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Why was Jo Cox murdered? The true extent of Thomas Mair's evil may never be known

Poster boards of Jo Cox at a memorial event in Trafalgar Square (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Poster boards of Jo Cox at a memorial event in Trafalgar Square (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)


June 12, 2021   8 mins

Thursday is market day in Birstall. But on June 16, five years ago, the West Yorkshire village was even busier than usual. The Euros were in full swing, and by midday the local pubs had started to fill for that afternoon’s match between England and Wales.

Carrying a holdall and a plastic Tesco bag, Thomas Mair hovered on the market square with a baseball cap pulled low over his face. Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen, wasn’t due for her constituency surgery at the local library for another half an hour. As he waited, Mair stood and ate a Flake.

Five months later, he watched as CCTV footage of that day was replayed in Court 8 of the Old Bailey, occasionally taking notes in block capitals. From the press seats, I watched as Mair looked straight ahead, emotionless, as the devastating injuries he’d inflicted on Jo Cox were described: multiple stab wounds, two gunshots to the head and one to her body. As Mair attacked the 41-year-old MP, witnesses variously heard him shout “This is for Britain” or “Make Britain Independent”.

Within hours of Jo Cox’s death, commentators were blaming the toxic, highly-charged atmosphere fostered by the EU referendum. On the Leave side, any suggestion of shared sympathies with a racist killer, however remote, was greeted with contempt and indignation, and the perpetrator was cast as a mentally-ill loner.

Against this backdrop, the eight-day trial pieced together a forensic narrative of the murder, right down to the chocolate wrapper discarded in a bin in the market square. Mair’s guilt and motivation was never in question. In his sentencing remarks, the judge said: “There is no doubt that this murder was done for the purpose of advancing a political, racial and ideological cause namely that of violent white supremacism and exclusive nationalism most associated with Nazism and its modern forms.”

Mair had remained silent throughout the trial, and the judge refused his request to address the court after the guilty verdict. Prior to that, he had spoken just once during the entire criminal justice process, at the magistrates’ hearing a few days after the murder. Asked his name, he replied: “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain”.

What I found particularly unsettling was how, until the killing, this 53-year-old man had lived an anonymous life, with no known history of violence and no criminal record. That his first offence was the murder of an MP seemed extraordinary.

And so, soon after the trial, I wrote to Mair at Frankland prison, explaining that I was a crime writer interested to know what he would have told the court had the judge allowed his request. To my surprise, I received a short note in response. In block capitals, Mair told me he had written a three-page reply but that it had been confiscated by the prison’s censors. He did say he was open to a “dialogue”, but as far as I know my response to that never reached him. Instead, the prison informed me that any further communication was banned, and that Mair’s pages of thoughts had been “placed in stored property not to be issued until release”, even though his whole life sentence makes that an impossibility.

That dead-end left me to piece together the clues to Mair’s mind from the literature — presented by the prosecution — that he kept in his meticulously tidy bedroom and the scant traces he’d left on the far-Right scene.

In the late 1980s, Mair, then an unemployed man in his mid-20s living with his grandmother, was a supporter of the National Front, a party whose main policy was the repatriation of all non-white immigrants. The reclusive Mair does not appear to have been an active member. He also subscribed to the pro-apartheid magazine, S-A Patriot, sold through NF publications, sending in a letter in 1988 to complain that the British media only ever showed white South Africans in the “worst possible light”. A decade after the end of apartheid, Mair was still raging at the demise of the racist regime, blaming “white liberals and traitors”.

Delving deeper into the contents of his personal library, detailed at the trial, the idea that such an extreme individual could have been pushed to breaking point by pre-Brexit tabloid scare stories about migrants seemed to me implausible. Mair’s hero was not Nigel Farage: the contents of his bookshelves suggests it was Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s cruellest henchman. Holocaust denial and racial separation were his obsessions.  

By the late-1990s Mair was immersed in the ideology of the US neo-Nazi National Alliance which, according to a pamphlet he owned, dreamed of a “New White World” which would come into being after “a final cleansing”. A sort of bible for those on this most violent fringe of the far-Right was William Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries, which depicted a future race war where feminised white men would “regain their manhood” and take revenge on “race traitors”. A passage from the novel was extracted in one of the books on Mair’s shelves, James Ridgeway’s Blood in the Face, imagining “thousands of hanging female corpses… They are the White women who were married to or living with Blacks, with Jews, or with other non-white males.”

