A year ago, then Home Secretary Suella Braverman came in for heavy criticism when notorious Spanish neo-nazi Isabel Peralta was allowed in to the UK to address a nazi rally. Now, Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has equally serious questions to answer, as a violent Australian nazi with multiple criminal convictions is allowed into the country to address the Patriotic Alternative conference this weekend.
Blair Cottrell has several criminal convictions and has called for a portrait of Adolf Hitler to be displayed in every Australian school. Yet this weekend he will be speaking at a conference packed with impressionable young people, to an organisation that has seen several of its leading Hitler-worshipping activists imprisoned for inciting racial hatred and terrorist offences. Why does the Home Office – now under a Labour government – persist in allowing violent nazis into the country?
Blair Cottrell first became known in 2015 as Melbourne organiser for an anti-Muslim street gang, United Patriots Front. He took over from founder Shermon Burgess as UPF’s national chairman later that year, and soon became leader of the most extreme nazi wing of Australia’s anti-immigration movement.
Violence regularly broke out at Cottrell’s anti-mosque rallies. Some fellow racists saw him as too extreme, but Cottrell succeeded in publicity stunts including being photographed with the right-wing Queensland MP Bob Katter.
Cottrell has also been one of the leaders of the Lads Society, an early version of the far right’s current strategy of recruiting and training young men through martial arts clubs and survivalist camps.
The Lads Club attempted to recruit Brenton Tarrant, who went on to murder 51 people in terrorist attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019. Tarrant praised Cottrell online as “Emperor Blair Cottrell”.
Though Cottrell distanced himself from Tarrant’s terrorism, he has his own record of criminality and violence, both personal and political. In 2012 and 2013 he was convicted and jailed after arming himself with a tomahawk, stalking his ex-girlfriend and her new partner, and setting fire to their home.
He has displayed his violent misogyny several times since learning nothing from these convictions (including drug trafficking and burglary offences). In 2018 he posted on what was then Twitter, sneering at a Sky News political reporter: “I might as well have raped Laura Jayes on the air.”
Cottrell leads the street gang arm of Australia’s nazi movement, while its ideologists include Thomas Sewell, Jacob Hersant and Joel Davis. All these men are in their 20s and 30s. Davis spoke at PA’s conference last year. Now Cottrell’s appearance further cements the links between PA and Australia’s vilest nazis, built up during several years of PA leader Mark Collett’s video streaming.
Have UK border security and the Home Office learned nothing from this summer’s racist violence on British streets? Why are nazis with serious criminal records being allowed into the UK to address extremist conferences?