RedHanded - Episode 149 - Nazi Rage: The Murder of MP Jo Cox

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

In June 2016 the chaos of Brexit reached fever pitch in the UK. One week before the referendum vote was set to take place, politician Jo Cox was savagely shot and stabbed to death outside a public library in the middle of the day. According to eyewitnesses, the assailant screamed “Britain first” as he attacked the defenceless MP. The man was soon revealed to be Thomas Mair, a dedicated neo-Nazi whose decades-long rage had seemingly been sparked into violence by Brexit.  Listeners' Choice - vote here: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/vote  Merch Here  Sources: "The World After Cornavirus" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS8TxC3mJzk https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/23/thomas-mair-slow-burning-hatred-led-to-jo-cox-murder https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/dec/06/bedsit-nazi-man-killed-jo-cox-thomas-mair https://www.ft.com/mair https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/june/who-supplied-the-gun https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38051593 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mystery-how-mp-jo-coxs-10586393 https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/police-dont-know-how-thomas-mair-got-the-gun-that-killed-jo https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Impact-of-Brexit.pdf https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019/09/09/young-people-and-brexit-the-implications-for-the-far-right-and-scottish-independence/ https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/watch-labour-mp-confronts-dominic-cummings-in-parliament-over-boris-johnsons-disgraceful-language  https://www.stylist.co.uk/visible-women/jo-cox-foundation-feminism-great-get-together-anniversary/273334 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/18/world/europe/jo-cox-attack.html https://www.vox.com/2016/6/20/11963894/british-mp-jo-cox-death See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Saruti.

I'm Hannah. And welcome to Red Handed. Right, shall we address the big old award-shaped elephant in the room, or lack thereof? Yeah, I think we should. Basically, as you guys may or may not have noticed, some of you clearly have, because lots of you have already been voting, which is nice to see. But essentially, this is the third year that we've entered the British Podcast Awards, because, well, it's the third year we've been a podcast.

This year, unfortunately, we weren't even nominated for the true crime category, which is just sad, really, for us. Devastating. Like, it's so, obviously, we don't do this to win awards but you know it just makes me sad that the podcasting community has made it quite clear that they don't like what we do which is it just it just makes me feel sad the true crime podcasts that have been nominated are three of them are bbc i think they're all narrated by men i don't that about sums it up really it's it's so disappointing not to take away from the content and the work that would have gone into those but if that is the ethos that the British Podcast Awards wants to go with like they're not really there to highlight the grassroots independent

podcasts like us that's fine it's just kind of sad but you know what we just don't have and we will never have the resources that the BBC for example example, has to be able to do these things. They're sponsoring a lot of the categories, etc. The only resource we have is you guys. So if we're not going to be nominated, and from now on, we're probably not even going to apply for the true crime category. We would love it if you guys would get us back into the listeners choice because the first year you put us in the top 20. We didn't even really ask you to because we didn't think it was a possibility last year you put us in the top 10 it's amazing this year we would love to get back into the top 10 but if you could get us into the top three fuck if we could win i don't know if we could do that but if we get into the top three it would just make people take notice of

us that's the main thing i'm not even sure it will to be honest because what else can we do but it would be sweet sweet revenge um so if you could help us with that that would be fantastic you can go to the link in the episode description uh we'll post it and for the I think it's for the next month that it's running whenever I think the awards are in July sometime who knows we're not going so please sling us a vote for the listeners choice to help us feel less sad basically and i just want to say because a lot of people do ask this every single year you don't have to be british or in britain to vote you can be anywhere in the world you just need an email address that works and apparently they've changed some things up this year where you have to vote and then you'll get a verification email so be sure to click on that verification email otherwise your vote won't count so yeah let's just see what we

can do we don't ever want to sound ungrateful for all the amazing wins we've had this year because we've had so many and they're all thanks to you guys so this is just one thing we would love it if you guys could help us do even if they don't ever pay attention to us ever again after fuck it if we could get into the top three we would be the happiest people ever so it would be the best thing if we could win and then we'd never enter again just to cut off our nose to spite our face just a mic drop onto our noses and then walk away and um last year you guys might remember we did like a bonus episode as a thank you because you got us into the top 10. We're not going to go into in detail here today, but we will tell you guys, maybe none of the debate and next week's episode about all of the rewards we're going to be giving once we've solidified our reward scheme that we've got for you all.

So, yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Please, please vote. It would mean the world. And with that. Oh, and also, if you want to get your hands on some spooky spooky bitch merch that is going to be out for the next like three weeks so head on over grab

some of that and I think that's it for the announcements today yeah I think that's all I've got cool well apart from my crushing sadness oh no no no no we are sad but also eternally grateful for everything else we've got. So thank you. Please vote. And we've got a hell of a case for you guys today. So let's go. Many honourable and right honourable members will lay claim, I'm sure, to their constituencies being constituencies of two halves or numerous parochial parts. I am another in that respect. And Batleyley in Spain is very much that kind of constituency and it's a joy to represent such a diverse community. Batley in Spain is a gathering of typically independent, no-nonsense, proud

Yorkshire towns and villages. Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it Irish Catholics across the constituency or Muslims from India and Gujarat or Pakistan, principally from Kashmir. And whilst we celebrate our diversity, the thing that surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us. So what you just heard was part of a speech given by Jo Cox in June 2015, when she addressed Parliament here in the UK for the very first time, after being elected an MP for the constituency of Batley and Spen. Almost exactly one year after Jo gave this speech, a speech in which she proudly

spoke of the diversity of her hometown in West Yorkshire. She was brutally assassinated by far-right neo-Nazi terrorist Thomas Marr. On the 16th of June 2016, at 12.50pm, Jo Cox arrived at the Birstall Public Library to run a constituency meeting. That day Jo had two of her aides with her, Fazila Aswap and Sandra Major. The three women got out of the Silver Astra in which they'd arrived and walked onto the pavement outside the library. For a while before their arrival, 52-year-old Thomas Marr had been loitering outside. He was wearing a cream baseball cap, carrying a black holdall and a Tesco carrier bag, casually eating a chocolate bar. Once he spotted Joe, he moved in. He pulled

out a sawn-off.22-calibre rifle and shot Joe in the head. She fell to the ground and Ma dragged Joe by her hair into the road between two cars and began stabbing her with a dagger over and over again. Joe's aides tried hitting Ma with their bags but he pushed them away and slashed at them with the knife. Joe, who was still unbelievably alive, at this point shouted at her colleagues, get away you two, let him hurt me, don't let him hurt you. Onlookers couldn't believe what they were seeing. Remember, this is in the middle of the day, in the middle of town.

An elderly man, Bernard Kenny, also tried to save Jo, but Ma stabbed the 77-year-old in the stomach. And then he turned his attention back to Jo. He shot her twice more in the stomach. And then he turned his attention back to Jo. He shot her twice more in the head and chest. Then he picked up his knife and began furiously stabbing an already brutalised Jo. According to eyewitnesses, as he delivered the blows, he was yelling, Britain first, keep Britain independent. Britain will always come first. This is for Britain. And then he stopped, almost as abruptly as he had started the whole attack, and just slowly walked away.