That Mair was drawn to such views was particularly chilling in the light of his own family history. Born in Kilmarnock in 1963, Mair moved to West Yorkshire with his mother after his parents separated when he was 7. There she met Reginald St Louis, a Grenadian who had worked in the woollen mills of Huddersfield since arriving in the UK. The couple lived in Batley, while Mair was raised by his grandparents a couple of miles away in Birstall.

“Sometimes you look for the ‘wound’ and there is none, but in Mair’s case there was,” University of Kent criminologist and expert in terrorism Dr Simon Cottee tells me. Cottee believes that Mair could have felt abandoned, betrayed and resentful at his mother’s second marriage.

During the trial, Mair screwed up his face when the judge mentioned his internet search on “matricide”, made as he was researching Jo Cox, a mother of two. He reacted with the same contempt when her husband Brendan described the couple’s holidays in the Balkans volunteering with children orphaned by the war. As Mair was otherwise emotionless throughout, this response to mentions of mothers and motherhood stood out.

I was at the press conference after the trial when the senior investigating officer hinted that Mair, who had reloaded his gun after the attack on Cox, may have been planning to go on and harm his mother. Cottee, though, suggests the MP’s murder could have been a case of “displaced rage”: Jo Cox’s multicultural liberalism made her a “stand-in” or an “effigy” for the mother who betrayed Mair, but who he was unable to harm.

Mair had certainly harboured violent fantasies for many years. In his letter to S-A Patriot, he expressed a belief that “the White Race will prevail” though only after a “very long and very bloody struggle”. A decade later, in the aftermath of the London nail bombings, he ordered material from the USA on how to construct bombs and weapons. But he did not act on these thoughts until the summer of 2016.

It was only after the trial that the police revealed that the sawn-off .22 rifle Mair used to kill Jo Cox had come into his hands at some point between the summer of 2015, when it was stolen, and early June 2016, when Mair began to make Google searches on the MP at Batley library, typing sinister questions on how best to kill. If true, it would suggest that Jo Cox, MP for just over a year, was not a long-standing obsession, but had only drifted into his line of sight during the referendum campaign. The gun, it seems, came first. (The police still don’t know how he acquired the weapon, though they are sure he was not the person who stole it.)

Cottee described the rifle as a “rudimentary weapon”, not difficult to acquire with the right contacts. But the police characterised Mair as an “anti-social loner” of the most extreme kind; a man who sent just two or three text messages in as many years. He was not a pub-goer, had no criminal record and, as far as the police have been able to establish, no active membership or connection to any existing far-right organisations.

In the years since the trial, my requests for more information on this key issue have been met with terse responses from West Yorkshire Police. Recently, they announced that the active investigation into the gun’s origins had been closed, all avenues having been exhausted.

Cottee, however, is more intrigued by Mair’s use of a dagger, arguing that it revealed a desire to be close and intimate “in the killing moment”. Mair’s violence, fifteen controlled and precise stabs, was “too personal” and went “way beyond what was necessary”, he suggests. In what was Britain’s deadliest far-Right act of terror prior to Mair’s attack, David Copeland dreamed of sparking a race war with the nail bombs he set off around London. But Cottee thinks that for Mair, killing Jo Cox was an end in itself. When he was arrested in a cul-de-sac a mile from the crime scene, he was calm and passive.

“It was a moment of agency,” Dr Gwen Adshead tells me. The former forensic psychiatrist at Broadmoor, who I first met in the weeks after the trial, sees Mair’s crime as his attempt to make a mark in a world where he was “constantly on the receiving end of things”. She also sees a crime rooted in deep envy.

“Jo Cox had vitality and popularity and integrity and a partner and a family,” Adshead points out. The MP was the local success story: the Heckmondwike grammar schoolgirl who had gone on to Cambridge, lived an international life and later returned to serve the constituency where she’d been raised. “I am Batley and Spen born and bred, and I could not be prouder of that,” she’d said in her maiden speech.

