The cancellation of the Traditional Britain Group annual Xmas event in London last weekend has kicked off a bitter blame game on the far right, with accusation of betrayal made against one of the far right’s most prominent figures.
The fact that the secret venue of the meeting became known to their opponents is being attributed not to intrepid work by anti-fascists but to duplicity with the ranks of the far right itself. And the man at whom fingers are being pointed is none other than Patriotic Alternative boss Mark Collett (below) who had already fallen out with TBG and increasingly has the hump that they are cosying up to his bitter rivals in the Homeland Party.
Indeed, the fact that recent Homeland Party recruit Pete North was the guest speaker at the TBG event, thus raising their profile even more within the ranks of the far right, only added to Collett’s unhappiness.
It is being claimed that he personally gave permission to a PA member to leak the address.
Homeland was formed out of a breakaway from PA two years ago, and is led by former BNP and PA officer Kenny Smith. Some PA regional branches were virtually wiped out by defections and unlike PA, Homeland is currently increasing its membership.
But UKIP ‘leader’ Nick Tenconi is also coming in for a share of the blame for TBG’s humiliation. Heritage and Destiny, the self-styled nazi ‘intellectual’ magazine, is already pointing out that in recent years the far right have been able to hold their events without much in the way of physical disruption, unlike during the 1980s and 1990s, and that the TBG cancellation marks a departure from that.
Tenconi’s gang attack on a Stand Up To Racism meeting, in an Aldershot church the week before (below), is being seen as ill-considered and reckless, and threatens to start a tit-for-tat war that the fascists don’t particularly relish.
The row has also resurrected gossip among the far right about how Collett often avoids the handcuffs while those around him end up in the excrement. Though doubtless it is his proficiency at karaoke, rather than anything else, that has earned him the nickname ’Canary Collett’.
UKIP ‘Leader’ (he’s still unelected) Nick Tenconi has go the hump that a meeting he was due to address in Southampton has been cancelled. It is, he says, all down to left-wing intimidation.
As usual he’s lying.
He booked the venue (The View Bar) as ‘Nick’ for ‘After Work Drinks’ So, not unreasonably, when the pub discovered it was booked under false pretences, they shut it down. And good for them.
Tenconi, as we know, is now best bae with ‘Tommy Robinson’ with whom he is enjoying (at a distance given that TR is banged up) a far-right-handed ‘bromance’. We wonder how long it will be before it becomes a brotherly threesome…
But he plans to return to S’ton in the New Year, and is full of body-building bluster: “We will be returning to Southampton in January. We will meet the soldiers of anarchy and chaos head on. “There will be no mercy, no diplomacy, and no surrender shown to domestic terrorists. The battle rages on and victory in war will be ours.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah… And Southampton’s anti-fascists will be ready for you.
Well, those nazi ‘intellectual’ poseurs at Heritage and Destiny magazine are getting themselves into a right lather over the Traditional Britain gig in London that was called off last weekend when anti-fascists turned up outside, sporting a banner saying (wonderfully) ‘Fuck Off Posh Nazis’.
They say; “It’s too early to say whether last night’s thuggery was a one-off, or whether nationalists must again become accustomed to defending our own events using whatever means are necessary, rather than relying on the authorities to uphold the law”.
OK – so let’s just remember that only a few days earlier a gang of UKIP thugs led by party ‘leader’ Nick Tenconi invaded and attacked a Stand Up To Racism public meeting in a church in Aldershot, where people were actually physically assaulted.
If the far right really don’t want their meetings targeted, they shouldn’t start a pissing contest.
Fifty five years ago today, in December 1969, members of the Italian fascist terror group Ordine Nuovo detonated a bomb at the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura, in Piazza Fontana in Milan, killing 17 people and wounding 88 more. Other bombs were planted in Milan and Rome on the same day.
It was a key moment in the far right’s “Strategy of Tension”, a campaign of terrorist violence carried out in collusion with sections of Italy’s intelligence services, intended to be blamed on the left and lay the ground for a far right coup d’etat.
At first, this succeeded: anarchists became the initial focus of the investigation and one, Giuseppe Pinelli, died after falling from a police station window, inspiring Dario Fo’s play “The Accidental Death of an Anarchist”. It soon became clear however, that Ordine Nuovo was behind the bombing and members of the organisation were eventually convicted.
One of its most prominent members, initially convicted of participation in the attack, was Franco Freda (above) who was lauded in the UK National Front’s ‘Nationalism Today’ in 1988 after he had been acquitted on appeal, a link exposed in Searchlight (below). Then, the NF was under the control of the ‘Political Soldier’ faction which looked to Italian terrorists like Roberto Fiore for inspiration.
At the time the NF was hailing him, however, Freda remained convicted of other terror offences and in 2004 an Italian court reaffirmed the conclusion that he was involved in Piazza Fontana even though, because of his earlier acquittal, he could not be retried.
In response to the bombing the Italian trade union movement called a general strike and at the funerals of the victims over 300,000 people turned out on the streets in demonstrations of public anger at the outrage.