Jo's aides held her, talking to her about her children and trying to keep her awake until the ambulance arrived. But there wasn't much that the doctors could do. Jo had been shot three times, once in the chest and twice in the head. The rounds had passed through her hands as she tried to defend herself. She had also been stabbed 15 times, including in the heart, lungs and stomach. One of the stab wounds had gone straight through her arm and into her chest. And at 1.48pm on the 16th of June 2016, MP Jo Cox was pronounced dead. She was just 41 years old. Her last words had been,

My pain is too much. After the attack, Ma hadn't gone very far and police swiftly apprehended him. As he was being arrested, he screamed that he was a political activist. So in two weeks time from this episode being released, it will be the fourth anniversary of Joe Cox's murder. But before we get to why this happened or who Thomas Marr is, let's start at the beginning with who Jo Cox was.

Jo described herself as a real Yorkshire lass of humble white working class roots and although she may have been new to the world of politics Jo had always been involved with policy. She had studied social and political sciences at the University of Cambridge and gone on to become head of policy and advocacy at Oxfam. And it was here at Oxfam that Jo had met her husband, Brendan Cox. Brendan and Jo went on to have two children, a boy, Cullen, and a girl, Liza. They were just three and five when Jo was murdered.

Jo's decision to leave the third sector and run for office was all about her finding a way to make real change happen. She desperately wanted to improve the opportunities afforded to the people of her home county, arguably one of the more deprived regions in the UK. Recent reports from 2019 suggest that over one million people in Yorkshire are currently living in poverty. But Jo also had a passion for international humanitarian work. She had spent much of her career fighting for the rights of Syrian refugees and campaigning for the government to do more to put a stop to Assad's bloody regime. Moving into politics would mean that she could finally stop simply advocating for change, but instead have a real mandate for change.

Her sister Kim remembers the day that Jo told her about her decision to run for MP. And she had said, quote, For our international friends, MP means Member of Parliament. I don't really know whether... Did that need explaining? I don't know. I did it anyway. No, I think it's a good point. Yeah. Member of Parliament.

I guess it's the same as like, I mean, I don't know. There's so many different countries, so many different systems. Essentially, you have a constituency, the way that counties and towns and stuff may be put together and the way the nation is sort of carved up politically speaking. Then you have MPs that are voted in by the constituents of that area. And Joe was that for an area in the north of England from West Yorkshire, a place called, well, a group of towns and villages put together into one constituency called, as we said at the start, Batley and Spen. And then those MPs go and sit in the House of Commons and sort of sling insults at each other.

A friend of mine writes for last week tonight. And obviously, John Oliver is British guy. So like, sometimes they cover like British politics. They did a lot of stuff on Brexit. My friend who writes for that show is American. And so he'll spend a lot of time watching the House of Commons versus the Senate. And he's like, the House of Commons is so much more burn based than u.s politics like they're literally just like do a really witty absolutely savage takedown and then everyone cheers that wouldn't happen in the u.s and then they sit down really hard yeah no it's true it's definitely true in like my old old job we used to just have like parliament tv running in the office when there

was like education bills it's so burny like normal people don't watch that and see it it's exactly right a lot of like borderline finger clicking going on oh big time big time so right okay that that that's british uh the british political system entirely tied up in one neat little bow for you do you remember this happening? Do you remember the day it happened? I can't. I remember it being such a huge news story and I remember how I felt when it happened. But I was actually away travelling when it happened. So I don't think I even heard about it for a couple of days. Maybe it could have been like a week or more because I don't even know where I was at this time. I wasn't even around other British people when it happened necessarily.

I think I was still working at the charity when it happened because I was definitely working there when the Brexit vote happened because the two people I worked with were enormous Brexiteers. I know we had a lot of fights in the office. But I remember ringing my mum and saying, I can't believe I live in a country where politicians are assassinated on the street. I mean, it's heartbreaking. We'll go on to talk about this later. But Jo Cox is the first female MP, sitting female MP, who's ever been killed in the UK. But she's the second MP who's ever been killed.

But the way in which it happened. So the first MP who was killed was killed in an IRA car bombing but this this is like on the street shot and stabbed to death in the middle of the day I mean yeah yeah it was a lot and honestly this story is is heartbreaking we've done a lot of very difficult cases on here and we have been through the kind of worst of it because we've talked about the actual attack now. But the number of times I got very, very unreasonably, not unreasonably, but very like uncharacteristically emotional during the research for this surprised even me.

It's a really heartbreaking case. Yeah, because you're a bit of an ice queen, you know, not much of a crier. I just don't think I process my feelings by crying. Or I think I just don't really expose myself to stuff that's going to make me cry, which is why I never watch sad films. Because I'm like, who wants to feel that way? That's awful.

Let's just not do that to ourselves. No, you just need to, you like to control your environment. I do. I think controlled is the word, but ice queen is one I've heard. I nearly fucking cried at the parent trap last night. I'm out of control. I just think this whole situation is like, because I'm an emotional wreck anyway,

but at the moment I just feel like everything is so heightened and my reactions to things are so unreasonable, honestly. It's just a lot. I thought you were going to say you cried at the parent trap because you had gone through with your ear piercing plan that you've got. Oh no, that's tonight. Those of you who took part in last night's Patreon live stream, you will know that Hannah is planning to pierce her ears with an earring and an apple three times, no less. So maybe she'll vlog it for all of us. Yeah, I might Instagram live it tonight. I might do. Depends how many margaritas I've had. That's the other thing I'm going to do

today. I'm going to go down to Big Sainsbury's and get loads of margarita ingredients because i found a blender under my bed so uh that's my friday oh well let's fucking get on with this then yeah i need to get down to sainsbury's um do you feel do you know what's really i know i'm gonna have to put some money in the jar for this but i went to big sainsbury's and i queued in the car park and did the whole thing and kept two meters away and like uh I've got a mask now so I took that with me and it really struck me how completely normal it felt to just stand in the car park for however long 10 20 minutes it really like was such a strange feeling that I was like oh I don't find this odd anymore this is this is the new normal I mean this is the thing

who can remember a time before like 9-11 when you could just take like massive fucking gallon bottle shampoos on the airplane with you I think things will just never be the same again in certain ways there's a really interesting podcast released by the FT I think it's literally called why the world will never be the same again I'll share it if people want to listen to it. It's all the ways that people are predicting that things are going to change after this. Oh my god, that sounds horrible. Who knows? Apparently, that's why we have passports. It was after the last pandemic. Really? So who knows what we'll get this time. That's so, okay, I'm going to listen to this podcast. That sounds really interesting. It is. So yeah, I mean, obviously, it's a lot of like speculation, but interesting speculation.

We're going to shit on something else now. And that something else is, well, I'm going to tell you what it is. To begin to understand the circumstances that led to the savage attack on Joe Cox, we need to revisit a topic. Some might say the topic that we all used to talk about before coronavirus brexit i never thought that we would be doing a brexit rundown on this show in for a penny in for a pound i fucking shoehorned it in shoehorned it in not in this economy with saruti bala that is what's happening now everybody welcome get on in but no it's not shoehorned in at all. It's vital to this case. Jo Cox's murder was absolutely and directly linked to the way in which the Leave campaign during the Brexit referendum was run.

