Dr. Emma L. Briant

🚨 Jo Cox, a 41-year-old British Labour MP for Batley and Spen, was murdered on 16 June 2016 outside a constituency surgery in Birstall, West Yorkshire. Thomas Mair, then 52, attacked her with a sawn-off rifle and a knife, shooting and stabbing her repeatedly while shouting phrases such as “Britain first!”, “This is for Britain”, and “Keep Britain independent.” Cox died of her injuries shortly afterwards. Mair, who had a long-standing obsession with far-right and white supremacist ideology (including neo-Nazi literature and links to American extremist groups), was convicted of her murder and terrorism-related offences. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of release. The judge and court accepted the killing as a politically motivated terrorist attack by a far-right extremist. The murder took place one week before the Brexit referendum, and just a few hours after Nigel Farage, then UKIP leader, unveiled the controversial “Breaking Point” poster in Westminster. The poster showed a long queue of mostly non-white migrants and refugees (a 2015 photo from the Slovenia-Croatia border) with the slogan “Breaking Point: The EU has failed us all” and called for Britain to “take back control of our borders.” It was widely condemned at the time (including by some on the Leave side) for its imagery, which strongly resembled Nazi-era propaganda depicting columns of refugees or “invaders.” In a 2019 interview with media researcher Emma L Briant, Andy Wigmore, head of comms for Leave.EU (the group behind the poster co-founded by Arron Banks and Richard Tice) admitted the imagery was "inspired by Nazi propaganda" to maximize emotional impact. The murder and the poster launch both occurred exactly one week before the Brexit referendum on 23 June.