aftermath, but instead we have witnessed a nauseating battle for narrative control. 

From the outset, it was clear that the authorities and their allies in the media were desperate to prevent political inferences being drawn from this very political murder. The police and the government hastily announced that the murder was a burglary gone horribly wrong, before conceding that it appeared to be a more targeted killing. 

At that point, the strategy shifted to the same one that was deployed following the sentencing of Henry Nowak’s killer — in which anything beyond anodyne expressions of sadness at her death was portrayed as a heartless attack on the family’s privacy. This was harder in Widdecombe’s case, given her lack of close living relatives, but an admirable attempt was made nonetheless. 

We then shifted on to the more traditional British argument around contempt of court, which has now become a routine part of the aftermath of high profile killings in Britain. In the crudest possible terms, the authorities effectively threaten to let the guilty party off if anybody points out anything too inconvenient about the circumstances. Then, last week, we saw perhaps the most brazen attempt yet at political manipulation of the criminal justice system, when thirteen people were arrested over a suspected terror plot against an Islamic fundamentalist family gathering in Sussex. All thirteen were subsequently released, with the police confirming that no further lines of inquiry were being pursued. I cannot for the life of me come up with an alternative hypothesis for this, other than that the government felt that an act of political violence from the Right would be a convenient distraction from the Widdecombe story for the weekend’s news cycle, and one was duly rustled up.  

One thing that the police had been at pains to reiterate, both when they made their first mistaken arrest in the first stages of the investigation, and then with their subsequent arrest of the suspect who is now being charged, was that he was white. In fact he was so White that it needed to be capitalised. He was White British. It was said again and again in case anybody missed it, and started speculating that he might not have been White, and might instead have been another colour. But other than the weary argument about whether the police would have been so keen to have revealed the suspect’s ethnicity had it been anything other, there has been little subsequent discussion about the fact he was not a member of an ethnic minority. This has led some people to discern evidence of racism; if the suspect had not been white, his background would surely have attracted far more attention than it did. 

And there is an element of truth to this — had Ann Widdecombe’s assassin been an immigrant or a Muslim, there would certainly be discourse about borders or integration as a result. The police and the government would have been even more twitchy and hamfisted in their attempts at narrative control than they have been. Any political assassination is going to generate questions and controversy around the perpetrators distinguishing features — particularly if those features are not what we would expect of the perpetrators of such a crime. 

Ann Widdecombe was the Reform UK justice spokesman and had been a high profile supporter of the party since its inception, having previously served as an MEP for the Brexit Party.  Of course, Reform’s flagship policies are around stopping illegal immigration and reducing immigration generally. Yet prior to her death, very few would have placed Widdecombe at the top of the list of potential victims by an assassin who wanted to kill senior Reform figures. Nigel Farage would sit firmly at the top of that list, followed by the party’s current MPs or possibly Zia Yusuf. And furthermore, there does not yet appear to be an organised movement opposing Reform — or anti-immigration politics generally — from immigrants themselves and their descendants, independent of the broader political Left. The sort of people who really hate Reform UK to the point that they might consider violence are overwhelmingly white leftists.  

But Widdecombe was better known among the general public for her commitment to social conservatism, inspired by her Christian faith, than she was for her association with Reform. Aside perhaps from the fact that she might have been an easier target, that a killer would pick her over the likes of Farage would suggest someone who took umbrage at her individual stances, especially her views on sexuality and gender. Again, that kind of radicalism in this country is generally dominated by white people.  And that is why the suspect being white has not attracted much commentary — it stands to reason. 

Does this raise questions about prejudice or racism when we contrast it with the way that ethnicity or national status become significant elements of the discourse following other killings in Britain? I would argue that it doesn’t, and that instead it comes down to relevance. In other cases, the ethnic or national background of the killer raises questions that are pertinent to government policy or to prevailing social assumptions, and in others they do not. In cases where the suspect is white, all their being white usually tells us is that Britain is still a country that is overwhelmingly white, and that white people sometimes commit crimes. This would be controversial if anyone was arguing that they didn’t, but that is not an argument anybody has ever made. 

Taking two recent examples — the Henry Nowak case and the Belfast attack — we can observe how the perpetrator’s non-white background became pertinent to live political debates. In the Nowak case, it was the police’s handling of the crime as it was taking place which reignited discussions around police bias. The manner in which the suspect’s family aided and abetted his attempt to hide the truth also raised the issue of cultural differences and kinship obligations, and the manner in which the British authorities struggled to navigate these differences. The Belfast attack, in which a man was nearly beheaded by a Sudanese immigrant with a lengthy criminal history, underlined the propensity for extreme, random violence among those who come through the asylum system, and the risks to which the public are exposed by moving such people into provincial towns and cities. 

In neither case was there an attempt to brand entire ethnic groups as being collectively responsible for these crimes. In both cases, people’s objections were to government policy, and particularly to perceived unfairness. Over the last decade, there has been a seemingly never-ending stream of crimes and atrocities across Europe which, in their own narrow context, vindicate the worldview of those who are sceptical about mass immigration, or who believe that Western European governments have become biased against their own titular populations in favour of minority groups. 

Across the continent, governments, media organisations and public institutions are desperate to delegitimise the drawing of obvious political inferences from these events, in a manner that is not applied to any other part of the political spectrum. At the time of writing, the organisers of the Berlin Pride parade, which was subject to yet another deadly vehicular attack by an Islamist, are publicly condemning attempts to ‘use’ the tragedy “for political ends”. These condemnations come in the same vaguely dystopian format that we have got used to following every attack, in which the abstract concepts of “division” and “unity” are contrasted in Manichean terms. The people who carry out mass murder are conflated with the people drawing political conclusions from mass murder, under the simple heading “those who seek to divide us”. It is absolutely impossible to imagine the same approach being taken if such an attack were ever carried out by a white right-wing extremist. It is maddening and sinister, but for the time being, it is an impressive display of the raw political power the Left is still able to wield across Europe, even in its electoral twilight. 

We cannot depoliticise political violence, and the attempt to insist we try to do so is moribund

Unlike the Nowak case, or Belfast, or Berlin, Ann Widdecombe’s murder does not carry any political implications regarding migration or two-tier policing. It is however a reminder that the risk of political violence from the Left is seriously underpriced in modern Britain, where the authorities are desperate to portray the danger as being a two-horse race between Islamists and the domestic Far Right. Whilst it would not be fair to tar the mainstream centre left with this brush — even though they would have no compunction in associating Reform UK with any violence by right-wing extremists — they are quite happy to portray reasonable mitigations to this threat as being shady. There is a perfectly good reason why centre-left think tanks are happy to publish details of their donors, while centre-right institutions often keep theirs anonymous. Similarly, the Green Party doesn’t have to raise large amounts of money from private sources to pay for round-the-clock close protection for Zack Polanski. 

We cannot depoliticise political violence, and the attempt to insist we try to do so is moribund. On the Widdecombe case individually, if anybody wants to suggest why the fact that her killer was white is pertinent to any political question worthy of discussion, they are free to do so. But if that fact is not pertinent, then that by itself does not make discussion of a suspect’s background illegitimate in cases where it is. If your argument is simply that “white people commit crimes as well”, the reason that it doesn’t gain much traction in public debate is because that point is not interesting or controversial.