And for anyone who wants to sort of rage tweet at us saying, oh, this episode was so political, it's literally about an MP, a democratically elected MP, who was assassinated for her political beliefs. Because yes, of course, Jo Cox was a fervent Remainer. And she was killed a week before the referendum vote on Brexit, a time in which the Leave campaign reached a fever pitch in this country. But we're going to go on to discuss it more. So let's get back to the Brexit rundown. If you, like many people, never really understood what the fuck Brexit was about, you're about to learn. Brexit was quite obviously global news, but I'm not really sure how much of the actual campaign, like the aggressive nationalism and racial tensions it stirred up in our nation was really known outside the UK and in Europe. We can't just go into all of the intricacies of a massive political upheaval like Brexit in

this episode. We'd be here forever and we'd just have become a subsidiary of the podcast Brexitcast who incidentally won the listener's choice last year. So what we're going to do is we're going to do one of our famous usual red-handed rundowns on immeasurably large issues in a swift 10 bullet points or less or more, who knows, ish. So Brexit was the name given to the process of the UK leaving the European Union. It was decided upon by a national referendum, which was Leave versus Remain. And in 2016, Leave won with 52% of the vote. So it's 52 to 48%.

You'll see a lot of stuff of people referring to the 48 when they're talking about Brexit and they're describing the people who voted to remain. It's also caused a lot of problems with, I mean, London obviously voted to remain. There was that whole London Stays campaign, which like nice sentiment, but completely ridiculous concept. And caused a lot of problems in Northern Ireland because Northern Ireland voted to remain. And then because they are part of the UK, they were sort of forced to leave.

Anyway, lots of problems in Scotland. Problems, problems all over. Problems galore. So many problems. But although it is probably pretty obvious what Hannah and I's opinion is on Brexit and which way we voted, we want to make it crystal clear now that people who voted Leave aren't automatically to be affiliated with like the alt-right or neo-Nazis. There's a lot of that this episode, but you can't

lump everybody together who voted for leave. Lots of people voted leave for various different reasons. It is incredibly nuanced and varied. Intergenerational poverty brought about by years of the government's austerity measures, as well as just outright ignoring the plight of the working class in this country, led to a lot of resentment towards the establishment. And as usual, as we often see in situations like this, these very valid grievances that people had were hijacked by nationalists and bigots to channel this rage into a political decision that, at least in our opinion,

will likely not benefit those people at all. Let's be clear, like, the people who were pushing for this, I do believe some of the politicians were, of course, racially, ideologically motivated. But a lot of this is also just about fucking corruption. If we can leave the EU, we can deregulate a lot of things. We don't have to be beholden to answering to anybody else and we can just do whatever the fuck we want. That's what a lot of politicians here want. It's not to benefit, at least again, in our opinion, the ordinary everyday folk of this country. It's just gonna benefit the ultra rich if regulation is slashed all over the place, if we become some sort of

fucking rogue cowboy state. But what is important to know is that the unofficial champion of the Leave campaign was a man named Nigel Farage. I also love with Nigel Farage. Is it Nigel Farage or is it Nigel Farage? Is he just like that show? Did you used to watch it? Keeping up with the... What was that show called? With that bouquet bucket woman?

Fuck. Oh, Keeping Up Appearances. Keeping Up Appearances. I feel like he's Nigel Farage. I. I feel like he's Nigel Farage. I don't feel like he's Nigel Farage. So fuck that guy. Wait, his wife's French, isn't she? German, I think.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, and his kids have got dual nationality. Of course, because this is what I mean. I feel like it's about greed. But the thing is, if you go out onto the battleground states and you're saying, hey, I'm just really greedy and i want to slash regulation so we can do a load of corrupt shit vote for leave it's not really going to play well with people because they don't get what you're talking about and it probably sounds like it's not a good thing but if you use a different thing

that's going to really emotionally rile people up then hey you're on to a winner and those things are things like the nhs and immigration And also the weird thing they did here, which is coupling the two of them together, even though the fact is that our NHS is built on the backs of immigrants to this day. But anyway, that's a whole nother rant for a whole nother day. But basically, this guy, Nigel Farage, he was at the time the head of a political party in the UK called UKIP, which stood for the UK

Independence Party. And they were the only party, main party, outwardly backing leave at the time. And populist Farage, because fine, we'll stick with it, styled himself very much as an anti-establishment, pint-swigging man of the people. It was, of course, very much a cult of personality. And what cannot be ignored is is although these people may have been motivated for different reasons the Leave campaign was definitely one based on fear, xenophobia, racism, isolationism and lies. All underpinned as we said by massive corruption and greed. Again this isn't blaming people who voted Leave because I feel like there are different reasons people did it. This is what we think the political parties were motivated by. So the campaign brought out all of the usual suspects. It brought out all the closet racists and emboldened

the not so closeted ones. And also, of course, many complex societal and economic issues were simply suffocated under the usual smokescreen of immigration and barely veiled racism. Who can forget the UKIP billboard that went up, depicting a long line of dark-skinned refugees queuing up to get into Britain, with the words, in all caps, in bright red, BREAKING POINT sprawled across it. I mean, divisive isn't even really the word. Racist probably is. It's pretty stomach-churning stuff. And I think what really sort of made this stand out is that this kind of thing really broke with the norm of what we'd seen in politics here in the UK for quite some time. And the British public, it really felt like they were being told by the Leave

campaign that we were being oppressed by Brussels,sels immigration was destroying our nation and that we needed to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of high food standards access to the world's largest market free trade with our european neighbors free movement between the nations and most of all that disgusting red passport the absolute fucking height of subjugation fucking hell i, now. I remember so clearly, because this is when I was working at the charity and like my boss was just, you know, when you're like 17 and you just want to say the opposite of what everyone else is saying. He never, ever grew out of that. And he was, you know, a 55 year old man.

And he decided that he was going to vote leave. And I was like, but why? Like, what's your argument? He was like, but why? Like, what's what's your argument? He was like, well, the EU isn't democratic and people died for democracy. I was like, people died for colonialism. That isn't a fucking argument. Try again. I mean, how the EU isn't democratic is a big question, a big question mark around that. But again, there was almost no reasoning with people because, like we said, these people managed to identify and isolate the key talking points that were going to spark the most emotion in people and were going to force them to go the way that they wanted for the

political win they wanted. Suddenly, to many who were unhappy, struggling to find work, feeling marginalised and ignored, they were being told it was because of the EU and we needed to make Britain great again. I also pointed that one out and I was like, has anyone brought up the fact that the Conservative Party's slogan is make Britain great again and that's exactly what Trump's thing was? I remember bringing that up in the office and they'd be like, oh, well, it's not the same. You know, it doesn't matter.