By contrast, Mair, lonely and disconnected from society, had lived an empty life in his childhood home with his grandmother’s floral decor and his Nazi literature. “It may have made him feel that he was not alone,” Adshead suggested, when I asked about Mair’s fixation on figures such as Heydrich. “He thought he belonged to this group of people who felt the same way; that it was alright to have horrible, hateful feelings.”

Following the trial, the police disclosed that Mair had received treatment for OCD and mild agoraphobia. Mair’s mother, in her few words to the media, said that he had been treated for depression some twenty years earlier, which would have been around the time of his grandmother’s death.

Yet his life had contained shards of hope. He volunteered as a gardener at the grounds of Oakwell Hall, close to Fieldhead, an experience he described in 2010 to a local reporter as having done him more good “than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world”. I also met former colleagues of Mair at a scheme known as the Electronic Village which taught IT skills to disabled people. They talked of how Mair had arrived there to learn low in confidence and self-esteem, progressing to become a valued voluntary assistant.

But a few hours a week of human interaction and empathy could not unmake the long, slow shaping of a fascist life.

Adshead believes the “political fever” surrounding Brexit could well have provoked Mair’s rage. “But it is only one [factor] and often the final factors are very much to do with the individual perpetrator,” she clarifies, adding that Mair’s hatred had been trying to find a political cause.

“I would definitely think of the political environment as being a kind of “bicycle lock factor”, she explains, referring to a theory that a violent criminal needs multiple factors to align like the cogs in a combination lock in order to act. The final “number” that causes the lock to “spring open” can be something as seemingly insignificant as a look or a smile or a familiar phrase from the victim.

Adshead, whose new book describes her experiences of working with Britain’s most dangerous offenders, says the only chance of finding this final, usually deeply personal, “link” is by speaking to Mair himself, over many hours. Even then the answers may prove elusive.

But the only glimmer of access had been shut down. When I last tried to contact Mair in prison, I was told that any correspondence could be a “hindrance or distraction” to his “rehabilitation process”. It was an odd explanation for someone deemed beyond redemption by the court.

“We’re trying to put something rational around something fundamentally irrational and we can wear ourselves out trying to think about that,” Gwen Adshead said when I told her of my frustrations. “If we can understand why he did it then maybe we could control it next time. But ultimately it may make no sense.”


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Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago

I’d give Kester’s essay no more than 2/10.
There have been hundreds of murders of innocents by political fanatics in this country over the last 50 odd years. The left wing, and Labour in particular, generally supports, excuses or tries to explain away terrorism. Whether it’s the IRA murdering children, or Hamas murdering children, or the 7/7 bombers murdering commuters, or Al Qaeda doing 9/11, or the Russian government poisoning its enemies in English county towns, or thugs murdering police officers or looting shops, the left is always pretty clear that the victims in some measure had it coming, or were clearly in the wrong place with the wrong opinions or uniform. The target is almost always a western democracy, so the left supports all attackers of it.
When one of their own, of utterly unimpeachable crypto-Marxist saintly virtue, is killed by a nutter, the world really has turned upside down, and that really is a scandal. Nutters are only supposed to murder people the left already despises anyway: Jews, British soldiers, Tory politicians, people with jobs.
There’s thus a presupposition embedded here that Mair’s Brexit-y crime (yes, we spotted that) was exceptionally bad. He wasn’t a Muslim legitimately murdering commuters, or a Hamas terrorist murdering Jews; no such person gets a handwringing Kester essay trying to fathom the nature of their evil. No, his real crime was worse than that: it was to be white and to hold views of other races indistinguishable from those the IRA, Muslims, Hamas, and all Kester’s other preferred terrorists hold of Britain and the west.
All those types are held to a lower standard than the white Mair, who’s especially damned because he’s white and because his victim mattered and the 7/7 killers’ didn’t. One white nutter thinking terrorism a good idea is monstrous, 600,000 UK Muslims thinking the 7/7 attacks were justified is unworthy of study.
When I read something from the left about the unique evil of the 7/7 bombers or the murderers of PC Blakelock or the black youths of London murdering each other, I’ll take this kind of bleating seriously, but until then the subtext to this effort is “only the enemies of the left should die this way”.

