When Phil Curson turned up outside the Bell Hotel in Epping last July, he did not come as an outraged but peaceful local as he claimed. He came as what he has always been: a Combat 18-connected street nazi with more than two decades of racially-motivated violence behind him, looking for a fight.
He found one. And today, a jury at Chelmsford Crown Court found him guilty of violent disorder arising from the riot on 17 July last year, when a mob attacked police officers, pelted counter-protesters with missiles and reduced a market town in Essex to what the prosecution called a scene of chaos.
Protests kicked off
The protests at the Bell kicked off when an asylum seeker Hadush Kebatu, who had arrived in the UK by small boat days earlier, was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, for which he was subsequently convicted.
Several hundred locals people gathered outside the hotel through the afternoon of 17 July.
But as some fifty SUTR counter-protesters arrived at Epping station and were escorted towards the hotel, the mood becamse violent. Officers were punched, kicked and grabbed; police vans were repeatedly kicked and damaged; and a group had attempted to barricade a road using a wheelie bin and materials stripped from nearby roadworks before attacking the police vehicles that drove through them. Eight officers were injured.
Caught on camera
Curson was captured on body-worn camera in the middle of it, shoving officers, kicking at one who had his back turned, screaming abuse. The jury were not persuaded by his barrister’s suggestion that he was an innocent bystander separated from his partner after a quiet drink at a nearby pub.
Those who know Curson’s history will not have been surprised by any of this.
In the early 2000s he was a central figure in a nazi gang that ran a sustained campaign of violence across the Harold Hill area of east London, culminating in a ferocious attack on two teenagers in Romford town centre. Darren Bagalo, 17, and Farman Khan, 18, were set upon by men carrying knuckle dusters and knives.
Life threatening
Both were stabbed. Bagalo’s injuries were initially life-threatening. The gang had been caught on CCTV doing Nazi salutes minutes beforehand. During house searches police found Combat 18 and Ku Klux Klan literature, “Keep Romford White” leaflets, and a photograph of Curson and two others posed before a Nazi flag, clutching weapons.
Curson was jailed for violent disorder and racially aggravated grievous bodily harm.
In the years since, he has been photographed with convicted Combat 18 killer Martin Cross and, more recently, alongside former Blood and Honour activist Lance Wright, including at the far-right demonstrations at the Honor Oak pub in south London in 2023.
The Epping disorder was no more a spontaneous community protest than the Southport riots that preceded it. It was an opportunity, seized by people who had spent two years agitating around the Bell Hotel long before Kebatu arrived.
Curson’s presence at the front of the police line, not watching, not marching, but fighting, tells you everything about what kind of opportunity they thought it was.
He will be sentenced at a later date.