It's not the same. The Tories, their decision making is poor. Boris is, in my opinion, and this is just my opinion, quite an empty man in that I feel like he's just willing to go along with whatever he thinks is going to play well to the base and be propped up by his party. Did you see they've had to embarrassingly do a U-turn on the migrant NHS surcharge? I saw that yesterday and I laughed for about three minutes. What poetic justice. I mean, it truly is. For those of you who don't know what we're talking about, again, let's do a one sentence rundown on that. The NHS in this country is free to use for all British citizens and people of settled status here. A lot of our

NHS staff, so doctors, nurses, care workers, etc, are immigrant workers. For some reason, the government has been charging people who work in the NHS who are immigrants, I believe it's not doctors and nurses, but I believe it's like care workers and stuff, to use the NHS that they work for. It's shocking, it's embarrassing, it always has been, but in the face of this fucking pandemic, where the majority of NHS workers who have died are BAME slash straight out immigrants, it's a fucking disgrace. And thankfully, the Tories have finally backed down on their bizarre crusade. I felt like, why is this the hill you want to die on? This is such a bizarre thing.

Just let it go. Well, yeah, well, they've had to now. So Make Britain Great Again wasn't about dealing with the rampant inequality in our nation. It was all because of those damn immigrants. So Make Britain Great Again wasn't about dealing with the rampant inequality in our nation. It was all because of those damn immigrants. And Paul Mazaros, an anti-fascist activist in Bradford, West Yorkshire, summed it up perfectly with an interview with the people who will listen to simplistic explanations, whether it's from some mad imam or the right. And simplistic explanations were everywhere during Brexit. It wasn't just Farage and the fringe parties. Johnson, our current COVID-19 patient handshaking prime minister, shrugging off Barack Obama's

support for the Remain campaign by calling him the part Kenyan US president, as if that makes any difference to anything. The UK was ablaze with racial tension. And this isn't just our opinion. The police reported a five-fold increase in reports of hate crime in the five days following the announcement of the Brexit vote. Many examples of racist incidents were also recorded, including threatening phone calls made to Black and Asian-owned businesses, as well as Polish families receiving flyers through their letterboxes reading, Leave the EU, no more Polish vermin. An in-depth study was also conducted by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue on the impact of Brexit on the growth of the far-right in the UK.

And it found that the UK far-right groups gained a significant number of followers from the murder of Joe Cox MP and the Brexit campaign. Britain First's Twitter followership increased by over 700 in the five days following Joe Cox's murder. The online reach of Britain's four most prominent far-right groups also grew massively during the Brexit campaign. For example, British Unity increased its visibility on Twitter by almost 12,000% in just one month.

The English Defence League, the BNP, or the British National Party, and Britain First were also all talked about in a much more positive way online following both the murder of Joe Cox and the EU referendum result. Now, don't get me wrong, while we're here sort of shitting on overly simplistic ideas, I'm not here to peddle you guys another overly simplistic idea. Because I do get that while levels of support online are an important indicator to understand the current state of far-right groups, I do totally accept that the extent to which increased online support and visibility for far-right groups translating into actual support offline is not totally clear or necessarily even directly comparable, but they are interesting statistics that can't be ignored. And the thing is, Brexit and the referendum campaign definitely had an impact, probably because the likes of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, the former head of the

EDL or English Defence League, got a lot of time in the spotlight. But lurking in the shadows, simmering with years of built-up rage, was Thomas Marr. Thomas Marr didn't need the Leave campaign to scaremonger him into hating immigrants. He was an OG race hater. Marr didn't jump on the bigot bandwagon after Brexit popped up. He was driving the fucking thing, and he had been for decades. Thomas Marr was born in Kilmarnock in Scotland in 1963.

His mum Mary was just 17 when she had him. They were a normal, working-class family from the 60s. His dad worked in a factory and his mum stayed at home. Thomas was a normal child, nothing out of the ordinary. The only thing that we could find to make him even slightly different at this age was that he suffered from epilepsy throughout his childhood. Three years after Thomas was born, his mum had another baby, Scott, but shortly after, Thomas's parents separated. In 1970, Mary left Scotland and took her boys to Batley in West Yorkshire. After this, the children really

didn't see that much of their dad. Mary moved on from her first husband and began a relationship with a man called Reginald St Louis. He was originally from Granada in the Caribbean. And in 1973, Mary and Reginald had a son, Dwayne. Dwayne would later go on to describe his father as, quote, a big guy, 6'2", plenty of muscles. And he also noted that, quote, even though Yorkshire was racist at the time, they didn't mess. I'm not sure exactly what happened after Duane was born, but soon after his arrival, Thomas and his brother Scott left their mum and went to live with their maternal grandparents in the nearby Fieldhead estate.

In 1979, Mary and Reginald got married and moved into a house just a few minutes walk from where the now teenage Ma and his grandparents were living. Right, so let's unpack some of this. There is no doubt that Ma, growing up at that time in that area, was growing up in an environment of racial prejudice. As Duane pointed out, being not white in the UK during this time wouldn't exactly have been like super chill. The National Front were stirring up all sorts of rage with their constant marches demanding the repatriation of non-white immigrants. And also, of course, you can forget good old Margaret Thatcher, who frequently expressed concerns

that Britain would be, quote, swamped by people with a different culture. And as well as all of this, Marr possibly also had his own personal issues. I don't think that it takes a psychological genius to draw a potential link between Marr's future race hate and his mother's relationship with Reginald. He may have felt that Mary abandoned his father to be with a black man, even though she didn't leave his father for Reginald. It was much later. He may have also felt rage, potentially, that Dwayne, his mixed-race half-brother, got to have a happy family life with two parents who stayed together, something that he hadn't had. But if Thomas had been feeling these things and identifying with groups like the National Front from all the way back then, he was very good at keeping it a secret from everyone,

including his family. Duane still says that he saw no sign of racism or extremism from his half brother. And again, any resentment or anger he harboured towards his mother, he hid well. Ma was known to be loving and seemingly devoted to Mary. In July 1996, when Thomas was 33, his grandmother passed away and he was left all alone in the house. And in a bit of an Ed Gein move, Ma didn't change anything in the house after his grandma died. It all stayed pink and we've discussed this word before. I don't know how to say it.

Chintzy. You know, I remember you and Esther explaining it to me and I was like okay fine I understand what that concept is but you know when you learn a new word and then you hear it everywhere I have never heard that word again I'm sure you're the only person that uses it okay so I think basically chintzy is like a lot of kind of crushed velvet, a lot of like tassels. Think like old lady decor. That's basically the vibe of Thomas Marr's house, even after granny's gone. Let us know if you have ever heard that word before.

So he kept it that word and he also kept it absolutely spotless. Not that anyone would have known. He didn't seem to have any friends, visitors to the house or any sort of social pursuits. According to his mother Mary, Thomas Marr was severely depressed. But despite his lack of personal connections, Marr was regarded by most as the perfect neighbour. Everyone on the estate described him as a quiet loner who kept to himself, but they all thought he was always polite, even kind of helpful.