Andrew D
Andrew D
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Classic whataboutery. The author is writing about Mair, and what might have motivated him to do what he did. He’s not writing about the motives of members of Hamas, IRA, jihadis etc, or attempting to place Mair in a league table of evil-doers.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Andrew D

Rubbish. He thinks Jo Cox’s murder is uniquely bad because she was a lefty. This article would simply not exist if Mair had murdered Nigel Farage. He wouldn’t have cared, and nor would Cox.
The choice of subject exposes his bigotry, so it’s wholly on point to bring this up, especially as Cox was herself a friend and supporter of anti-Semitic terrorists and Labour Party leaders.
Mr. Aspden has written a book about a black criminal he says was killed by police officers. So where’s his book about PC Blakelock, a police officer killed by black criminals?

Andrew D
Andrew D
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Perhaps you should write a book about the killers of PC Blakelock. Then we can all give you 2/10 for not writing about the killer of Jo Cox.

David Owsley
David Owsley
3 years ago
Reply to  Andrew D

Not really. Jo’s Corbyn-like sympathies surely played a role in her fate.

Andrew D
Andrew D
3 years ago
Reply to  David Owsley

Ah, I’d forgotten that sympathy with Corbyn’s ideas merited summary execution. Thanks for putting me right.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Andrew D

Clearly a graduate of the Cathy Newman school of debate.

Andrew D
Andrew D
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

I assume you’re referring to the ‘so what you’re saying is…’ line of argument.
I don’t think I’m the Cathy Newman here. From some of your comments:
He thinks Jo Cox’s murder is uniquely bad because…
‘…the writer thinks her murder was uniquely horrible, apparently because…’.
Between the lines, it’s obvious that the writer is…’
The strong inference is that…’
My italics.
All inferences drawn, Newman-style, not from what the writer says, but from what he doesn’t say or what you think he might or should be saying. You’re also doing precisely what you accuse the writer (and Jo Cox) of – applying moral relativism when it comes to the actions of the party you sympathise with, while decrying that same relativism when displayed by those you criticise.

Graeme Cant
Graeme Cant
3 years ago
Reply to  Andrew D

That’s Ok. It’s not really like that.
But given what they’ve done, support for Hamas and ISIS is clearly a form of hate speech – certainly a lot worse than that for which Maya Forstater (see this edition) was sacked. As hate speech, people are usually forgiven when they are stirred up by it.

mike otter
mike otter
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Thanks for this comment. The left continues to hold itself above the rule of law and support terror as a political method so they will continue to be at risk that someone will push back. It should be the security services, the police and the courts but for some reason they are not willing or able. Defeating the violent proxies of leftism will take a lot more than the likes of Mair, who at least got someone who had thrown her lot in via Labour membership with terrorists Hamas, Hizbollah etc. Breivik and the NZ Mosque nutter just make the problem worse as like Labour’s proxies their victims were random and all appear to be civilians. If civil society cannot muster the strength to confront political terror from the left then terror from the right will fill the gap and make a bad situation worse.

David Slade
David Slade
3 years ago

This is the problem with these grand gestures of placing violent offenders in isolation from anyone who could understand them. It means the true nature of their motivations – and therefore if their actions are ‘indicative’ of any wider problem in society – is never properly understood.

It’s the same with the Christchurch killer – putting them beyond consideration – the NZ PM refused to even say their name – is an understandable emotional response but it turns them in to abstract characters whose motivations can be second guessed at to fit whatever narrative the authorities (or anyone else) want to push.

It would appear from the article , for instance, that Jo Coxs’ killing was not indicative of a far right rot in the UK after all, but that is how it has been continuously regurgitated.

Unless we get away from these emotive responses and grandstanding we will never be able to understand and contextualise the threat these people pose. They will always just be assumed to be ‘indicative’ of whatever point people want to make.

Frederick B
Frederick B
3 years ago

When I heard of this murder, which was almost immediately attributed to the far right, I despaired that it might cost us Brexit as the opinion polls were then very finely balanced. A few months I heard a prominent and active advocate for Brexit say that, in his guesstimate, the result would have been nearer 60/40 for Brexit had the murder not occurred. It seems plausible, but who really knows?

Christopher Elletson
Christopher Elletson
3 years ago
Reply to  Frederick B

I too thought Brexit was lost when i heard about the murder.

