Today, sadly, is the 25^th anniversary of the start of neo-nazi David Copeland’s campaign of nail bomb terror in London. In an edited extract from his forthcoming autobiography, Gerry Gable reflects back on the events, the man behind the bombs, and the men behind him…

David Copeland

On 17 April 1999, a Saturday afternoon, a nail bomb tore through a busy market area in the centre of Brixton, south London. It was to herald the start of a deadly neo-Nazi terror campaign, and a desperate hunt for those responsible in which Searchlight was to play an important part.

The bomb was a crude device, a length of pipe packed with flash powder from large fireworks, with a detonator and a timing device made from a modified alarm clock, all packed into a box in a sports bag with about 3 kilos of nails poured in and around it for good measure. It was left outside the Iceland supermarket near Brixton tube station but had been moved around the corner by a market worker and left on top of a dumpster. That helped to reduce the casualties. Had it exploded in the crowded street, as was obviously intended, the casualties would likely have been more numerous and more severe. As it was, there were many injuries, some of them very serious, but no-one was killed. One photo became a lasting image of the attack: an X ray of the head of a two-year-old girl in which was embedded a three-inch nail

It was clear to us that this was a racist attack. And, although the device was crude, it represented a considerable step up in the intentions of at least some elements of the extreme right.

At that time, we had an infiltrator, codenamed Arthur, working inside the BNP and other far right groups. From him we knew that, initially, there was as much bewilderment and speculation in the BNP about who was behind it as there was on our side of the fence. The obvious candidates were Combat 18, but we had so seriously penetrated that group that we would have known if anything like this was planned. And we knew they were beginning to panic that it might be blamed on them anyway. Arthur made himself very busy, or as busy as he could without attracting suspicion, but he heard nothing indicating who might have been behind the attack.

A week later, there was another bomb, this time in the Bangladeshi area of Brick Lane in east London. Again, had things gone as the bomber intended it would have been far, far worse. The target was Brick Lane market, but the bomber did not realise it only took place on Sunday, not on Saturday. So, he dumped the bomb between two parked vans in Hanbury St, a little side turning off Brick Lane where it was found by a local man. He thought it had been lost and took it to Brick Lane police station. When he found it closed he dropped the bag into the boot of his car where, shortly afterwards, it exploded.

Arthur was becoming very frustrated; what was the point of what he was doing if we were helpless in finding out who was behind this? But he kept at it, phoning around people in the far right, looking for just the smallest clue.

The breakthrough came when police spotted, on CCTV footage, someone carrying the sports bag in which the Brixton bomb had been housed. The picture was very poor quality, so the Met sent it to NASA in the US for special enhancement. The image which emerged was soon on the front pages of the papers, and when Arthur saw it in the newspaper rack of a local shop it electrified him. He stared at it. “I know him!”

At home he immediately turned on the TV and watched the news reports. He saw the image coming up time and again and the more he saw it, the more convinced he became. “I think it’s Dave…” The young man he thought he recognised was 22-year-old David Copeland, who had joined the BNP two years earlier. He turned up at numerous BNP events but was always a bit of a loner, a bit apart. Arthur had spoken with him a few times and occasionally they had chatted over a pint, but Copeland was not someone that Arthur, or anyone in the BNP for that matter, knew particularly well. Nevertheless, his name was recorded in Arthur’s reports of those meetings.

Copeland harboured deep and profound hatreds: he despised black people with a passion and was driven by a bitter antipathy towards gay people, almost certainly the result of being teased when younger about possibly being gay himself. In 1999, he was working on the Jubilee Line extension in Bermondsey where his father had got him a job. He couldn’t even find work by himself.

At one BNP meeting, at the Swan in Stratford in September 1997, Copeland was pictured standing next to a bloodied John Tyndall during a confrontation with anti-fascists. (We later learned that Tyndall had merely fallen over during the melee and banged his head on the pavement).

But nursing the hatreds that he did, the BNP could not satisfy Copeland’s lust to take the war to his enemies. He read the Turner Diaries, that vile American blueprint for race war and genocide. He began to cast around for options more militant and extreme than the BNP could offer. Then, by chance, he heard about the National Socialist Movement, the creation of a long standing British nazi, Dave Myatt.

Myatt began a long political odyssey in the late 1960s when he joined Colin Jordan’s original National Socialist Movement. From there he moved to British Movement. Despite a purported “search for truth” that has taken him to Christianity, Buddhism, radical Islam and Satanism, the national socialist component of his philosophy has never waned.

