Author Archives: Searchlight Team

Nothing funny about this Tony Hancock

A nostalgic post on Facebook yesterday, from Mark Cottrell (above, right), editor-in-chief of the self-styled nazi ‘intellectual’ rag, Heritage and Destiny:

“I was in Uckfield in East Sussex yesterday” he writes, “so it would have been rude not to pop by and have a look at the old Tony Hancock Print Shop, which was used by generations of nationalists for over 50 years, to print their magazines, newspapers, posters, stickers, leaflets and booklets. As you can see it’s now a Tyre and Exhaust fitting unit. Tony had many faults, but he was a staunch nationalist till the end (as his late father was too).”

Oh, please, let’s not stop there. Let’s do Mr Hancock’s ‘faults’ rather more justice than that.

Anthony Sandford Hancock (pictured, top left) was a lifelong neo-Nazi, antisemite, racist and holocaust revisionist. He and his father, Alan Hancock, ran a printing press in Uckfield, Sussex, which acted as printer to the fascist and neo-Nazi movement worldwide. It flooded the globe with some of the most vile nazi propaganda imaginable. Most notably, the notorious ‘Did 6 Million Really Die’ by ‘Richard Harwood?’ (aka Richard Verrall of the National Front) poured off Hancock’s presses in print runs of tens of thousands and in many languages to be distributed worldwide.

After an international Northern league meeting in Brighton in 1971 was broken up by the anti-fascist 62 Group it was Hancock who arranged for a local Jewish Chronicle journalist to be savagely beaten and left unconscious in the street in revenge.

Hancock’s international connections put him at the heart of some of the most evil nazi organisations operating at the time. He was the main UK contact for the neo-Nazi terrorists and fascists who plagued Europe with bomb attacks and other violent outrages in the early 1980s. It was at his Heidelburg Hotel in Brighton that Ray Hill, there as Hancock’s guest, was originally introduced to the French neo-Nazi terrorist who would in turn introduce him to the French nazis behind the plot to bomb the Notting Hill Carnival in 1981.

He was also the first point of contact for the fugitive Italian terrorists led by Roberto Fiore who arrived in the UK after the Bologna bombing of 1980. It was Hancock who first received them in Brighton and shipped them on to League of St George contacts in London who looked after them.

In 1989, he inherited the printing business and various properties worth over £1 million from his father, Alan Hancock, a pre-war Blackshirt who remained a lifelong Mosleyite and was one of the defendants in the notorious Lewes race relations trial in 1968. He apparently committed suicide in 1989 but, for years afterwards, son Anthony had to put up with persistent rumours on the far right that it was he who had hooked Hancock senior up to the mains supply at the print shop and despatched him to Valhalla.

An expensive libel action brought by his solicitor, and marriage to a woman who hated his politics but loved his riches, not to mention a gambling habit and some crazy investments in non-existent goldmines, meant that his fortune was soon wiped out. A successful legal action from former NF luminary Tom Acton, chasing considerable debts, did nothing to help and he died, skint, in 2012.

There was however, one bright moment early in this dark life. On 5^th November 1980, outraged by what Hancock was up to in his printworks, a former member of the 62 Group, acting on his own initiative, drove down to Uckfield and burnt the place to the ground.

This is Searchlight’s full 2012 obituary for Hancock:

UKIP Conference: is the rogue builder running out of mugs?

Meanwhile, in Nottingham…

At the UKIP/English Democrats conference some UKIP members (at least) are wondering why they never received their eballots for the election of NEC members.

After the attrition of the last several months, seat after seat has fallen vacant and by our calculations only 2 out of 12 may actually be currently occupied. The most likely explanation is that fewer than ten prospective members have put themselves forward so that those that have will assume their posts without the inconvenience of an election.

This would explain not just the absence of ballots, but also the absence of NEC meeting minutes for the last six months. It may well be that Chairman and Rogue Builder Ben Walker (pictured) can’t actually summon a quorum.

