After the assassination of Jo Cox by a white supremacist, there was an angry insistence from progressives and the mainstream (the two were not yet the same) that the threat of the far-right be confronted. Questioning the role played by mental illness or even terming the assassin a ‘loner’ was framed as an attempt to shift the focus away from the killer’s motive. There was a mini moral panic over whether the culprit was being labelled a terrorist or not.
The Independent ran a grievance-dripping op-ed under the headline: ‘Why are we so reluctant to label white attackers as terrorists?’ The author objected to ‘humanising perpetrators of violence and terror who happen to be white’ and complained that Cox’s murderer ‘will be described as a victim of inadequate mental health care’. The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade said the coverage ‘raised questions about the political agenda of certain pro-Brexit newspapers’, citing the Sun’s description of him as ‘a mentally ill loner’.
