| Hateland -
Articles |
10/07/00
- London nail-bomber found guilty of politically motivated
murder campaign
By Julie Hyland
David Copeland was convicted for the London nail-bomb
attacks in April 1999 that killed three people and injured
139. Rejecting his manslaughter plea, made by the 24-year-old
engineer on grounds of diminished responsibility, the
12 jurors pronounced Copeland guilty of murder and he
was given six life sentences.
The three nail-bomb blasts occurred over a period of 13
days in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho, and were targeted
at ethnic minorities and gays. On his arrest Copeland
immediately claimed responsibility, stating that he had
selected his targets for political reasons.
Describing himself as a Nazi, Copeland said that his aim
was to cause “murder, mayhem, chaos and damage”
and “set off a racial war”. Official commentary
on the trial and its outcome has largely ignored Copeland's
politics.
The numerous articles that have appeared simply regurgitate
a version of the legal arguments of the defence—that
Copeland's murderous attacks were the result of social
ineptitude, sexual confusion and “religious, grandiose,
persecutory delusions”.
On the surface such explanations appear comforting, depicting
Copeland as just a deranged individual and a one-off case.
One could, however, find similar deficiencies in the biography
of virtually any fascist.
History has demonstrated that identifying feelings of
personal inadequacy, grudging resentment, the desire for
power—Copeland admired both Hitler and Stalin—may
give a psychological insight into why certain individuals
are attracted to right-wing politics. But simply reducing
Copeland's actions to some apparently innate character
defects obscures more than it clarifies.
One of the difficulties for official commentators is that
Copeland does not fit the traditional image of the fascist
as a lumpen, unemployed youth.
The Times noted with bemusement that even the team of
eight psychiatrists who examined Copeland after his arrest
could not “fully explain why a boy brought up in
an affluent, respectable middle class family home in the
Home Counties developed such a murderous revulsion for
blacks, Asians and homosexuals, fantasies of being an
SS officer who could rape and kill women, and a belief
that he was God, sent to earth to start a British race
war.”
Personalities are shaped not only by close family relations,
but also by the broader social and intellectual environment.
Only by understanding this is it possible to begin to
uncover why Copeland's damaged psyche and emotional instability
expressed itself in a murderous hatred for particular
groups of people.
Copeland is very much one of “Thatcher's children”,
born just three years before her Conservative government
came to power in 1979. His consciousness developed against
the background of a right-wing offensive launched against
the social gains of working people coupled with a drive
to enrich a privileged section of the upper middle class
and secure their support for Thatcher's pro-business agenda.
The privatisation of former state-owned industries and
attacks on welfare provisions was accompanied by measures
strengthening the repressive powers of the state, undermining
longstanding democratic rights. In seeking to justify
these measures, the Tories appealed to the most backward
prejudices.
They described the gutting of social services as part
of their efforts to “roll back the frontiers of socialism”
and deemed workers' opposition to be the actions of “the
enemy within”. Thatcher pronounced that there was
“no such thing as society”. All that counted
was rising share values and personal enrichment.
Anything that could jeopardise this was to be swept to
one side. Racist and anti-gay propaganda was so much a
feature of this ideological onslaught—Thatcher claimed
that Britain was being “swamped” by immigrants—that
the National Front and other fascist groups all but liquidated
into the Conservative Party.
It is not possible to know how Copeland might have developed
had he grown up in a more healthy social environment,
let alone under conditions where there had been a genuine
socialist opposition to the Tories.
But the Labour and trade union bureaucracy sought to prevent
precisely such a development, and within a few years had
themselves adopted much of Thatcher's free-market credo.
Acts of resistance by working people were betrayed and
defeated and it appeared that there was no credible alternative
to the right-wing agenda of the Tories.
By his early teens Copeland, already something of a social
misfit, was an open racist who boasted loudly of his hatred
for blacks and gays. Yet he was not politically active
at this stage. It appears that, having successfully graduated
from school, Copeland choose to internalise his frustrations
at this point, becoming more and more socially withdrawn.
This makes all the more striking his decision to join
the British National Party (BNP) in May 1997. It is necessary
to place this action in its wider political context in
order to appreciate its significance. The 1990s were marked
by the impoverishment of ever-broader social layers.
Fully one-third of the population was officially deemed
as poor, whilst many more teetered on the brink of poverty.
Public sector cuts—both in terms of services and
employment—also had their impact on the middle classes,
whilst global developments in communications and markets
led to company rationalisations and downsizing, particularly
hitting professional and managerial workers.
The result was a spectacular collapse in the social base
of the Conservative Party. In the May 1997 general election
the Tory government suffered one of the largest electoral
defeats in British history, as many of its traditional
supporters deserted it in droves.
This met up with widespread anti-Tory sentiment amongst
working people, expressing the inchoate desire of millions
to put an end to policies that in the course of 18 years
had produced a social catastrophe. Working people wanted
change—to rebuild health and education, restore democratic
rights and begin to reverse the social inequalities of
the last decades.
Copeland evidently regarded such aspirations with deep
hostility and responded by entering into fascist political
activity for the first time. By the end of the summer
in 1997 he had already passed through the BNP, considering
them not extremist enough for his liking, and joined the
predominantly skinhead British National Socialist Movement,
which has been linked to paramilitary fascist groups.
In court the jury heard that Copeland told police that
the Labour government was full of blacks and gays and
that he had intended to shoot Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Along with swastika flags, an arsenal of weapons was found
in his home.
Copeland also said that if God did not rescue him from
the trial, he was confident that within five years an
extreme right-wing government would replace Labour and
immediately release him from prison. Since coming to office,
the Blair government has carried out measures that Copeland
and his ilk view as tantamount to treachery, such as the
holding of an inquiry into the racist murder of black
teenager Stephen Lawrence, its pledge to root out “institutionalised
racism” and end discrimination against gays.
There are parallels to the extreme right in the US, who
view Clinton, the most right-wing Democratic Party president
in history, as a virtual communist. Copeland had apparently
been studying material from the American right wing.
He was reading the “Turner Diaries”, the fascistic
novel also found in the possession of Timothy McVeigh
when he was arrested for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing
that killed 168 people and wounded 600. To view Copeland's
actions as those of an aberrant individual would be dangerously
complacent.
They constitute a stark warning regarding the diseased
intellectual and social climate produced by two decades
in which the British ruling class made common cause with
racists, homophobes and extreme right-wingers in its drive
to undermine the social position of the working class.
Labour's election has done nothing to lessen these dangers.
Having rejected any claim to represent the interests of
working people against big business, Labour has pledged
instead to create the capitalist “meritocracy”
the Tories promised but failed to deliver, by eliminating
social prejudices.
But while Blair mouths liberal rhetoric against racism
and sexism, his government continues to impose further
public spending cuts and tax breaks for big business and
the rich while scapegoating immigrants and asylum-seekers
for the social problems this creates.
Under conditions of growing social deprivation, moreover,
Labour's championing of identity politics plays directly
into the hands of the far-right—by encouraging the
idea that white, black and Asian workers must compete
against one another for education, health provision, housing
and jobs.
For these reasons, though Labour may be viewed with enmity
by the extreme right, its policies can only provide fertile
ground for the growth of fascistic forces. |
| Contact : bernard.omahoney@bernardomahoney.com |
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