Myatt’s philosophy centres around the idea that individuals should seek to overcome their limitations and embrace their inner darkness in order to achieve a higher state of being. This philosophy would later form the basis of the Order of Nine Angles, a bizarre satanic-nazi cult founded by Myatt using the pseudonym Anton Long, which advocated the most extreme forms of personal behaviour – including sexual behaviour – to purge devotees of the moral limitations imposed upon them by the ‘ZOG-controlled’ state and enable them to do what was necessary to ensure the victory of the white race. This sect was, in later years, to crop up in connection with nazi terrorist cases in Britain and the United States, resulting in arrests and convictions.

Arthur had been to an early NSM meeting in Chelmsford in November 1997. It was opened by Steve Sargent, brother of C18 leader Charlie Sargent, whose main concern seemed to be absolving Charlie of the accusation that he was a police informant.

Steve Sergant

The more interesting speaker was a young man called Tony Williams. Arthur’s report notes that Williams attacked the BNP for calling the NSM “Hollywood nazis” and declared that he believed the NSM could form a government. And then he started attacking the Jews.

Dave Myatt spoke last and told the 20-odd people present not to be disappointed by the low attendance because they represented “the cream of Great Britain” and would ultimately prevail.

Myatt had authored a call for terrorist action called “System Breakdown – A Guide to Disrupting the System” setting out a design for a terrorist campaign along the lines of that in the Turner Diaries. He also wrote an essay entitled A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution, posted online in November 1997.  It advocated violent race war and included chapters on “Assassination” and “Terror Bombing”.

Race war, it argued, “… means creating tension and terror within ethnic communities and damaging their homes by firebombs and explosive devices. Part of this involves attacking individuals (and killing some of them)”.

David Copeland joined the NSM in early 1999 and only a few weeks later, now living in Fleet, in Hampshire, was appointed NSM Southern Regional Organiser. A letter from Tony Willams welcomed him into “leadership, responsibility and accountability to your comrades”. He obtained a copy of Myatt’s “Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution”, studied it and absorbed it. From other NSM literature he got hold of the web address which provided him with instructions for making a bomb. Now, the nail bomber was primed.

Shortly after we gave the police Copeland’s name, and an address we had for him in Barking, the police received information from one of Copeland’s Jubilee Line workmates who provided his name, but also, crucially, his phone number, which was listed to the house in Fleet where he was now living.

However, although the CCTV image had led to Copeland being identified, and establishing that he had extreme right connections, as far as the police were concerned it only had the effect of moving him up the list of names they were methodically working through.

But it spooked Copeland. He saw it on the front page of the Evening Standard as he came out of a porn shop on Soho. He immediately went home, collected a bomb he had has just finished making, returned to London and hid out in a cheap hotel in Victoria. He had originally planned to plant the device on Saturday, as with the earlier devices, but now he could not wait. The next day, Friday 30 April, he took it to the Admiral Duncan, a gay pub in Soho, and left it. It was the most devastating of the three attacks: three people died, three friends: Andrea Dykes, who was 4 months pregnant, Nik Moore and Jon Light. Andrea’s husband was seriously hurt. They had met up to celebrate her pregnancy. 79 others were injured, many seriously and some having to have limbs amputated.

Copeland went back to Fleet where later that evening he was arrested. Even now he was not being treated as a target suspect; the two Flying Squad officers who turned up at his address were amongst those still routinely working their way through a list of possible names on which Copeland was number 10. Only when they went into his room and found it decorated like a nazi shrine, with bomb making equipment scattered round and a partially made bomb under the bed, did it become apparent that David Copeland was more than just another name on a list. 

Searchlight’s information about Copeland was passed to the Met’s Special Branch five hours before the Admiral Duncan bomb exploded. It would always have been too late to prevent it, given that Copeland was, at that time, out and about in London. That is, to us, a lasting source of regret. But even so, Copeland had already been arrested by the time SB shared it with the investigation team; when Flying Squad officers turned up at Copeland’s home, it still had not been passed over.

When Copeland came to trial, the police and the prosecution were peddling hard the notion that he was a ‘lone wolf’, acting out of his own deranged motives. And, lazily, most of the press coverage followed that narrative.

The exception was the BBC’s Panorama programme, which was made by Andy Bell, then the programme’s Specials Producer, and Nick Lowles, who was seconded from Searchlight as Assistant Producer. The reporter was veteran crime journalist Graeme McLagan. Virtually alone they investigated the links between Copeland and the NSM and the extent to which he had been influenced by Myatt, Tony Williams and the like.  The programme, broadcast immediately after the trial ended with Copeland’s conviction, documented those links and analysed what had happened. By 1999, it said:

“…a fatal chemistry was taking place. Copeland, the loner, deeply insecure about his sexuality and nursing a loathing of black people and gays, was feeding on a diet of literature which developed and sharpened his hatred and his anger.

