Lammy tells Vance he was wrong to tie teen murder to immigration

David Lammy said he confronted U.S. Vice President JD Vance over the killing of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, telling him he was wrong to turn the murder into an immigration argument. Lammy said the two held a robust phone call on Saturday, and that he pushed back on repeated public claims from Vance that anger over the case should be tied to a mass migration crisis.

The dispute has sharpened around facts that do not fit the political message some activists have attached to the killing. Lammy said the killer, Vickrum Digwa, was British and already behind bars. Digwa was convicted this week and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 21 years after using an 8-inch Sikh dagger. Police said Nowak was handcuffed as he lay dying from a stab wound, and officers initially treated him as a suspect because Digwa falsely claimed he had been the target of a racist assault.

That sequence made the case unusually combustible in Britain. What began as a brutal homicide quickly became a rallying point for anti-immigration activists and far-right figures, who seized on the killing to widen the argument beyond the courtroom and into the country’s border politics. Lammy said the case had been weaponized in that way, turning a specific crime into a transatlantic talking point.

The fallout was not confined to Westminster or Washington. Police in Southampton were pelted with objects after a demonstration over Nowak’s death, underscoring how quickly a single case can spill into public disorder when it is folded into larger culture-war fights. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office condemned people trying to interfere in British democracy and stir division, a signal that senior officials saw the political exploitation of the case as a threat in its own right.

Lammy’s clash with Vance also carried unusual weight because the two men had built a personal relationship despite standing on different sides of the political spectrum. Their exchange exposed how a violent crime can be recast across borders, with facts about the victim, the defendant and the sentence pushed aside by narratives aimed at inflaming fears over immigration.