Title: Mr Evil

Author/Artist: Graeme McLagan and Nick Lowles

Publisher: John Blake

Media: Book

Reviewer: Pan

Thanks to Scotland Yard’s media savvy, and a lazy mass media that hangs on their every word, the popular view of David Copeland – the London nail-bomber – is that he was a lone nut with no connection to any organisation. According to this view Copeland was simply a sick loner acting out his racist and anti-gay fantasies, and nothing to do with the BNP, Combat 18 or any other group on the far-Right.

In fact Copeland was not simply a lone nut, he was a member of a tiny sect called the National Socialist Movement, and before that had been a BNP activist who had flirted with C18. Copeland was a neo-Nazi activist, engaged in organised political activity rather than somebody working completely on his own. The police knew this after they had arrested him, but still they chose to propagate the lone nut theory.

Mr Evil, by Searchlight editor Nick Lowles and BBC journalist Graeme McLagan, attempts to redress the view and to make it plain that Copeland was a product of the Nazi scene in this country. Unfortunately the book is deeply flawed, and while it certainly corrects the popular view there isn’t much to commend it, either as a work of committed journalism or engaged anti-fascism.

Given Nick’s connection to Searchlight, it is no surprise that it, and it’s world-view, predominate. Not only does this mean that active anti-fascism is largely written out of the story – so that it appears that fascists operate without facing any opposition – it also means that the threat from clowns like the National Socialist Movement is vastly inflated. While people like the NSM are a dangerous lunatic fringe, in terms of the very real threat of fascism in the UK it is the BNP and possibly the National Front who predominate.

There is also a strong tendency to stoop to the lowest common denominator here. The book reads like a sleazy tabloid expose. Links by the NSM’s guru David Myatt to obscure satanic groups are wheeled in, as though we’ll be shocked by the revelation that these people consort with the devil. What is the point? Similarly when Copeland claims to have sat through a ‘snuff movie’ as a teenager living in Hampshire this is accepted by the authors without question. Thus they accept both the existence of snuff movies, and that they are so easily available that snotty teenagers in the home counties can get their hands on them. If snuff movies are so readily available how come the police have never got their hands on one?

This lack of critical faculties is clearly important as it allows the authors to establish Copeland’s credentials as ‘Mr Evil’. He watched snuff movies; despite being a bit of a Christian fundamentalist he worked with satanic occultists… However reading between the lines the picture of Copeland that emerges is very different. Far from being evil incarnate he was an insecure little creep with few friends and fewer social skills. He was drawn to the BNP because they appealed to his insecurities, offered him status and pandered to his existing prejuidices.

Copeland clearly fits in with a specific psychological type. He isn’t a uniquely ‘evil’ person at all, but fits in with a pattern of behaviour common amongst racist spree killers (see my Lone Wolf for further details). In the States Bufford Furrow and Benjamin Nathaniel Smith are two recent examples of neo-Nazi spree killers with many traits in common with Copeland. The authors seem to be unaware of other cases, or else have not mentioned them because it would deflect from their central theme: Copeland as Mr Evil.

Having established Copeland as a damaged individual further corrupted by contact with the far Right, the authors close the book with a number of calls to action. Predictably these involve calls to strengthen the hand of the state. As suggested in Lone Wolf, this includes the knee-jerk reaction of demands to censor the Internet and stop access to fascist web sites. The authors also demand that more police resources are spent spying on the far-Right. Their poltics are so bankrupt that they can’t rely on argument or the forces of anti-fascism to stop the far-Right. This isn’t anti-fascism, this is authoritarianism of the worst kind.

Despite these numerous criticisms, if the book manages to dispel the popular myth of Copeland as a lone nut then it has at least some value. Just don’t expect to get a real understanding of contemporary British fascism reading it.