And it would explain how he and unelected leader Nick Tenconi have been able to reposition UKIP as a party of the extreme Christian right without as much as a whisper of formal opposition. That may change today.

But the conclusion has to be that UKIP is not just running out of members, it is also running out of mugs.

UKIP gathers in Nottingham: welcome to the ‘program’

So, UKIP and the English Democrats gathered in Nottingham today for the first day of their first joint conference. And, as well as having to face demonstrators outside the hotel where they met (above), it was not all smooth running.

Apart from anything else, the ‘confidential’ Conference ‘Program’ was so confidential that half the attendees still haven’t seen tomorrow’s agenda. So, to lighten their darkness, we are posting it here.

Oh, and a note to the hapless party Chairman and conference organiser Ben ‘Rogue Builder’ Walker: spelling it ‘program’, unless in a computing context, is really a pretty obvious Americanism and not a great look for a patriotic UK party such as yours. Talking of Walker, we are wondering why some conference-goers are referring to him – sotto voce – as ‘Bent Walker’.

Now, before you get cross, this is clearly not intended as an offensive reference to the UKIP Returning Officer’s sexuality; in fact, the man got married to his long time, and long suffering, girlfriend only a couple of weeks ago. But what other inference is intended, we have absolutely no idea.

Demo pic: SUTR

Grave concerns met with roaring silence on the far right

Radical changes in the laws governing graveyards may be on the cards if recommendations published on 3 October by the Law Commission are adopted by Parliament. This may even open the door to new constructions over old cemeteries, though such speculation may be jumping the gun a little.

England and Wales are fast running out of urban and suburban burial spaces, while many existing cemeteries have been closed to new interments since Victorian times, having been declared ‘full’.

“The last burial in many of these will have happened well over a century ago,” says the report, “so they could be suitable for grave reuse. We provisionally propose that it should also be possible for the Secretary of State to reopen closed burial grounds.”

This may seem like an odd subject for Searchlight to be exercised about – but then, we’re not. We’re just sitting here waiting for sections of the far right to blow their fuses at the news. It is, after all, only a couple of months since the spitlerati were all in a lather about the re-use of one particular graveyard in Stoke on Trent.

“The entire area where the cemetery used to be, where our ancestors are still buried, has been turned into a car park for Mosque goers,” wailed Britain First co-leader Paul Golding regarding St John’s in Hanley, a dilapidated church that has been purchased by a Muslim group to serve as a mosque, and multi-faith community hub.

Britain First’s Paul Golding and Ashlea Simon stirring up hostility at St John’s church

Former BNP leader Nick Griffin also stuck his oar in. And the far-right agitation worked. In the febrile post-Southport atmosphere the church was attacked by a racist mob (below) and had to be protected by a substantial police cordon.

To listen to the nutty nazis, you’d think that rampaging jihadists were feverishly tarmacking over Christian remains like there was no tomorrow. In fact it was all bollocks. There were no remains to disturb, and hadn’t been any for almost 40 years. All of the bodies had been disinterred and relocated in 1985, as part of a shopping centre development.

We’re not aware of any ‘betraying our kith and kin’ agitation taking place at the time. Certainly not a riot. But hey, it’s mass exhumation for Allah that’s the outrage. Clearing corpses for Mammon appears not to be a problem.

Anyway, here we are with some genuine, not made up by Britain Last, proposals to mess around with places where it’s definitely the case that “our ancestors are still buried”. Grave-sharing, perhaps. Squeezing in ‘a small one’ between existing plots. Maybe even covering up with car parks, or shopping centres. Surely the hysterical heritagists will be up in arms. “Hey! That could be my great-great grandfather under there!”

