The return of the National Front
With the rise of the BNP and its recent electoral success, the smaller, more radical racist groups in Britain are sometimes forgotten. However, in recent months the National Front (NF) has once again been making its presence known with a series of demonstrations (see here, here, here, and here, for example). In the following article I shall look at why the return of the NF to street activism is something that needs to be carefully monitored.
In February 2009, Hull National Front organiser Nick Walsh gave an interview to the Racial Volunteer Force (RVF) which is, according to its website, ‘an International Militant Pro White Organisation’ and ‘brother organisation of Combat 18′. According to a May 2009 edition of National Front News, the ‘NF Unit Development Department’ is ‘now headed by Nick Walsh with full responsibility for handling all newly established NF units and also with the monthly production of an Organiser’s Bulletin’.
In the interview, Walsh states that ‘[t]he NF is intended to be a political force which is able to represent all true nationalists of good character from the B&H skin to the suit-wearing community activist’. He also thanks the RVF ‘for allowing me an opportunity to put forward some of the views of the National Front to the many White Nationalists who visit your website’.
Walsh, a leading activist in the NF, therefore encourages Blood & Honour (B&H) skinheads to join the party and also considers the RVF and its website visitors to be the kind of ‘White Nationalists’ that the NF would like to work with. Let’s have a look at what this means in practice.
Blood & Honour, as shown by this B&H website, is a partner organisation of the violent extremist group Combat 18 (C18). The ‘18′ in C18 stands for Adolf Hitler (A=1, H=8) and B&H takes its name from the Third Reich ‘Law for the protection of German Blood & German Honour’, a law which barred marriages between German Jews and German gentiles. B&H/C18 considers itself to be an armed ‘revolutionary’ organisation that seeks the violent overthrow of democratic societies and their replacement with National Socialist states.
The ideology and nature of Blood & Honour is also clear from propaganda videos such as this and this.
So, these are the kind of people that the National Front considers ‘true nationalists’ and seeks ‘to represent’.
Then there’s the Racial Volunteer Force, a group seen by the NF as ‘nationalist’ and worthy of support.
Leading RVF activists include Mark Atkinson, a long running key figure in Combat 18, who was imprisoned in 1997 for his involvement with a magazine called ‘Stormer’:
In 1997, three [Combat 18] members were jailed at the Old Bailey for possessing racist publications, and later that year, Mark Atkinson was jailed for publishing its Stormer magazine.
Atkinson was caught with hundreds of copies of the 12-page magazine, described by Judge George Bathurst-Norman, as containing “vile out-pourings of hatred and incitement to violence”.
Undeterred, upon his release Atkinson helped set up the RVF and returned to publishing ‘Stormer’, resulting in yet another jail sentence in 2005, along with other RVF activists. As the BBC reported at the time:
Five white supremacists have been jailed for a total of 15 years at the Old Bailey for creating and distributing race hate material.
The five members of the extreme right-wing Racial Volunteer Force (RVF) all pleaded guilty to race hate crimes.
A sixth man was given a suspended sentence of nine months for possessing a racially inflammatory booklet.
The court heard the group paid tribute to Soho nail bomber David Copeland with instructions on how to make a bomb.
The five jailed had all admitted conspiracy to publish the group’s magazine, Stormer, with the intention of stirring up race hate.
[...]
Judge Jeremy Roberts told the members: “No-one is being sentenced for their political beliefs – this is a free country.”
The group had formed in 2003 to “encourage readers to resort to violence against people with non-white backgrounds”, he said.
“The real danger is that it only needs to fall into the hands of one or two individuals who might be persuaded to take up the suggestions and cause a great deal of damage,” said the judge.
The organisation, which is a splinter group of the right wing Combat 18, wrote of their hatred of non-whites and articles featured anti-Jewish headlines such as Roast A Rabbi.
With a picture of a firebomb, the magazine said: “With the winter nights to shroud you in darkness we thought a few of you would like to don your disguises and rubber gloves and make things a little warmer.”
And, by the side of a swastika on the front cover, it said: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Another edition featured bomb-making instructions and praise of Soho bomber David Copeland, who was jailed for life for murder after attacks targeting the gay community and ethnic minorities in London.
Peter Davies, assistant chief constable of Lincolnshire, said: “It is difficult to imagine more extreme race hatred than was contained in the material which was seized during this meticulous inquiry.”
In addition to this, Mark Atkinson writes on the RVF website that a Loyalist terrorist, Stephen Irwin, is an RVF ‘comrade’. Irwin is currently serving eight life sentences for his involvement in the Greysteel atrocity and for slashing a man with a knife at a football match.
These are the kind of people involved with the RVF, a group that the National Front is happy to associate with. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the criminal convictions of some of its own activists. Take Terry Blackham, for example, a man who led a National Front anti-Muslim demonstration in the wake of the 7/7 terrorist attacks. Blackham’s involvement in such a demonstration was somewhat ironic, given the fact that he’s a convicted gun-runner for Loyalist terrorist groups in Northern Ireland.
Then there’s the current chairman of the NF, Tom Holmes. A Blood & Honour supporter, Holmes was convicted in 2006 for racially aggravated harassment. In an interview for Blood & Honour Magazine, Holmes thanked gun-runner Blackham for his support during the trial.