From the Turner Diaries he absorbed the idea of sparking a campaign of terror against the enemies of his race.

That idea was fuelled by the writings of the NSM whose literature also provided the internet website address from which Copeland got his instructions in bomb making.”

With intelligence from Searchlight, Panorama then set out to track down and confront the NSM leaders who had had such an evil influence on the young, inadequate David Copeland.

Williams hides from Panorama

They had no real success putting questions to Williams: he was holed up, in his converted vicarage in Norfolk, and despite some ingenious ruses to get him to show himself, he could not be drawn out into the open.

Steve Sargent, at this time, was being equally shy, surfacing just once a day and driving from the council estate in north London where he lived to a local park to exercise his pit bull terrier. He was accosted by the film crew as he drove out of the estate car park. The exit was blocked off with a van and he was questioned through the window of the car by Graeme McLagan. Not surprisingly, he said nothing and kept his head very low. When it was judged enough time had passed that the viewer would be able to form a view as to his reactions, the vans were withdrawn, and he was allowed to leave.

Steve Sargent confronted by Panorama

The third doorstep was by far the most telling. David Myatt, living in rural Cambridgeshire, was being watched by an ex-police surveillance officer with a specially-kitted out van. His movements were established and when, in the morning, he cycled through a narrow passageway from his quiet street to the nearby main road, Myatt’s route was blocked by Panorama’s film crew. Again, his retreat was sealed off by a parked van, and he was interrogated by Graeme McLagan.

Repeating that he had no comment to make, even when provided with the opportunity to deny any influence on Copeland, Myatt only broke from his script once, when McLagan asked him “Any guilt?”

“What I feel” he replied, “is between me and God. It is nothing to be made public. It is a private matter”.

He might try telling that to the bereaved and maimed and injured victims of Copeland’s attacks.

Copeland entered pleas of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility. He was nevertheless convicted of three counts of murder and other offences and sentenced to serve at least 50 years in prison.

I was interviewed for the programme and the producers gave me the last word. I said:

“You have to look at a young man like Copeland and think here is a young guy who’s done terrible damage to our society, he’s killed, he’s done terrible damage to himself and his family as well. Who, at point A, is responsible for all of this? Who woke those terrible ideas up in that boy’s mind?

“I think you just go and see who produces this hate material, and you know…”

You can watch the Panorama investigation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhf-NwlIVtc

British fascists are blaming each other and sinking further into mutual mudslinging after the far right’s many factions failed to nominate candidates in most areas at the local council elections on May 2^nd. Influential neo-nazi umbrella group, Heritage and Destiny, lost no time in going online after nominations closed to describe the right wing showing as “feeble”.

The worst embarrassment was suffered by Patriotic Alternative’s führer Mark Collett. Last month he announced that three PA members would be standing as independents, but when nominations closed two of these had failed to get onto the ballot paper.

Collett can blame Jewish conspiracies for PA’s persistent failure to register as a political party, though many of his own former members suspect the real reason is that Collett and his deputy Laura Towler wish to avoid scrutiny of PA’s donors and accounts. Such suspicions are among the reasons for PA’s split last year into at least three rival groups.

But who can Collett blame for his announced candidates in Tameside, Darren McLean in Hyde and Robert Booth in Droylsden, failing to hand in their nomination papers. Were they kidnapped by Mossad on their way to the Town Hall? Did Searchlight agents burgle their homes? Did the dog eat their paperwork?

There is a deafening silence from PA’s Yorkshire bunker, although Towler’s fundraising streams highlighted the one candidate in the entire country that PA has managed to nominate, in the Cheshire borough of Halton.

Collett’s bitter rival Kenny Smith and his Homeland Party, mainly made up of former PA activists, are also putting up just one candidate, in their case able to use a party name because Homeland (unlike PA) is registered with the Electoral Commission.

Confusingly, Roger Robertson was never in PA, but jumped ship to the Homeland Party from the British Democrats. He’s a former BNP regional organiser who split from Nick Griffin more than fifteen years ago and (like Leppert) ended up in Anne Marie Waters’ For Britain Movement before moving on to the British Democrats and now to Homeland

The newly registered National Rebirth Party, created by the third ex-PA faction, Alek Yerbury’s National Support Detachment, has no candidates. The much older National Front and British National Party, which barely exist in 2024, also have no candidates.