It is of course too soon after the publication of the Law Commission’s report to expect them to have fashioned long, considered statements on the new outrage, but we thought readers would be interested to learn what the churchyard protectors’ first-take responses were…

Britain First’s co-leader Paul Golding: 😶 🌵 🐪 💤

Britain First’s co-leader Ashlea Simon: 🐪 💤 🌵 😶

Nurse, Is It Tea Time Yet’s Nick Griffin: 💤 😶 💊 🐪

Cynics might suspect that the far right only uses graveyard protection as a pretext for anti-Muslim rhetoric. Or that the outrage only comes into play when there’s a riot waiting to have its fuse lit. We could not possibly comment.

Austrian far right scores election success – and British fascists suck up to them

BY ROGER PEARCE

The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) has become the latest far-right success story, finishing in first place in Sunday’s election with 28.9%, though a very long way short of a parliamentary majority. Unlike most other insurgent anti-immigration parties, it’s a party with deep historical roots.

Searchlight readers will remember two earlier periods of FPÖ success, even after the party had moved away from ‘liberalism’ towards the far-right.

During the 1980s Jörg Haider (a closeted homosexual with family roots in Austrian Nazism) led a right-wing faction that took over the FPÖ. Very much in the style that has become common in the 2020s, Haider regularly flirted with Nazi slogans while avoiding anything that would make him too toxic with the political mainstream. He addressed notorious gatherings of Second World War veterans, including SS members, and built links with Arab dictators including Saddam Hussein.

At the 1999 Austrian parliamentary elections Haider’s FPÖ polled 26.9% (not far short of what the party achieved yesterday) and he entered a coalition with the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). Despite being party leader, Haider was too controversial to be given a cabinet post, though for years he retained a power base in the state of Carinthia, where he was Governor for a total of more than eleven years until his death in a car crash in 2008.

By the time of his death Haider had lost control of the FPÖ. After a period of turmoil its next high-profile leader was Heinz-Christian Strache, who had started out close to Haider and in his youth was known to be an ally of neo-nazis in both Austria and Germany.

Strache became a poster boy for the generation of far-right leaders (including Marine Le Pen) who believed that they could ‘de-demonise’ movements formerly tainted by Nazism and fascism. He succeeded in taking the FPÖ back into coalition with the conservative ÖVP from 2017 to 2019. Strache served as vice-chancellor of Austria until May 2019 when a corruption scandal forced him to resign.

This scandal and allegations of financial and political ties to Russia held back the FPÖ for a few years. Their return to electoral success this week is unlikely to see them back in government, because the conservatives will no longer see them as acceptable coalition partners.

This is not only because of their perceived ties to Moscow. Under their latest leader Herbert Kickl, the FPÖ has again adopted racist rhetoric and played with Nazi-era terminology.

Some of these tendencies go right back to the circumstances of the FPÖ’s creation, which built on the earlier absorption of Austria’s ‘national liberal’ tradition into Hitler’s Nazi Party. For historical and religious reasons, Austrian ‘liberals’ were often more sympathetic to Nazism than Austrian conservatives. The first FPÖ leader was a former SS officer and Third Reich agriculture minister, Anton Reinthaller.

In the 2020s, Austrian politics hasn’t moved as far from these Nazi tendencies as some FPÖ apologists maintain, although Putin’s machinations are now an important factor.

It was no surprise to see the UK’s Homeland Party’s online accounts sucking up to the FPÖ. Just a day before the Austrian elections, Homeland’s leader Kenny Smith (a former BNP official with decades of connections to leading figures in the British nazi scene), welcomed an AfD youth leader to his party’s conference.

For the time being the FPÖ distances itself from AfD and prefers to work with Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán. But as we are starting to see in the UK, the anti-immigration movement is abandoning all barriers and all traditional notions of decency and ‘moderation’. It would have seemed ridiculous until very recently to imagine AfD officials working with a British nazi fringe group. So it would no longer be unthinkable for FPÖ to do the same.

That’s why it’s all the more important for mainstream parties to maintain a clear line against any alliances or pacts with the far right, whether formal coalitions or rhetorical flirtations. Even without its deep historical roots in Nazism, the FPÖ should be recognised for what it is. A party of racist hatemongers and Russian agents, and a party that has no place in government.