Adrian Davies, the far right’s favourite barrister, recently hosted his fellow lawyer, the leading American nazi Sam Dickson, on a private tour of the UK. When riots broke out in Manchester city centre, Davies and Dickson were in the thick of it. Being in their 60s and 70s respectively, they weren’t scuffling with police, merely happening upon the violence while leaving an art gallery. Dickson was pictured (below, left foreground) in a police ‘kettle’ outside the art gallery.
But it turns out that Dickson hadn’t flown all the way from Georgia just to visit art galleries.
One stop on his tour was in Yorkshire, where he and Davies showed up drinking beer and discussing strategy with prominent nazis including British Democrats leader, Andrew Brons (the ex-MEP who started his jackbooted odyssey in Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement where he pondered the ethics of synagogue arson), and Brons’s former BNP colleagues Mark Cotterill and Peter Rushton who run the self-styled ‘intellectual’ racist journal Heritage & Destiny.
Like Brons, Dickson’s far right activism dates back to the ‘60s. He has been a regular speaker at some of the world’s top racist shindigs, including the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, American Renaissance, and the secretive Charles Martel Society (of which Dickson is a trustee).
For many years Dickson was especially closely associated with the nazi apologist David Irving, and regularly hosted him at one of the wealthy lawyer’s properties in Florida. In 1992 Dickson and Klan lawyer Kirk Lyons toured the UK speaking at meetings organised by Irving.
But a few years ago, Dickson and Irving had a serious falling out, rumoured to be linked to Irving’s notoriously lax attitude to other people’s money and property. Though Irving is now crippled and forced into retirement by a stroke, it’s not thought that Dickson visited his former friend at his Notting Hill flat.
Dickson was among many racists and fascists who gathered in St Petersburg in 2015 for an ‘International Russian Conservative Forum’ sponsored by groups linked to Putin’s intelligence service. In 2017, he attended the notorious Charlottesville rally that brought together nazis and Trumpists.
If the new UK government is serious about keeping out far right extremists, Sam Dickson should have been near the top of their list. His close colleague Jared Taylor is already banned from the UK and the entire Schengen area, covering most European countries. Dickson has an even murkier record than Taylor as one of America’s most influential nazis and Holocaust deniers.
Though his presence during this country’s most serious far right violence for years was undoubtedly coincidental, serious questions should be asked at the Home Office as to why such a man entered the country.
Photo, left to right: Andrew Brons, Sam Dickson, Unknown man, Mark Cotterill, Adrian Davies, Peter Rushton.