Taking a leaf out of the extremist handbook

This week the question has been firmly put. Should there be more Nazis on television or less, or for the grammar pedants out there, fuhrer?

All right. That’s a really bad joke. The point is that so many people including journalists have got this horribly wrong.

Cotterill needs to be confronted, subjected to scrutiny and forensically cross-examined.

What to call him then? The media has cobbled together several terms, all of them fairly unhelpful, including activist, patriot and ultra-right wing extremist. On Channel 7 he was described as one member of a group who were planning to put “a neighbourhood watch group together”.

Let’s start with what he is. Mr Cottrell is a violent criminal, having been convicted of arson, stalking, aggravated burglary, trafficking in steroids and breaching interventions orders. He added racial vilification to his rap sheet earlier this year.

Full column here.