Nick Faulks
Nick Faulks
3 years ago

So did the stock market. The FTSE put on, in money terms, the biggest two day celebration rally in its history.

Mike Smith
Mike Smith
3 years ago
Reply to  Frederick B

Strangely convenient in fact. One of the odd features of this case was that he was caught in a cul-de-sac and the police called out his name. How did the police know who the suspect was?

Nick Faulks
Nick Faulks
3 years ago

Where is he now? Is he even alive? His family’s attempts to discover such basic information through FoI requests have been rejected.

Mike Smith
Mike Smith
3 years ago
Reply to  Nick Faulks

Which, in my opinion, is quite sinister.

Simon Coulthard
Simon Coulthard
3 years ago

What a brutal act of violence against an innocent – it’s still shocking all these years later

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
3 years ago

Especially as she stood up for the victims of certain gangs who,raped underage girls with impunity.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Anna Bramwell

She most certainly did not.

Justin Anderson
Justin Anderson
3 years ago

There is obviously more to this given the states absolute determination to make sure no one can discuss his case , motivations etc. I am surprised more people aren’t talking about this.

James Chater
James Chater
3 years ago

Don’t we know enough about this man? Criminology has its proper uses but so often ‘criminologists’ seem to be in the business of titillation too. I had to force myself to finish reading this.
It is instructive that the comment on here receiving the most green thumbs ups so far, focuses more on the supposed selectivity of the Left, rather than the wretched subject himself. Extraordinary
I am on the ‘left/centre’. There are no excuses for any acts of terrorism or murder.
As the writer says, using the so-called ‘bike lock theory’, the febrile atmosphere around the EU Referendum campaign provided one of the ‘numbers’ to release the ‘lock’.

Last edited 3 years ago by James Chater
Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  James Chater

I sense the accounts given here of what Jo Cox was actually like probably come as a total surprise to you.
Her views were utterly abhorrent to any normal person, but the lunacy and hatred of the left have now gone so far that her being a Corbyn-, ISIL- and Muslim-paedophile-rape-gang-supporter strike you as nothing out of the ordinary; all perfectly acceptable left-wing positions.
As a result, the author – and I guess you – think there’s something uniquely awful about some nutter objecting so much to this that he murdered her. It’s as though it’s somehow in bad taste for these matters to be brought up. These rightie loonies must be especially wicked to murder such a saint.
Get the beam out of your eye.

Simon Coulthard
Simon Coulthard
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

She’s an extreme leftie so she desserved to die did she? That’s a repulsive argument Jon.

She was an MP for Batley and Spen – meaning I’m certain she wasn’t leading some leftist Marxist Stalinist policy of killing and gulaging. You can’t hold her responsible for weaknesses in leftist arguments.

You sound like you condone killing people because of their political ideology.

Graeme Cant
Graeme Cant
3 years ago

I don’t think he sounds like that at all but a lot of left sympathisers sound like THEY condone killing of people who disagree with them. Israelis, for example.
Read The Forgotten Rachels by Tom Gross.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago

No, that’s not what I said. I pointed out that the writer thinks her murder was uniquely horrible, apparently because – very unusually – it was done by some nutter who appears to have sympathies with the extreme right.
Jo Cox was herself, however, an extreme left-wing nutter and sympathiser / supporter of causes who murder on a much more prolific scale, and who choose their victims either by race, or randomly, or simply because they are easy to murder.
The idea that the murder of one such extremist by another was somehow so much worse than murders of innocents by left-wing or Islamofascist criminals that it needs a special article all about it is, therefore, moral incompetence on a breathtaking scale. Between the lines, it’s obvious that the writer is flabbergasted that his own side, rather than his enemies, might be at risk of murder by vicious loonies.

James Chater
James Chater
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

The author is a crime writer, trying to make sense of the insane murderer, Thomas Mair. He is not overly interested in the innocent victim, Jo Cox.
The rest of the comment seems to be saying she ‘had it coming to her’ because she was a Corbyn supporter, ‘OK’ with ISIS, Muslim paedophiles etc. Alarming monstrous skewed ‘logic’ in itself.
With regards ‘eyes’ and ‘beams’. What?