As we reported yesterday, the Traditional Britain Group (TBG) will tonight welcome Pete North (above), an ex-UKIP activist and recent recruit to the fascist Homeland Party, as guest speaker at its Christmas party in central London.
North’s rightward drift has already caused fierce reactions among Homeland’s former comrades in Patriotic Alternative. PA’s deputy leader Laura Towler, whose husband Sam Melia is about to be released from jail after his conviction for inciting racial hatred, didn’t mince her words. This might be the season of goodwill, but in the Towler-Melia household that doesn’t extend to ex-comrades who dare to criticise your incessant grifting.
“The absolute state of Pete North”, howled Towler. At Searchlight we know that his real sin in her eyes is to have joined Homeland, but Towler has to keep up the pretence that the problem with North is his failure to extend his racism into antisemitism.
What triggered PA’s deputy führer this time was North’s insistence on blaming Hamas terrorism for provoking the war in Gaza. Outside the cesspit inhabited by Homeland and PA, decent people are able to disagree about aspects of the Gaza tragedy, but for Britain’s fascists it boils down to whether Muslims or Jews are the priority hate targets.
PA are the ultimate hypocrites in this obscene hatemongering game. When it suits their leader Mark Collett, he becomes an Islamophobe, tagging along at a recent London demonstration in support of the fraudster Tommy Robinson, even though PA and others regularly denounce Robinson as a “Zionist shill”.
But when there’s a chance to berate their rivals, PA acquire “anti-Zionist” principles. In her attack on North, Towler insisted “You cannot be a nationalist and want a safe homeland for the British people while also supporting Israel. Anybody who does is either completely clueless and needs to stop talking or they’re dodgy as hell and are trying to direct efforts down a dead end, thus working against nationalism.”
Anyone who still hasn’t worked out Towler’s “nationalism” and “anti-Zionism” should bear in mind that she’s best known within her circles as an especially devoted fan of Sir Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader who was married at the home of nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler as guest of honour. Her jailed husband Sam Melia was previously active with the banned nazi terrorist group National Action, and after NA’s proscription he created a secret network called “The Hundred Handers” distributing propaganda to stir up racial hatred.
Towler and Melia’s boss at PA is Mark Collett, who is a contender for the hotly disputed title of world’s number one nazi grifter. Older readers might remember Collett as one of a series of young male acolytes promoted by the BNP’s Nick Griffin. In 2002 he agreed to take part in a fly-on-the-wall documentary for Channel 4, believing it would help promote him as the BNP’s up and coming “intellectual” and as Griffin’s heir.
Channel 4’s reporter spent six months with Collett, and the resulting film (titled Young, Nazi and Proud) was so embarrassing for Griffin’s young favourite that he considered resigning from the party. He thought again, when he realised most fellow members were so stupid that he would be able to make an easy living in charge of leaflet design and other publishing.
Eventually Collett’s arrogance provoked the enmity of a handful of other literate party activists, who created a rebel faction that first tried to persuade Griffin to ditch him, then broke away in an attempted coup at the end of 2007.
Among the leading anti-Collett rebels were BNP administrator Kenny Smith and his then partner Nicholla Ritchie. When discussing how best to undermine Collett, Smith and his faction’s co-leader Sadie Graham (an elected BNP councillor and head of ‘group development’ for the party) were in no doubt as to where they should turn for information.
In a telephone conversation that was recorded and ended up in Griffin’s hands (thanks to his then allies, former South African secret agents Lance Stewart and Arthur Kemp), Graham told Smith: “Basically, we need back copies of Searchlight, because whatever has been in Searchlight about Mark we could use but lots of our people haven’t even read Searchlight, so how the f**k can we get loads of back copies of Searchlight.”
Readers can guess how amused we were when Smith turned up again, this time as an ally of Collett in PA. But the two never quite trusted each other after the 2007 split, which led to a long and expensive court battle between Griffin and Smith’s faction.
So it wasn’t exactly a shock when Smith and Collett fell out again, eventually leading to formation of the Homeland Party, which took away most of Collett’s most efficient regional and branch organisers. For Smith, this was sweet revenge, a more effective repeat of the damage he inflicted on Griffin’s BNP in the late 2000s.
One mystery in 2024 is why TBG has chosen to get cosy with Homeland, while keeping PA at arm’s length. Mark Collett and TBG leader Gregory Lauder-Frost are two of the most pro-Kremlin individuals on the British far right, but Lauder-Frost has pretensions to gentility, and sees Collett (despite his status as a Leeds University graduate) as too close to the boot-boy image of British nazism.
We shall be keeping a close watch on TBG’s tie-up with Homeland (as well as its continuing links to Kenny Smith’s rivals in the British Democratic Party). As UKIP stumbles from crisis to crisis collapses and Nigel Farage continues to be a “Marmite” leader repelling many leading activists within the confused space between the Tory right and outright fascism, we expect to see competition intensifying for members and donors.
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