Can evil always be explained?

It is perfectly normal that we try to explain a crime or an act of evil. But the obsessive, opportunistic search for scapegoats often verges on the pathetic.

With the shocking case of the Edlington attacks coming to court, I've lost count of the number of hacks and politicians explaining what turned those two children into "monsters".

David Cameron was quick at pointing the finger at "Broken Britain" and all that is "going deeply wrong" in society under Labour, words that anyone with half a brain would associate with the most distasteful cheap political pointscoring. As if no heinous crime took place when Maggie and Major were in government in the 80s and 90s - something so obvious that it's actually painful to type up.

To be fair, Robert Reiner is even more pathetic. In his view, the fault lies with "the key aspects of neo-liberalism", he writes in today's Guardian, adding that "the embrace of unfettered free-market economics by [Cameron's] party in the 1980s and by their buddies around the world" is to blame. Wasn't there anyone at hand to tell this man that the Moors Murders took place in the early 1960s?

David Wilson follows similar lines. "Boy torturers were already tortured", is the headline to his article in the Guardian. He insists that the two torturers already experienced a background lined with neglect, that they were even allowed to watch porn or gory films like Saw and that they often witnessed their aggressive father in action. All ingredients that would make 3/4 of the UK population potential "monsters" then.

Along the same lines, left and right, the roll call of social services and children boards, blood-spattered movies and porn on tap, Labour's Britain and Thatcher's neo-liberalism, the death of the coal industry and state benefits, narcissism and the underclasses.

However, what if -for once- we stopped our finger pointing and quit digging up explanations at all costs?
Can pure evil always be explained? Could it be that the responsibility lies solely with the perpetrator and that the irrational, inexplicable evil streak that runs through humankind sometimes cannot be deciphered?

Because unfortunately, torturers, serial killers and assorted scumbags have stemmed from all decades and walks of life, pre- and post-Thatcherism, pre- and post-New Labour, in council estates and in more affluent homes, the product of a "broken family" or an apparently solid one. They may have watched horror films or not. They may have been into classical music or Marilyn Manson.

John George Haigh, the "Acid Bath Murderer" wasn't on state benefits, didn't smoke spliffs and didn't have the opportunity to watch Saw as a child. He was brought up a devout Christian and even went to a grammar school. Alas, that didn't stop him from dissolving nine people in acid.

Fred West may have come from a poor family of farm workers with a terrifying history of incest and bestiality, but Harold Shipman was brought up in an apparently stable and religious house, completed his studies and remained a respected and well-paid GP until someone found out he murdered up to 250 people for no apparent reason.

Baby P was tortured and abused by a crack cocaine addict and a sadistic neo Nazi in a manky council flat, but six innocent people were chopped up by Dennis Nilsen, a soldier, then a policeman and then a civil servant in middle-class Muswell Hill.

Some people may argue that he was a loner though, which may have given the game away, but then look at Peter Sutcliffe. His social life was apparently "normal", he had mates, but still he became known as the Yorkshire Ripper.

Mary Bell, convicted of the manslaughter of two boys in 1968, was the daughter of a prostitute and an unknown father. Steve Gerald Wright though, known as the Suffolk Strangler, came from a middle-class family and later became a pub landlord.

So to Daily Mail readers, Thatcher-haters, political opportunists and all the devil's advocates crying out for mitigating circumstances: stop trying to single out water-tight and predictable patterns of psychopathy. Shovelling blame onto others will do no good. As loath as I am to admit it, some people are simply beyond help.