Thomas Mair (murderer)

Thomas Alexander Mair (born 12 August 1963 in Kilmarnock, Scotland) is a neo-Nazi, white nationalist terrorist who was convicted of shooting Labour MP Jo Cox on 16 June 2016, during the Brexit campaign. On 23 November 2016, Mair was found guilty of murder and other offences connected to the killing. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order.

Mair has had links with far-right groups in the United States, as well as pro-apartheid and white nationalist groups within South Africa. He was arrested for life on 23 November 2016 charged with murder, a common law offense, instead of under any anti-terrorism legislation.

Early life and background

Thomas Alexander Mair was born in the Scottish town of Kilmarnock in August 1963, the son of James, a machine operator in the lace industry, and Mary, a factory worker. The Mairs had a second son, Scott, but the marriage did not last long, and Mary and the boys moved to Birstall, a mill town eight miles south-west of Leeds. Mary remarried, and Mair has a half brother, Duane St Louis.

Detective Superintendant Nick Wallen from West Yorkshire Police described Mair as a "loner in the truest sense of the word ... who never held down a job never had a girlfriend never any friends to speak of".

Mental illness

Mair has been described as a "loner" who exhibited traits of mental illness, most notably obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was so obsessive regarding his cleaning that he was known to scrub himself with pan scourers, and his house was obsessively orderly. He had a persecution complex, believing "collaborators" – liberals, leftists and the mainstream media, who were by far "his greatest obsession" – to be the cause of the world's problems.

Mair was described by his younger brother as apolitical and as having had a history of mental illness. Thomas Mair had lived in Birstall for at least forty years and was described as polite and reserved. In 2010, Mair attended Pathways Day Centre for adults with mental health problems. He then began doing voluntary work and was interviewed by the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, telling the newspaper that volunteering had improved his mental health. Mair said: "I can honestly say it has done me more good than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world". The evening before the killing, Mair visited an alternative therapy centre in Birstall seeking treatment for depression; he was told to return the next day for an appointment. However, Mair's health was not part of the defence case in the trial. After his arrest, he was examined by a psychiatrist who could find no evidence that his mental health was so poor that he was not responsible for his actions.

Links to far-right groups in the UK and Europe

Although he has had links with the National Front in the 1990s, and more recently has been seen at a English Defence League rally, both anti-fascists and supporters of various far-right organisations deny that he had ever "crossed their radar". Mair was particularly fascinated by the Norwegian Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in gun and bomb attacks in 2011, and kept newspaper clippings about the case.

Todd Blodgett, an American former far-right activist, told the SPLC that in May 2000 (when Blodgett was working as a paid informant for the FBI), Mair attended a gathering of American white supremacists in London that was convened by National Alliance head William Luther Pierce and arranged by another member of the British far-right, Mark Cotterill. According to Blodgett, the group of 15 to 20 people included Stephen Cartwright and Richard Barnbrook, and the group discussed how to expand American white power music (such as that promoted by Resistance Records, which Pierce had recently purchased) into Europe. Blodgett described Mair as quiet, self-educated, well-mannered, and loosely affiliated with the Leeds chapter of the National Alliance. According to Blodgett, Mair expressed racist and antisemitic views, was a Holocaust denier, and admired the neo-Nazi band Skrewdriver.

Mair was a frequent user of his local library's computers to research matters such as the British National Party, white supremacism, Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, Waffen SS, Israel, public shooting, serial killers and matricide, as well as the Wikipedia page of Ian Gow, the last MP to be murdered by a Provisional IRA car bomb, and anti-Brexit MP William Hague.

Community demographics

Due to demographic changes in the towns and villages around Birstall and Batley, the area is considered "fertile ground for the far right, for whom the many Muslims in the area represent a highly visible enemy". In the mid-90s, one local man formed an offshoot of the National Alliance, which he called the National Socialist Alliance. In 2006, after a jury at Leeds crown court cleared Nick Griffin and Mark Collett of the British National Party of incitement to racial hatred, Griffin hailed West Yorkshire as "an unusually radicalised" part of the UK; meaning that he believed many people there shared his views.

A number of far right groups such as the British Movement, National Action, the National Front, the Yorkshire Infidels and Liberty GB have recruited in the area, and members of the far-right have staged marches in the area in recent years. The local authority, Kirklees council, asked Tell MAMA in 2016 if it could help devise a strategy to ease community tensions that were being exacerbated by the far right. Despite these factors, Mair appeared to have little involvement in such groups within the UK.