Another particularly nasty NF figure is Anthony White, twice convicted for distributing racially inflammatory material. In 2007, White was found to be selling such material through the Yorkshire National Front website and a Yorkshire Evening Post article reports that:
Jailing White, Judge Peter Benson said he had been in possession of the most repulsive and offensive racist material it was possible to imagine.
“It’s clear to me from the content that some of that material was intended for distribution in sensitive areas of Leeds intending to stir up racial hatred against ethnic and religious minorities,” Judge Benson said.
In addition to its interview with Nick Walsh, the RVF website also features an interview with Eddy Morrison, a veteran hardcore racist. Morrison has recently returned to NF activism after a period with the White Nationalist Party (a group he set up) and its current incarnation the British People’s Party. In recent months, Morrison has been a featured speaker at NF meetings (alongside fellow RVF supporter Walsh) and is now the webmaster of the party’s main website.
In a 2001 article on the website of ‘Aryan Unity’, a neo-Nazi umbrella organisation he founded, Morrison declared:
I decided I was fed up of hiding my National Socialism (a hopeless and unrewarding task) and formed Aryan Unity – an idea rather than an organisation dedicated to WORLDWIDE National-Socialist Unity and Pan Aryanism.
I define Pan-Aryanism as accepting our world view that the Aryan folk, spearheaded by Aryan/NS freedom fighters throughout the White World is now our only hope.
So today I can say quite proudly that I am a National Socialist and the days of being a “little Englander” are far behind. I recognise that our ultimate enemy – the coming New World Order in all it’s [sic] varied guises and with its tentacles squeezing the lifeblood from our people throughout the world as well as strangling free speech, can only be fought against by an Aryan world-wide effort. I hope Aryan Unity can play its part in that eternal struggle.
For National Socialists the Second World War did NOT end in May 1945 – it was just one lost battle amongst many – the struggle for the existence of our people and the preservation of our culture and heritage continues.
The Aryan Unity website is registered to Simon Sheppard, a former BNP member recently sentenced (along with British People’s Party associate Stephen Whittle) to four years and 10 months in prison for inciting racial hatred:
Judge Rodney Grant told the pair the material that was used on leaflets and online was abusive and insulting and had the potential to cause grave social harm. He said: “These are serious offences. I can say without any hesitation that I have rarely seen, or had to read or consider, material which is so abusive and insulting … towards racial groups within our own society.”
Before his recent return to the NF, Morrison set up the openly Nazi White Nationalist Party and then the equally Nazi British People’s Party (BPP). Perhaps the most well known figure involved with the BPP is Martyn Gilleard, a neo-Nazi would-be terrorist (as well as a paedophile). In this picture we see Gilleard (right) chatting to Morrison:
In 2008, Gilleard was convicted of terrorism offences and possession of child pornography and jailed for 16 years:
Four nail bombs capable of causing an explosion similar to that of a hand grenade were discovered in the fork-lift truck driver’s home.
Police also discovered an armoury of gun powder, fuses, live bullets, swords, axes, knives and a bayonet along with internet material on how to poison people and make bombs.
The search of the flat in Goole, East Yorkshire, also revealed notes, including one in which he wrote: “Be under no illusion, we are at war. And it is a war we are losing badly.
“Unless we the British right stop talking of racial war and take steps to make it happen, we will never get back that which has been stolen from us.
“I’m so sick and tired of hearing Nationalists talk of killing Muslims, of blowing up mosques, of fighting back. Only to see these acts of resistance fail to appear. The time has come to stop the talk and start to act.”
Officers also found anti-Semitic literature and photographs showing his admiration for Hitler and the Nazi cause.
Another key BPP figure is Kevin Watmough, who helps to maintain ‘Redwatch’, a website linked to violent attacks on anti-fascists, including a stabbing and a firebombing. Searchlight reports:
Watmough has been an active nazi since the early 1980s. He was first aligned to the NF and the extreme British Movement, before switching allegiance to the BNP and Combat 18 in the early 1990s.
Together with White, Watmough was at the fore-front of the C18-inspired violence in Leeds in 1994. Anti-fascists were attacked in the street and in their homes. In one case windows were smashed at the home of a local trade unionist while in another a crossbow bolt was fired through a bedroom window.
By the late 1990s, Watmough was becoming a key figure in Combat 18, running its propaganda and internet operations. He is named as the administrative contact for a C18 website.
Redwatch, it turns out, is currently hosted on the website of Eddy Morrison’s Aryan Unity organisation.
Eddy Morrison, then, is a current NF activist and webmaster with links to some of the most violent neo-Nazis in Britain. Nick Walsh, another leading activist, supports the Combat 18 splinter group the Racial Volunteer Force, and the head of the NF is a convicted racist with links to Blood & Honour. That the NF is increasing its street activities and seeking to recruit members from Blood & Honour and RVF supporters should be of serious concern to the police and to anti-fascists.
In his RVF interview, Morrison states that ‘a resurgent NF … shall be looking at the Comrades of the RVF and other groups to use their strength in defending the rights of patriots to win back our streets’. Given the kind of people we’re talking about, the potential threat to public order and to those who oppose racism from such a union should not be taken lightly.