Last edited 3 years ago by James Chater
David Yetter
David Yetter
3 years ago

I ticked the thumbs down, because one really oughtn’t speak ill of the dead. I do, however want to thank you for calling the most recent pack of Sunni jihadis to plague the Middle East, “Daesh”. First it really bothers them as it is a slur in Arabic, and second I hate their having ruined the use of Isis in things really referring to the river through Oxford or the Babylonian goddess of wisdom. (It isn’t even an acronym for a good translation from the Arabic. ISIL is better since “al Sham” is not Syria, but the Levant.

Mangle Tangle
Mangle Tangle
3 years ago

A poor essay, I’m afraid, with a click-bait type headline. Sorry, but that’s how I see it. There are examples of rational and caring people who kill others. For example, war, or self-defence. Or the man (Princeps) who assassinated the Arch-Duke back in 1913 (he did it for cold, ‘reasonable’ reasons but was otherwise – by all accounts – a normal person). I’m afraid this murderer of Jo Cox falls into the much much larger category of nutters. Now, you can obsess and analyse all you want but at the end of the day he (or she) are just plain odd – and dangerous. Who they eventually fixate on is – well – terribly bad luck for the person chosen, and that’s it. So given that, any ‘analysis’ which explores the motivation of the murderer and the background and context of the victim is at best pointless and at worst doing a disservice to the victim. That latter consideration should have given the editor pause before he accepted this article.

Mike Smith
Mike Smith
3 years ago
Reply to  Mangle Tangle

So it was a motiveless killing then? I for one, after reading this article, have no idea what his true motives were.

Roger Inkpen
Roger Inkpen
3 years ago

Putting this guy down as a far right nutter who murdered an innocent MP over Brexit never really convinced me.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but the Syria/Russia angle bothers me. Amongst her many other saintly causes, Jo Cox was a known supporter of the White Helmets – the civilian rescue workers in Syria.
Many on the far-right as well as the far-left consider the White Helmets some kind of western proxy, not only trying to destabilise the Assad regime, but also aid Isis and any other Islamist groups operating in the country.
I’d recommend the podcast ‘Intrigue’ which details a lot of this.

Mangle Tangle
Mangle Tangle
3 years ago
Reply to  Roger Inkpen

“Putting this guy down as a far right nutter” – how about just nutter?

Mike Smith
Mike Smith
3 years ago
Reply to  Mangle Tangle

Except the judge basically called him a far-right nutter. It is in the article.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Roger Inkpen

She also opposed the bombing of Syria because it wasn’t Assad who was being bombed. She was actually trying to protect ISIL, who she didn’t think should be bombed if he weren’t.
This is, of course, a totally incoherent position: she wanted us to attack both sides. Either she thought there was somehow a way this would cause both sides to lose, or she wanted Assad attacked so he would lose and ISIL would win. My money’s on the second.
This doesn’t require a Russian conspiracy; it just requires her to have been callous, anti-white and rather stupid. The probability that all these were so is lent support by the fact that she went off on one, when she won her seat, about how great multiculturalism was, while Asian paedophile gangs were raping white children in her own constituency.

Last edited 3 years ago by Jon Redman
Simon Coulthard
Simon Coulthard
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

I normally hate the phrase “victim blaming” but why oh why are you justifying the murder of Jo Cox? Given his library of far right literature, it’s not unreasonable to cite Mair’s politics as motivation. Though maybe, as Michael Smith said, he’s just a nutter and his politics had nothing to do with his choice of victim here.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago

Learn to read. I am not “justifying the murder of Jo Cox”. I am questioning why the writer thinks it was uniquely bad compared to the hundreds of other political murders we have seen in recent times.
The strong inference is that it was uniquely bad because it was of someone on the extreme left by someone on the right. Murders by people on the left or whom the left supports – Hamas, ISIL, Hezbollah, the IRA – are fine and dandy. We don’t need any articles about the victims of those. But we can’t have any left wing loonies being murdered or what’s the world coming to?