Ma used to help the little old ladies on the estate with their shopping and even their gardening. He had never discussed his controversial politics with anyone in the area and seems never to have even said anything that raised a neighbourly eyebrow. Ma never really had a normal job. You'll often see him listed as a gardener,

but it seems like that work was mainly voluntary. Honestly, it's the weirdest thing. Guys, if you're near a laptop, just search, start to type in the name Thomas Ma. And it comes up, you know when it's like the drop-down on Google Chrome, and it's like Thomas Ma, British gardener. I'm like, he fucking murdered an MP. Why is he being described as a gardener?

There is a lot of stuff about the way this was portrayed in the press, which is just like misdirection big time, I think. I specifically remember none of the headlines in the sort of more right-wing newspapers mentioned the Britain First thing that he said before he killed her. I remember really, really clearly that not being reported. The implications of this killing and the way the right-wing media reacted to it, it's what you expect it to be.

Horrifically, following Jo Cox's murder, people like Nigel Farage said that it was slowing down the momentum of the Leave campaign. Several right-wing newspapers even came out and floated the idea that it was a false flag operation, that somebody had murdered Joe Cox to tarnish the Leave campaign. In 2010, Ma was doing a bit of volunteering at a country park when he spoke to a reporter from a local paper. The interview obviously resurfaced after the attack, because he told this reporter that he'd previously received mental health treatment saying, quote,

many people who suffer from mental illness are socially isolated and disconnected from society. Feelings of worthlessness are also common and mainly caused by a long-term unemployment. And this quote does sound sort of reflective and informed but also quite detached yeah he'd clearly been struggling with his mental health for a long time and he seemed to understand the impact it was having on his life but I can't really shake the feeling that it's like he's taken this quote directly out of a clinical description of depression it's like he's reading a textbook and it's like someone's saying it to him the way he phrased it is like he's just heard it said and he's just like repeated it like a parrot definitely it's like he identifies saying it to him. The way he phrased it is like he's just heard it said and he's just like repeated it like a parrot.

Definitely. It's like he identifies with the fact that he's going through it because he says he's received that mental health treatment. But yeah, it's exactly it. He sounds like he's reading aloud a textbook. So ultimately, from the outside, it appears that Thomas Marr lived an unremarkable life of social isolation for more than 40 years. But underneath the veneer

of boring loner as his neighbours thought of him, Ma was quite the neo-Nazi. Following his arrest, the police quickly discovered that he had been a regular at the local library, the very same local library in front of which he had stabbed Joe Cox to death. The thing is, Thomas Marr didn't have his own computer, so he had been going to the library not to borrow books, but it's where he'd been doing all of his Googling. He had spent his time on these public computers searching for more and more extremist far-right material. Guns, the Ku Klux Klan, the Waffen-SS, serial killers, the BNP, public shootings, Ian Gow, who, as we mentioned earlier in the show,

was the last MP in the UK to ever have been murdered. And, of course, Marr spent hours and hours searching for information on MP Joe Cox. I think this library might need to work on their firewalls. I know. I really think that they they dropped the ball there. I mean, it's a lot because in the days before the shooting, he had even typed in a very specific question. Is a 22 round deadly enough to kill with one shot to a human head?

The librarian remembered Thomas Marr. She told the police that he was a strange man and he'd come in and barely look at her. He'd have his head down and quietly mutter a single word, computer. When the police raided his home after the attack, amongst the old lady decorations and the fluffy carpet, they found a literal library of race hate. Marr was a meticulous man. He liked order. That much was clear from his impeccably clean house to his neatly arranged books. And of course, the perfectly dusted statue of a giant golden Third Reich eagle with a swastika on it that sat atop his bookcase. He was hip hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Cone.

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Start your free trial today. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying

and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. I found this morning, I'm not going to say, I found some Nazi memorabilia under my bed. You know the like throw that I have on my bed that's got like sequins and stuff on it? Yeah. It's got a swastika on it.

I found it yesterday. But which way round is the swastika? It's the Hindu one. It's okay. There you go. There, it's fine. Those Nazis, they're just fucking running around culturally appropriating all those swastikas from the East. Leave them alone.

That's what I say. I'm not here to be like, let's take back the swastika. They can have it but I remember Zara released a bag quite a few years ago that had like the sort of original swastika on it and then they had to like re-recall it and I was like I don't even understand why you even tried to do that why you can't defend that there's so many other symbols yeah a cat fucking anything that's not a swastika oh man that's a lot but when I do go back to India there are a lot of swastika not swastikas because I don't think that the one that's turned the other way around is maybe still called a swastika I don't know but like especially when women get their henna done and stuff there

will always because it's like a sign of like prosperity or something. And I'm like, that wouldn't play well. I was just gonna say, bit awks. So this swastika eagle book face, book face, book case was overflowing with books. And these weren't just any old books. Marr hadn't cut any race hate corners with his library curation. Many of the books were rare out of print publications and specialist books that would have been hard to find and expensive to buy. And we had a peruse of some of these books. There was a book by Guido von List called The Secret of the Runes, which is all about, quote, uncovering a complete cosmology and esoteric understanding of the primeval Teutonic slash Aryan peoples. When we did the Nazi episode for Valentine's Day, I swear to God, all of the white nationalist,

white supremacist websites are full of that absolutely nonsensical bullshit. Like that sentence barely makes sense. I can't remember like the favorite ones, but there was something like esoteric Hitlerism and stuff like that. They're just fucking mad for it. Nazis are fucking mad for some weird, roony, occult shit. It's because they want to sound smart. That's literally it. They want to just confuse people with their bullshit.

So then they're like, oh, you know what? Actually, racism's great. They're just such fucking dorks. Dorks. And I actually think the secret of the runes I can't I think I've come across it before like I think it's a really like standard text because they're all obsessed with like vikings and ancient norse shit and nazis just love the occult anyway and there was another book in this library called SS race theory Selection. I did try to see if you could find these books and you don't seem to be able to buy this one on like the first couple of pages of

Google. It's listed on Amazon, but you can't buy it on there. I saw it in like the Google search results on Amazon. I clicked on it. But when it takes you through to Amazon, it just kept saying like item not found. And instead of it just being like a blank page then show me a picture of like a big black labrador and it was like book not found this is Nigel why not check out the dogs of Amazon I was like what the fuck's going on I've never seen that before I hate that shit that's horrible so weird I was like stop fucking using Nigel the dog to like cover up all this weird shit. Like stop listing this book. Or don't.

Like, I don't know, whatever you want to do. But what I did find was like a PDF preview of the book. It's weird. It's fucking weird. There's a lot of like, I don't even know. It's a lot. No, thank you. No, thanks.

If you want to find it, it's out there. Go nuts. lot no thank you no thanks um if you want to find it it's out there go nuts and another book that ma had because why stop when we can just go through his entire literary collection was belt buckles and brocades of the third reich this is a real book i looked it up and i actually found this one on amazon but it will set you back a fucking cool $140 for a copy. And Hugo Boss probably get a fucking cut of that. I'm also like, how does he fucking afford it? He doesn't have a job. Like, how is he buying all of these like incredibly expensive books?

