I have a growing discomfort in the way the word “community” is used in British public life. It is a word that appears to offer warmth, belonging and mutual responsibility. Yet in practice it is often used as a fog. It blurs the difference between individuals, institutions, associations, cultures, interests, families, faith groups, neighbourhoods, activists, pressure groups and criminal actors. It turns hard social facts into soft language. It allows people to speak as though they have explained something when they have only renamed it.
The murder of Henry Nowak should not be overshadowed by the so-called community associations of the perpetrator. A young man was killed. That must remain the moral centre of the matter. No invocation of a wider identity should be allowed to displace the death of an individual. No appeal to cohesion, sensitivity or group feeling should make us look past the immediate human fact that a life was ended.
This is not an argument for collective guilt. It is the opposite. The point is that collective language is failing us in both directions. It can be used to blame a whole population for the action of one person, which is unjust. It can also be used to shield scrutiny by implying that criticism of an individual, a practice, an institutional failure or a social pattern is somehow an attack on an entire “community”. Both moves are corruptions of liberal democratic judgement.
We need to become much more precise. A person is not a community. A family is not a community. A religious identity is not a community. A neighbourhood is not automatically a community. A political pressure group is not a community. A set of loosely associated people who share an origin, faith, language, grievance or cultural background is not necessarily a community in any meaningful civic sense. These are different forms of association, and they should be named as such.
The language matters because it changes the hierarchy of concern. I am uneasy that the defence of a “community” can appear to take precedence over the death of an individual. Once that happens, public morality has been inverted. The victim becomes a problem to be managed. The perpetrator becomes a representative figure. The wider group becomes the subject of official anxiety. The living abstraction is protected more carefully than the dead person is remembered.
That is not liberal democracy. That is a drift towards sectarian management. We are not, or should not be, a cabal of impervious tribes and clans, each insulated by its own grievance language and mediated by public authorities afraid of naming reality. We are citizens before the law. We are persons before we are categories. We are accountable for what we do, not for the symbolic meanings others attach to our ancestry, faith, colour, class or cultural background.
To secularise identity is not to erase difference. It is to remove the aura of immunity that now surrounds some identity claims. It is to say that the state should not treat group feeling as sacred. It is to insist that justice must not be negotiated through communal sensitivities, reputational management or the fear of offence. A liberal society can protect freedom of religion, freedom of association and freedom from discrimination without turning every social identity into a protected moral territory.
The word “community” has become especially dysfunctional because it implies care where no care may exist. It suggests dense bonds of responsibility, reciprocity and accountability. Yet, many people who are described as belonging to a community have no practical relationship with one another at all. They may not know one another. They may not share values. They may not accept the same authorities. They may not participate in any shared civic structure. They may simply be grouped together by outside observers, public bodies, media shorthand or activist representation.
This is where the phrase “care in the community” acquires a bitter resonance. It is care in the community, except no one cares, and there is no community. There are services, gaps, families under strain, isolated individuals, unmanaged risks, moral evasions and institutional procedures. Calling this “community” does not make it humane. It can make neglect sound relational. It can make abandonment sound local. It can make failure sound like belonging.
When anti-social and nihilistic attitudes appear, they must be examined as attitudes, behaviours and forms of social failure. They should not be dissolved into the language of community. Nor should they be excused as the misunderstood expression of identity. A person who commits murder is not the embodiment of a people. Nor is he relieved of responsibility because public institutions fear the implications of naming what has happened.
The response to Henry Nowak’s murder should begin with Henry Nowak. It should begin with the reality of a young life lost, the grief of his family, and the need for justice to be seen clearly. It should then examine the conduct of the perpetrator, the circumstances of the killing, the handling of the scene, and the institutional assumptions that may have shaped the response. Those questions are legitimate. They are not made illegitimate because they touch on race, religion, policing or public fear.
What should be resisted is the temptation to turn the case into a referendum on a population. That is precisely why the word “community” is so inadequate. It is too vague to identify culpability and too loaded to permit scrutiny. It encourages public authorities to speak in abstractions when they should be speaking in particulars. It encourages commentators to claim collective meaning where there may be only individual guilt, institutional failure and civic confusion.
We need a better civic vocabulary. We need to speak about persons, citizens, families, networks, institutions, congregations, organisations, neighbourhoods, movements, subcultures and interest groups. Each term points to a different kind of relationship. Each carries a different kind of responsibility. “Community” should not be used as the default substitute for thought.
There is a humane way to hold this line. It is possible to reject racial scapegoating while also rejecting the sentimental defence of group identity. It is possible to protect innocent people from backlash while still demanding a full account of what happened. It is possible to condemn hatred without pretending that public anger is irrational. It is possible to say that no wider population should be blamed, while also saying that no wider identity should be used to soften the moral fact of murder.
The secular liberal principle is simple. The individual life comes first. The law comes next. Institutions must be accountable. Identity must not become an alibi. And public language must stop hiding behind “community” when what is really at stake is responsibility.
Henry Nowak should not be remembered as a catalyst for communal tension, nor as a symbol to be absorbed into someone else’s narrative. He was a person. That is the point from which any decent society must begin.
[1] Factual details checked against public reporting and official statements published between 1st and 3rd June 2026.
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