Nigel Farage has speculated that the case of a woman murdered and dismembered in Exeter is receiving little attention compared to Sarah Everard because the suspect is a migrant and the killing does not help the “anti-police” agenda.
“A 32-year-old woman goes missing. After an extensive police search her body is found. It’s been dismembered into seven different pieces. Some of it is found in the back streets of the city, the rest in nearby woodland.
“And yet, for this young woman, there’ve been no big demonstrations; no torchlit parades; no anti-police protests; no demands that men have to change their ways and change their behaviour — in fact, you’ve never ever heard of her name,” suggested the now-former Reform UK party leader, in a video message to followers titled, “Why won’t the mainstream media talk about this?”
The victim’s name, he explained, was Lorraine Cox, contrasting the lack of media interest in her death to the intense interest in the death of Sarah Everard — who has been the subject of protests and vigils which “will lead undoubtedly to more legislation”, Farage believes.
One reason for this, Farage speculated, is that the British media’s focus is “so London centric” that it tends to treat incidents in London, like Ms Everard’s death, as if they “matter more” than things that happen “out in the provinces” as with Ms Cox’s death in Exeter, Devon.
“But there’s a deeper part to this story,” Farage said, pointing out that the person currently on trial for Ms Cox’s death — Farage stressed that the case should not be prejudged, as he has not been convicted of any crime at this time — is “a failed asylum seeker who’d come to this country from Iraq”.
The suspect in Ms Everard’s death — who is also innocent unless and until he is proven guilty, Farage noted — on the other hand, is “a white male in his forties with a shaved head… and even better for those who wanted to make political capital out of Sarah Everard’s death, he was a serving police officer.”
This, Farage suggested, made the Everard suspect “an ideal person” for activists “to be seen to be protesting against” — while the Cox suspect, given his migration background, “would have been, for many on the Marxist side of politics, too difficult, and too inconvenient” to highlight.
Farage highlighted comments by one of Sarah Everard’s acquaintances that the protests around her death had been “hijacked”, saying they were “turning into anti-police demonstrations”.
“[B]ehind it all are exactly the same people who are behind the protests after the death of George Floyd,” Farage accused.
“Remember, they said it was about racial justice after George Floyd had died, but actually we know that the Black Lives Matter protest was a deeply Marxist organisation intent on defunding the police and bringing down Western society, bringing down capitalism, bringing down the whole world structure as we know it — and the same thing is happening here,” he claimed.
Farage continued: “This has been hijacked; it’s the same people as last time… It’s now been taken over by Marxists intent on fighting this big campaign against the police.”
To strengthen his argument, Farage highlighted the fact that Sir Winston Churchill’s statue — as during successive Black Lives Matter demonstrations — has been defaced with graffiti branding him “racist”, with the Battle of Britain war memorial also being vandalised.
“I don’t think Cressida Dick is fit for purpose as head of the [Metropolitan Police]… but [while] I might be critical of individual actions or individual officers in the police, but I know the vast majority of men and women serving in our police forces are doing their absolute level best to maintain law and order on our streets and their morale is sinking to a low,” he added.
“We must not allow the horrible murder [of Sarah Everard] on Clapham Common to be turned into an anti-police movement, and frankly an anti-men movement too,” he concluded.