That's what I thought. It's very strange. He must just be like saving up his benefit. It must be. And like not eating. Yeah. I mean, there was just lots of like tinned food in the house. Like I don't think he was like particularly bothered about that. But this book that's going to cost you $140, as the title suggests, Belt, Buckles and Brocades of the Third Reich.

It's literally about Nazi belt buckles and brocades. I had to Google what brocades were, was, is, was, were. I was like, what does that mean? I still don't think I really understand but of this book what I do have to say is that because I could find it on Amazon I really enjoyed the Amazon reviews it's got a solid 4.5 out of 5 I have to say and somebody by the username pocket watch crazy gave it five stars and said quote this is a great book and has a good detail for someone who liked to collect belt buckles is it is it really is that why you were reading it is that why i feel like if you're just really

into belt buckles and brocades do you spend 140 pounds on one that's specifically about nazis i feel like you spend 140 pounds or 140 dollars on a book about belt buckles for nazis because you fucking love nazis right i i would be leaning towards that direction but also maybe people feel incredibly strongly about belt buckles and brocades like maybe it was the the missing hole in their belt buckle collection and they were like i've done done everything else. I've been all over the world. I just need to fully understand the Nazi belt buckle and then I will be complete. Maybe. Unlikely, but possibly.

Possibly. Possibly. I also really love the idea of just using the term pocket watch crazy, not as like to describe somebody who's just into pocket watches, but just generally. He's fucking pocket watch crazy. It's so weird mars library also of course included the obligatory holocaust revisionist texts but interestingly we thought he also owned denying the holocaust the growing assault on truth and memory which of course is

a pretty famous book in which historian deborah lipstadt pulls apart the bullshit nonsense of such thinking, such thinking being Holocaust denial, obviously. Which is quite interesting that he's reading both of them, isn't it? Yeah. I feel like a lot of people who are very fundamentalist in their thinking aren't too open to reading stuff from the other side. Yeah, to getting both sides of the story. I mean, maybe he just bought it to put it on the bookshelf. Maybe. And it is also as famous as it is because the man that Deborah talks about in that book and accuses of being a Holocaust denier, Holocaust revisionist, sued her, tried to sue her for libel because of the book, unsuccessfully. But maybe that's why. I don't know.

Interesting. OK. Another book that Ma had a well-thumbed copy of was The Turner Diaries by William Luther Pierce. And if you don't know what this book is, well done, good for you. It's an incredibly notorious far-right dystopian novel from the 70s, but unlike other dystopian stories that are full of the human spirit to survive and fight challenges, this one's just full of race hate. Absolutely loads of it. He's fucking mad for it. And this book, unlike the others, like fucking belt buckles of Nazis or whatever, you can find The Turner Diaries pretty easily. But seriously, like, I wasn't

going to read it. We're never going to cut corners on the show, but I'm not going to read The Turner Diaries. That's just something that's not going to happen. But what I did try to do, I did try to find like a pricey or like a summary of it, like a fucking Sparknotes guide to the Turner Diaries or something. I didn't find one. And now I feel like my Google search history just makes me look like the laziest white supremacist in the world. It's not out there that I could find. But I did find some fun quotes that we can

all recoil at um so here's one quote there are many thousands of hanging female corpses all wearing identical placards around their neck they were the white women who were married to or living with blacks with jews or with other non-white males so as you can see there is very clearly that element of white people who intermingle with non-whites being as bad as the people of color that these white supremacists hate and the essence of this quote given his mother mary's second marriage i feel like at least in my opinion strengthens that idea that we floated about Mar's feelings of rage towards her. And also that the murder of Joe Cox, whilst it was, of course, politically motivated, was it also in some way a surrogate killing of his mother? Because police also found that in the days leading up to the shooting, Mar had spent quite a lot of time at the library on the computers

reading about a killer, Futoshi Matsunaga, a particularly notorious case of matricide that happened in Japan. Matricide obviously being when you kill your mum. And after shooting Joe Cox that day, Ma actually reloaded his gun and quietly walked away. I wonder, did he have another target in mind? His mum. Maybe it was the librarian.

I don't think he ever spoke to anyone else. At Mar's house, the police also found a dossier that he had compiled on Jo Cox, as well as her schedule of local public meetings taped to his bedroom wall. They also discovered fanboy press cuttings of his favourite race-hate wankers, Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik and London bomber David Copeland.

I feel like Anders Breivik is pretty well known. If you want a deep dive, go and check out 22 July on Netflix. Anders killed 77 people, mostly children, at a Workers' Youth League summer camp. We'd like to have a look at Breivik in an entire episode later on, so we'll probably leave him for now. But an interesting comparison to make is that just like Ma, Breivik went after a left-wing political youth organisation. His victims were mainly white. Once again, it's that thinking, it's the white lefty enablers who really need to be punished for what he deemed cultural suicide. David Copeland, for those of you who don't know,

was another far-right terrorist, and he seems to have been Ma's main source of inspiration. In April 1999, over the course of two weeks, Copeland detonated three nail bombs around London. Given the locations he chose, he was clearly targeting black people, Asian people and gay people. Is he the one that nail bombed the Admiral Duncan on Old Compton Street? Yeah.

Yeah. That was the last bomb that he detonated. He literally went in that order, black, Asian, gay. And his final one was bombing a gay pub in Soho called the Admiral Duncan, yeah. And by the time he was caught, he had killed three people, but more than 140 people were injured. Some even lost their limbs. And I think it's interesting between Breivik and Ma, that idea of not necessarily going after the people that they say that they despise, but going after the people that they see as their enablers, allowing them to take over society. But really, these guys, what you need to know is that they all just fucking love each other in one big fucking racist circle jerk. David Copeland loved

William Luther Pierce, the guy who wrote the Turner Diaries, as did Timothy McVeigh, the man who carried out the Oklahoma City bombings. Then Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old Australian who killed 49 people in the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand last year, were also apparently in contact, which is particularly troubling as it is interesting. Then, of course, who can forget the bowl-cut dickhead Dylan Roof from Charleston, who is also referenced in the manifesto of the Christchurch shoot-up and they all just love a manifesto don't they so they're all just like self-referencing each other in these it's just a big it's just a big like gross circle jerk that's the only thing I can think I honestly can't imagine thinking I

was important enough to write a manifesto on anything I literally was thinking just then I was like what would it take for me to write a manifesto? And I cannot think of a single situation in which I would be like, I, Hannah Maguire, have the key. Maybe just a rapid decline into the world of white supremacy. Then that manifesto just writes itself, my friend. Oh, God. Well, fingers crossed I don't completely lose it in that respect. But I mean, no promises. I'm pretty close to the edge at the moment. No, we'll see what happens.