SA Patriot and the Springbok Club

According to The Daily Telegraph, a January 2006 blog post attributed to the group described Mair as "one of the earliest subscribers and supporters of SA Patriot", a far-right, pro-apartheid publication (renamed SA Patriot in Exile in 1991), and published at least two letters in the publication in the years 1991–1999. Mair wrote to the organisation in 1991 saying that:

I was most impressed by your publication and the insight it gives into the South African scene ... Meanwhile, you might be interested to know that the British media's propaganda offensive against South Africa continues relentlessly. Almost every "news" bulletin contains one item about South Africa which, needless to say, never fails to present Whites in the worse [sic] possible light ... The nationalist movement in the UK also continues to fight on against the odds. The murders of George Seawright and John McMichael in Ulster are an extreme example of what we are up against. 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.

— Mair in 1991

In 1999, Mair wrote to the publication. In his letter, he spoke out against "'collaborators' in the White South African population" who were opposed to apartheid, saying that:

It was heartening to see that you are still carrying on the struggle ... 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.

— Mair in 1999

The Southern Poverty Law Center noted that, following the death of Jo Cox in 2016, "Mair sounded a similar theme. Asked his name by the court, he responded with, 'Death to traitors, freedom for Britain.'" This, according to The Guardian, was "his ultimate obsession". In 2006 the magazine's online newsletter asked for information on Mair's address as "recent correspondence sent to him was being returned".

Mair also bought literature from the Springbok Club, a "small, sinister group of British-based South African and Zimbabwean exiles" that "regards itself as the shadow white government of South Africa". Alan Harvey, editor of the Springbok Club's official magazine, told The Guardian that Mair sent the group £5, "which would have been enough for about five issues" of the magazine.

Copeland trial and the National Alliance

Having been galvanised by Copeland's attacks, Mair took his first steps on the long road that would lead to his own hate crime.

— The Guardian

The Guardian refers to Mair as "an extremely low burner" who "appears to have fantasised a 'collaborator' for more than 17 years, drawing inspiration from" David Copeland.

David Copeland, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and admirer of William Luther Pierce (head of the National Alliance) was a source of great inspiration to Mair when he bombed Black British, South Asian and LGBT populations on a 13-day campaign in the hope of triggering a race war within the United Kingdom. 3 died and more than 140 injured, many losing limbs, and was arrested shortly after this final bombing of the Admiral Duncan.

10 days after Copeland's first court appearance, a consignment of goods from National Alliance headquarters in was being sent to Mair's home. According to a packing slip obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mair had bought numerous items from the organisation, including: manuals on the manufacturing of bombs and homemade pistols; 6 copies of Free Speech, a publication of the National Alliance; and a copy of Ich Kämpfe. Over the course of four years, he began to subscribe to Free Speech as well as Secret of the Runes and We Get Confessions. The SPLC released receipts indicating that, between 1999 and 2003, Mair had spent more than $620 buying publications from National Vanguard Books, the National Alliance's publishing arm. These included works on how to make improvised weapons, such as explosives and firearms." Mair "amassed a small library about the Nazis, German military history and white supremacy, which he kept in a bedroom at his home on a bookshelf topped by a gold-coloured Third Reich eagle with a swastika", including books on "Race Theory and Mate Selection Guidelines" and the Luftwaffe, as well as devices on how to construct bombs and explosives.

Brexit and assassination of Jo Cox

Main article: Assassination of Jo Cox

Many politicians and prominent political figures not only failed to condemn [hate speech,] but also created and entrenched prejudices, thereby emboldening individuals to carry out acts of intimidation and hate towards ethnic or ethno-religious minority communities and people who are visibly different.

— Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, referencing the Brexit referendum campaign.

During the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom, campaigners who wanted the UK to leave the European Union frequently described migrants as "swarms", claiming that uncontrolled immigration would trigger mass sexual attacks, as had recently occurred in Cologne, Germany. Hours before the assassination of Jo Cox, UKIP launched its infamous "Breaking Point", which was accused of similarities with Nazi propaganda. The prosecutor, from the counter-terrorism division of the Crown Prosecution Service, later told the court that a single-barrelled firearm was recovered from Mair at the time of his arrest.

As a "passionate defender of immigration and the remain campaign", Mair saw Jo Cox as "a legitimate target". He viewed the Labour MP as "one of 'the collaborators' [and] a traitor to his race", according to The Guardian. At the time of the murder, Mair was an unemployed gardener.

Cox's death was the first killing of a sitting British MP since the assassination of Eastbourne MP Ian Gow by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1990, and the first serious assault since Stephen Timms was stabbed by Roshonara Choudhry in an attempted assassination in 2010.

Mair had acquired a firearm, a German made Weihrauch .22 bolt-action rifle, from which the stock and most of the barrel had been removed. It was stolen from the boot of a sports utility vehicle in nearby Keighley in August 2015, although police do not know who directly stole the weapon. Mair had carried out online research into .22 ammunition, reading one page that offered an answer to the question: "Is a .22 round deadly enough to kill with one shot to a human's head?" He also bought a replica British army Second World War dagger.