The Home Office and UK Border Security have again turned a blind eye to militant racists entering the UK to speak at a fascist conference.
Last Saturday, as Searchlight revealed a few days before the event, Jared Taylor spoke at Mark Collett’s Patriotic Alternative conference. It turned out he wasn’t to be the only one.
PA again held their nazi rally in rural Leicestershire, this time at Long Clawson Village Hall. Almost 200 attended, making this the largest British far-right indoor event held this year.
Jared Taylor is the founder of American Renaissance, which long predates the Trump movement and is one of the longest established racist organisations in the world.
In 2016 he was banned from the UK by Theresa May, Home Secretary in David Cameron’s Conservative government; and in 2019 he was detained in Switzerland and deported back to the USA after being banned from Europe’s entire Schengen zone at the instigation of Poland’s then right-wing government.
In 2017 Taylor was banned from Twitter, but was reinstated to what is now called X this year as part of Elon Musk’s deliberate policy of enabling the far right.
Why has a Labour government decided to take the Elon Musk approach? Why is Labour more tolerant than Tories such as Mrs May of notorious racists?
The Home Office cannot claim ignorance, since Searchlight revealed Taylor’s plans several days in advance.
He used the well-known route taken by American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell more than sixty years ago when coming to Britain to attend the National Socialist Movement camp organised by Colin Jordan and John Tyndall.
Taylor flew from the USA to Dublin, where he met with fellow racist “celebrity” Keith Woods, then travelled by ferry and rail to London where he spent a few days with friends and family before making his way to Leicestershire. There he stayed for the weekend at a hotel in Melton Mowbray with other extremists such as Collett and Steve Laws, who earlier this year split from the Homeland Party.
Frozen out
Collett is a former BNP official who once boasted to Channel Four reporters about his admiration for the Third Reich and Ulster terrorists.
His arrogance and a series of scandals (including entertaining under-age girls at a hotel in Blackpool during a BNP conference) eventually led to Collett being frozen out of the BNP, but he made a comeback thanks to Larry Nunn of the now defunct Western Spring organisation.
Paramilitary training
Nunn brought Collett together with other young nazis who were trying to create a non-electoral route to a seizure of power. This included paramilitary style training courses in Wales. Some of these young fanatics created National Action, later banned under the Terrorism Act.
Collett tried to build a new movement out of former NA activists and BNP veterans like himself. He focuses especially on the new world of online streams, many of them part of a subculture of video gamers and enthusiasts for physical training.
Collett founded Patriotic Alternative in 2019 and numerous activists have been convicted and jailed for terrorist and racial hatred offences, as reported frequently by Searchlight.
Fellow fascists have become suspicious as to why Collett himself has evaded prosecution, and their suspicions are likely to harden after a Labour government turned a blind eye to this weekend’s conference, which was a blatant defiance of the authorities.
One of his fellow speakers was the Swedish nazi activist Dan Eriksson who now leads a tiny extremist faction called Free Sweden. As we reported earlier this year, Collett was detained by Swedish border control and sent back to the UK when he tried to attend one of Eriksson’s conferences.
Yet the Home Office failed to carry out reciprocal action to prevent Eriksson spreading his race hate poison to a British audience.
Bitter splits
Since the age of 19 Eriksson (now 43) has been active in several Swedish far right groups, some of them openly nazi. Like Collett, he has been part of repeated and bitter internal factional splits.
Eriksson was once allied to Nick Griffin and Roberto Fiore as President of their “cultural” front group Europa Terra Nostra which obtained funding from the European Parliament.
In 2017 Eriksson created Det fria Sverige (Free Sweden). As with Collett’s PA, this brought together old-school veteran fascists and a new generation of online podcasters. And like Collett’s group, it soon had its own series of factional splits.
Separatist communities
Eriksson has one other thing in common with Collett. Both Free Sweden and PA solicit donations to create separatist rural communities, arguing that this is a better use of time and money than carrying out traditional political work.
They seem to have been influenced by similar notions in the USA, which have been endorsed by Jared Taylor but in several US cases have also been promoted by armed fanatics with a terrorist agenda.
Collett’s mentor Larry Nunn was among the first to take this separatist approach in Britain, though his rivals on the British fascist scene point out that very little has happened so far other than the purchase of tiny plots of land by Simon Birkett and his nazi “Woodlander Initiative”.
Similar criticisms have been made by Eriksson’s rivals among Swedish nazis.
Ukrainian far right
Unlike Collett and Taylor, Eriksson has ties to the Ukrainian far right rather than to Putin’s Russia. Perhaps PA’s führer is again hedging his bets.
Among the conference stallholders were two with pro-Ukrainian links, the nazi magazine Heritage & Destiny and the Holocaust denial publisher ARMREG which is the British outlet for the “historian” Germar Rudolf.
Now 60 and growing into a new role as “elder statesman” of Holocaust denial, Rudolf has for years had a network of British and American contacts who tried to help him evade a prison sentence in his native Germany.
In 2005 he was deported from the USA to Germany to serve a prison sentence, and in 2019 he was arrested for “open lewdness” after police in Pennsylvania found him in a public park “naked from the waist down”.
Rudolf was sentenced to two years’ probation after a Pennsylvania court convicted him of indecent exposure and open lewdness.
Home Office failure
We would once have assumed that Rudolf’s various convictions for nazi and Holocaust denial activities, and especially his new role as world leader of this side of the Hitlerite movement, would lead to him being excluded from the UK.
But after this week’s shocking failure by the Home Office perhaps we can expect even him to be allowed to visit unhindered in the future.
Was the PA conference enabled by weakness and incompetence in Whitehall? Or is there now an agenda of surrendering to American racists, as part of a wider government policy of toadying to Donald Trump and MAGA?