Not of being racist, of just, you know, clinging onto my sanity. So basically what we're seeing here is what we've discussed before on the show. It's that rise of the leaderless terrorist. And it's that idea that terrorism these days is rarely sort of seen or carried out by groups of individuals under the guidance or control of one singular leader. People like Ma et al that we've discussed, dangerous, angry, disconnected individuals simply need to be radicalized, either via the internet or the news or magazines, propaganda that they're consuming from somewhere. And they just need to be inspired by fanatics to take action. Of course, following such acts of terrorism, like the ones that we've

mentioned, and of course, also the murder of Joe Cox, organizations like the EDL, Britain First, and the BNP, and whatever it may be in the respective countries, swiftly come forward to say that it had nothing to do with them. They didn't order these men to kill. They had no responsibility for it. I mean, yes, I'm sure your fevered race-baiting speeches and vitriolic screamings about the dangers of immigration had nothing at all to do with what these men did. It's like when religions are like, nope, not with us. Yeah, it's this lack of wanting to take ownership or responsibility for the power of your words and the impact that other people, they don't have on other people. Yeah. What do you mean? I've only spent five years trying to radicalise people. What do you mean I'm responsible for radicalisation? But that's the genius of it, isn't it? This whole leaderless

terrorism. Now you can continue on to be free and go on and radicalise more people because they can't tie you specifically to this. And of course, predictably, all of the major right-wing players came out and said that the murder of Joe Cox wasn't to do with them. Even though Maher apparently yelled, Britain first, this is for Britain, as he stabbed Joe Cox to death. I'm sure it had absolutely nothing to do with you, Britain first. They took zero responsibility for their words or their policies. They just wanted everyone to know that Ma wasn't a member of their organisation

and that he had never come to a meeting. Ma was a loner, and of course he wasn't going to meetings. He wasn't someone like Tommy Robinson. Ma was much more at home on the internet. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, ten days after David Copeland's first trial hearing way back in 1999, Ma had joined the US organization the National Alliance. And he began ordering all sorts of fun terrorist shit through them, like manuals explaining how to

build bombs and how to assemble homemade pistols. This discovery led to a lot of misreporting that the gun Ma had used was homemade. I definitely remember reading that. But it wasn't. It was a sawn-off.22 rifle, like we said at the top of the show. And it seems that it was stolen from its legal owner out of the boot of a car in August 2015. But just who stole it and how Ma got his hands on it is still kind of a mystery. And on top of his associations with US extremists, Ma was also subscribed to a right-wing magazine called SA Patriot from South Africa. And Ma had been writing to them from as far back as February 1988,

saying things like, quote, Despite everything, I still have faith that the white race will prevail, both in Britain and in South Africa. But I fear that it's going to be a very long and very bloody struggle. That's what these men want. They want it to be a long and bloody struggle. There's no end game, really, for them. Because do you really think, as somebody with all the challenges you have

feeling marginalized feeling disconnected feeling socially isolated do you really think if you just kill or get rid of all of the black and brown people all of the immigrants everybody that somehow you're going to be king of the world of course you're fucking not like this idea is they just want the struggle they know that there's no end to this oh yeah they just want to be a fucking pretend war hero in their like hatred battles that's why they're so obsessed with vikings oh of course so this wasn't just that something he had been doing in like the 80s and then he was kind of over it because a decade later in 1997 he was still going strong, and he was writing again to the SA Patriot, a few years after Nelson Mandela had come to power, saying, quote,

I was glad you strongly condemned collaborators in the white South African population. In my opinion, the greatest enemy of the old apartheid system was not the ANC and the black masses, but white liberals and traitors. So the ANC was obviously Nelson Mandela's party. Again you see Ma's hardline Nazi thinking. You don't fight the blacks or the Muslims or the Jews. You fight the system that enables them and by fight the system he meant you kill the politicians that you disagree with. So what's important to note here as we've sort of mentioned is that this thinking is not exclusive to Ma and as Breiv, like we said with his manifesto, thought very similarly. And it was also, in fact,

a keystone in the ideology of William Luther Pierce. Basically, their whole notion is that white supremacists can never come to power in a democratic system. And although we can speculate, we'll never really know what led Maher to go from quietly raging in his bedroom to actually committing a murder. He didn't say a word during the hours and hours of police interviews following his arrest. But two days after the murder, when he appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court, where suspects in terrorism cases are taken, when he was asked to state his name, instead he just said, Death to traitors freedom for britain that's like stephen griffiths didn't he say something stupid when he was in the standards like i am the knight

or something like that it wasn't that but it was something along those lines yeah it's just it's like i know i'm fucked in his case i literally fucking shot a bunch of people with my crossbow or whatever he did and this guy's like i I stabbed an MP to death in the street. I'm just going to go out with all the drama in the world. Like, fuck off. He's trying to score himself a slot in someone else's manifesto. That's what he's trying to do. Yes, yes.

No, you're totally right. This is now all about his martyrdom. And I'm going down fighting. After this revelation, he decided to give everyone the silent treatment. He didn't take the stand at his trial at the Old Bailey. He refused to even enter a plea. But the evidence was overwhelming. A psychiatrist found him to be sane,

and after an eight-day trial, the jury unanimously found him guilty and he was sentenced to a whole-of-life order. The judge concluded that Ma had killed Joe Cox to seek to advance the cause of white supremacism, saying, quote, You are no patriot. By your action, you have betrayed the quintessence of our country, its adherence to parliamentary democracy. And so with that, just like he'd lived much of his adult life, Thomas Ma disappeared silently into prison. So given all of this, we don't know exactly what catalyzed Ma's attack on Joe Cox. As we've shown, he'd been communicating with racist groups from around the

world for decades. And as sad as it is to say, there had been plenty of opportunities for violence before. For example, the leader of the 7-7 bombers was a local man from Dewsbury, not far from where Ma lived. In 2010, a bus driver and BNP member from Batley had been caught making a load of nail bombs in his bedroom. Then, of course, as we discussed in the Charlene Downs case that we did, there were the cases of sexual grooming by Asian men of white girls dominating the headlines in the mid-2010s. But through all of this, Ma didn't take up arms, so to speak. But there was something in the Brexit campaign and something about Joe Cox that had triggered him. Perhaps, like many before him, he had hoped to spark a racial war

and just felt that the climate of Brexit Britain was the best shot he was going to have. His proclamations of being a political activist when he was arrested do seem to suggest that maybe he did have such a grand plan. But I don't think, again, that we can ignore the more than likely suppressed rage he had towards his mother coming into the equation too. Whatever it was, Ma's actions cannot be neatly separated from the racist ideologies, aggressive campaigning and rhetoric of the many right-wing organisations and political parties out there. After Joe Cox's murder, the other main political parties,

the Conservatives, the Lib Dems and even UKIP, all agreed not to run a candidate against the Labour Party in the by-election to fill Joe's seat. But the BNP and Liberty GB both used Joe's murder as an opportunity to try and make political gains and use the tragedy to divide a shocked constituency further. So they hit the streets and went hard with the message of ethnocide. But I'm glad to say that despite all of their hard work, between them they barely got 800 votes. And Joe Cox's Labour Party colleague, Tracey Brubbin, won the seat with over 17,500 votes.