Last edited 3 years ago by Jon Redman
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago

So far as the left is concerned, there are those the perpetrators that deserves every ounce of vilification that the left can summon, and indeed who presents the opportunity to vilify by association, however tenuous, their political enemies; the present article being a case in point
And then there those perpetrators about whom they are remarkably silent and whose victims need to be be quickly and quietly forgotten. I give you the Asian rape gangs and Kriss Donald

Last edited 3 years ago by Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Mike Smith
Mike Smith
3 years ago

The most chilling part of this story is this section: Mair’s guilt and motivation was never in question. In his sentencing remarks, the judge said: “There is no doubt that this murder was done for the purpose of advancing a political, racial and ideological cause namely that of violent white supremacism and exclusive nationalism most associated with Nazism and its modern forms.”
Surely in any case, there must always be some doubt?

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
3 years ago

As John Major said, time to understand a little less and punish a little more…

Nick Faulks
Nick Faulks
3 years ago
Reply to  Martin Smith

Well, I would like to understand who put him up to it, but I can understand why the authorities might prefer that to remain unknown.

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
3 years ago
Reply to  Nick Faulks

Yes, closed mind for closed-mind’s sake it seems, or a cover-up.

Last edited 3 years ago by Martin Smith
JR Stoker
JR Stoker
3 years ago
Reply to  Nick Faulks

The thrust of the article is that nobody put him up to it, he is an ill loner

Nick Faulks
Nick Faulks
3 years ago
Reply to  JR Stoker

That may be the direction in which the writer wishes to take us, but what the words say is that we shall never be permitted to learn the truth.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
3 years ago
Reply to  JR Stoker

Idiotic remark – vastly improved by further comments below

Last edited 3 years ago by Ian Barton
Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

So why was this raised then? Are your reading comprehension skills maybe not up to much?
Go on, have at it: what was being slyly hinted at by

On the Leave side, any suggestion of shared sympathies with a racist killer, however remote, was greeted with contempt and indignation, and the perpetrator was cast as a mentally-ill loner.

given that the remainder of the piece dedicates itself to proving that he was not “a mentally-ill loner”?

Mike Smith
Mike Smith
3 years ago
Reply to  Nick Faulks

I would like to know how the police knew who he was by name and why Mair wasn’t running away because he walked into a cul-de-sac.

Simon Coulthard
Simon Coulthard
3 years ago
Reply to  Martin Smith

Could Mair be punished any more without reintroducing the death penalty?

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
3 years ago
Reply to  Martin Smith

Quoting anything John Major says usually makes me think the opposite must be true. For a person to behave in this appalling way must mean that they are mentally ill, and the more we can work out what the causes and cures might be, the better.

Whether a crime writer is the best person for such a task I very much doubt; I can quite understand that the prison authorities, trying a measure of cure and rehabilitation, would certainly not want an amateur intervening in their process to get a dramatic story that might help sell a book.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Martin Smith

Well, yes, but Jo Cox was a selectively-educated opponent of selective education, an advocate of sex equality who got her seat off an all-women shortlist, a Corbyn nominator and supporter of Labour Friends of Palestine (i.e. of Hamas and Hezbollah), an opponent of bombing ISIS in Syria, and completely bought in to the wonders of multiculturalism.
It says much that views as extreme as hers are so unremarkable in the current Labour party that she can be deified as though she were a worthy and completely uncontroversial figure. The fact is that she was just as much a nutter as Corbyn. Had Mair been a Muslim who murdered a white Conservative politician, she would certainly have had nothing to say, nor any regret to express on the matter.
All political murder is reprehensible but it isn’t automatically worse when people of the left are those getting murdered. There is no natural order of political murder that says it can only happen to innocents and the right.

Simon Davies
Simon Davies
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Cox was working on an “Islamophobia” report when she was killed whilst remaining completely silent on the grooming and rape of young white working class girls by Muslim men in her constituency.
There have been a series of court cases involving perpetrators from Batley and other Kirklees constitutiences in the last few years and its difficult to believe that Cox wasn’t aware to some extent of what was going on.

David Owsley
David Owsley
3 years ago
Reply to  Simon Davies

One of which was headlines (with the ‘celebrity squares’ pictures of all ‘Asian’ men on the front page of the local rag) that week.
That more isn’t made of this is the answer to why Mair is isolated from communication. That and the coordinated (and obvious) attempt to make it about Brexit suggests it was nothing other than ‘arranged’.

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
3 years ago
Reply to  Simon Davies

Well, after working for Oxfam for 20 years, she should have been sensitised to the problem.