I wish we could say that things have changed since Joe's murder, but if anything, it sadly seems that politics have become even more ugly since. And let's not forget the way in which some politicians even try to use Joe Cox's murder for their political agendas. Many of you may remember Boris Johnson saying, to honour Joe Cox's memory, let's get Brexit done. I mean, if that's not vomit-inducing enough for you, how about those politicians who totally ignored Joe's murder

because it was inconvenient to their cause? Like, for example, Nigel Farage, who said in his victory speech after Leave won, quote, and we did it without a single bullet being fired. Firstly, leave alone how bizarre a statement that is anyway Like, as if he's saying another option to the vote would have been violence. It completely ignores what happened a week before the referendum took place. It's just completely despicable. But fuck all of those people, let's end with Jo. As Jo Cox's funeral procession drove through the streets of Batley in the summer of 2016, thousands of local people turned up to mourn,

to which her son asked her husband Brendan, I didn't know so many people loved mummy. There is also a square in Brussels named after Jo Cox. She lived there for six years. She loved the city and strongly believed in a united European Union. Back home in the UK, a coat of arms and a plaque designed by her children was placed on the walls of the House of Commons in memory of Jo, and inspired by a line from that very first speech that she gave in there.

Quote, We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us. The plaque reads, More in common. And finally, It's all well and good for us to tell you how other people viewed Jo, but we thought we would leave you to remember Jo Cox as the woman she was, in her own words, using her Twitter bio. Mum, proud Yorkshire lass, Labour MP for Batley and Spen, boat dweller, mountain climber, former aid worker. I feel like I need a little cry now.

Yeah, me too. I feel like I need quite a big cry. Yeah, it's just so senseless, the entire thing. The only thing I can say is that her legacy does live on. There is the Jo Cox Foundation that is called More in Common. I don't know what to say. I just feel like, especially in this climate, really recently as well, like Anna Salbery, MP, was getting loads and loads of death threats.

Yvette Cooper was getting death threats. Like, the fear is real of being a woman in politics, I think. And this is just such a sad story of what can happen because of someone like Thomas Mark. So there you are. There you have it. There you go. How many other things can I say?

Thank you very much for listening. Please sling us a vote in the British Podcast Awards listeners choice. That would be, I mean, arguably the most important thing you could do today. It takes two seconds. So please head on over and let's stick it to him let's fucking stick it to the man without any race hate uh yeah fuck the system let's fuck the system but do it with your votes please uh we are a democracy if you love democracy you should vote for us that's what i'm gonna say i'm taking a hard line on this. That is the slogan we are going for.

So yes, thank you guys so much. As ever, like we said, the merch is out on redhandedshop.com for the next three weeks. I think until the 12th of June, we're going to keep the merch up. You can get your hands on the Get In The Bin merch as well as the Spooky Bitch merch.

Remember that 10% of all proceeds are going to be going to Solace Women's Aid to help them support women who are going through some horrific domestic abuse during lockdown. Other than that, you can also come support us on Patreon. Loads of you have been doing it. It's just super exciting. We've got some great content planned for you guys this month, next month. What month is this?

I don't know. Whatever. Something. Including an interview with the man who was the defense lawyer for jodie arias i think that's how you say her name that's what i'm gonna say i haven't watched a documentary yet about her but i'm gonna go with it um so if you would like to get your hands on all that kind of fun content as well as under the duvet immediately after the show to cheer everybody up head on over and here are some lovely people who have done so that we're going to thank now fuck right immediately confused by the first one uh lara lahua demi farrar alana falconer

christine white philippa bailey tanya smith katie inglis louise prior erin alston l fox Alston, Elle Fox, Charlotte Korn, Carolyn Ellis, Joanna Pendergast, Jessica, AJ Vieira, Hayley Littlewood, Lucy McCarthy, Dene, yep, Issy, Georgia, Leila Sawaradi, Alison, I'm terrible. I'm a terrible brown person. I don't even know if you're brown. I feel like maybe. I can't tell. Alison Biggs. Kate Kua. Carly Sarah Eccles Hall.

Eccles Hall? Yep. Lauren O'Loughlin. Lou Whitley. Mauve. Mauve? Yeah. Corrigan.

Maeve Corrigan. Amy Lilly. Kat Spotswood. That's cute. It's like a character from fucking Sullivan family or whatever it was. Okay, I'll tag. Sylvanian family. Sullivan family.

Sylvanian family. Hannah Curtis. Catherine Hall. Catherine Lyons. Shelby Clipp. Laura V. Catherine Dixon. Kelly Soule.

Amy Butterworth. Alexis Cornelius, Savannah. My first ever pretend boyfriend left me for a girl called Zoe Butterworth. I hope you're not related. I don't know why I said that, but it's too late now. Right. Savannah, Elizabeth Rakowski, Alyssa Prince, Bethany P. Oliver. It's fine. I'm much more successful than him now. Sydney Suleot, Clara Dahl, Nia Williams, Erin, Emily, Anne Vance, Judith Crother, Crother possibly, Kitty Heppel, Daisy Morrison, Soraya Esmail, Shane Kelly, Catherine Turner, Matthew Stephen Cam, Jackie Sanger, Maggie Victoria Spears, Daniel, Ian Mearns, Emily Payne, Dania, Dania Olsen, Jana, Jana, I don't know, Hannah maybe even, Chalice Cooper, Rebecca Allen, Emmeline Coverdale, Annessy Kapanainen. There, you're just making this up now. Ashley Norgard, Gwen Skelton, Aisha Williams,

Colleen McCormick, Rayanne Tripp, Marissa Bean, Sophie Dinafrio, Josie Atkinson, Brandy Matthews, Eberle Flynn, Johanna Vertanen, Damian Trinity, Michael, Michelle Kidd, sorry, Emily Anderson, Paul Michael Davis. What's it like having three first names, Paul Michael Davis? I also used to know someone called Philip Wayne Stanley.

Sarah Nilsson Sparks, Maria Golnik. I feel like people who do that, it's just their mum wanted originally to have like multiple children and then child birth was too hard and she was like you know you just get all the names i had in my head there you go have them all your georgia mary joku mu uh victoria lottie howell sophie ellis druv shiva rao cicely cecily conair jen riannon, Jesse Turner, Lynn Rupert, Lauren Rickard, Anne Kirshenmeyer, Caroline Chaloner and Holly Ginsberg. Thanks ever so much for supporting the show. Guys, if you message us and say, I signed up last week and I haven't had my shout out yet.

Stop. I cannot tell you how big the backlog is. I promise you with all of my heart and soul, we will get to you. But it's not going to happen in a matter of weeks, I'm afraid. No, you're just going to have to go with the flow. See what happens. We're all in this together, etc, etc. Some more cliches. You know what?

That's it. I'm so hot. We need to get out of this box. Yeah. I need to go put some ice on my face and have a little cry, and then we'll feel better. So, yeah. I woke up at half past six because I was sweating so much,

and I put ice in my bra, and it was great. So I would recommend that if you're in a tight situation. It's fucking boiling. Right, I'm getting the fuck out of this box now. Yeah, let's end it there. See you guys later. Goodbye. Bye.

I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance but it instantly moved me

and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding and this time if all goes to plan we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come.

This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.