Ageing NF and BNP veterans mostly drown their sorrows in the pub nowadays, but some can be found in the British Democrats, whose four candidates at this year’s elections include three former BNP councillors. Party chairman Jim Lewthwaite is again standing in Wyke ward, Bradford. Former BNP London mayoral candidate Julian Leppert is contesting the new Waltham Abbey North ward in Epping Forest, having represented its predecessor Waltham Abbey Paternoster as a For Britain councillor. Lawrence Rustem is fighting another revised ward, Shepway, Maidstone. And parish councillor Chris Bateman is standing in Castledon & Crouch, Basildon.

Next to Mark Collett, the most red-faced fascist in England at these elections is Paul Golding (who was Collett’s predecessor as Nick Griffin’s blue-eyed boy around the turn of the millennium but is now better known for beating up women, including his former partner Jayda Fransen).

For the past couple of years Golding’s Islamophobic party Britain First has been the best of a weak bunch of fascist election campaigns. Party chair Ashlea Simon gained 21.6% in 2022 and 18.3% last year in Walkden North, Salford. But this year Ms Simon and her party have disappeared from Salford without trace.

Britain First will contest the London mayoral and GLA elections with just one candidate, former Generation Identity militant and BNP candidate Nick Scanlon, but elsewhere in England they have only two standard bearers, David Bamber in Cokeham ward, Adur, and Amanda Peel in Bablake, Coventry.

While Anne Marie Waters has quit her campaign to lead UKIP, her fellow Islamophobes from the deregistered For Britain are scattered among several different parties. Some are now in the National Housing Party, which continues its doomed mission to turn EDL hooliganism into electoral politics and has just one candidate, John Lawrence in Hollinwood, Oldham.

More respectable right-wing parties have a greater presence than the fragmented neo-nazi and Islamophobe movements but are a lot weaker in this year’s elections than many predicted.

Reform UK has been struggling to purge its ranks of antisemites and other lunatics. They have 325 candidates at this year’s council elections, as well as contesting three by-elections, the London Mayoralty and GLA, four other mayoralties, two Police Commissioner elections, and the parliamentary by-election in Blackpool South which is also on May 2nd.

The few areas where Reform has a credible slate of candidates give us clues as to where the party might be strongest at the General Election, and where they might hope to play a serious role in any post-election reorganisation of the British right, especially if the Conservative Party collapse is catastrophic.

These are Sunderland (full slate of 25 Reform candidates), Bolton (full slate of 21), Hartlepool (full slate of 12), Sandwell (18), Plymouth (17), Walsall (15), Barnsley (10), and Lincoln (10).

The Heritage Party, led by a former UKIP GLA member David Kurten, has 33 council candidates and another in a by-election, plus a slate for the GLA. Their strongest areas are Southend, where there are seven Heritage candidates and none from Reform, and Crawley, which has three Heritage candidates and again none from Reform.

UKIP is now more concerned with its own internal struggles (and control of party funds and future legacies) than with anything resembling normal politics. They have only 15 council candidates, plus another two in local by-elections.

In Dorset two of UKIP’s candidates are standing under the label ‘Patriots Alliance – English Democrats and UKIP’. This is the first product of a recent alliance with the English Democrats, led by Essex solicitor Robin Tilbrook, have been involved in several failed pacts with other far right groups over the past twenty years. This year Tilbrook’s diminished forces amount to five council and three police commissioner candidates.

A former UKIP faction that has also sought refuge in alliances with other micro-parties, the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom, has a candidate at the Blackpool South by-election but otherwise seems to have faded away.

For now, the British far right has more YouTube streamers and ‘content creators’ than election candidates.

Review by Andrew Weir

L to R: John Heffernan, Jane Horrocks, Jenna Augen

The latest example of Germany’s never-ending self-interrogation about Hitler is the darkly satirical play Nachtland – it translates as ‘night-land’ or ‘night-nation’ – by Marius von Mayenburg which closes at London’s Young Vic on 20 April.

The choice of date to end the run (Hitler’s birthday) may be coincidence, grim irony or a joke, but it gives a flavour of the kind of awkward choices the audience has to make several times during a deliberately provocative and arresting play.

The action is a series of squabbles between a brother and sister and their spouses as they debate what to do with a watercolour by “A.Hitler” they discover while clearing out their dead grandfather’s attic, with many an aside to the audience inviting our view.

The Jewish wife of the brother urges its destruction and can’t believe her husband’s greed and blindness to what Hitler represents, which drives them apart as he cleaves to his sister, to the strains of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and hints of incest. They kneel and face each other rejoicing in the financial bonanza to come as they minimise the war and the Holocaust.

The sister’s spouse, having scratched his hand on the painting’s frame while unwrapping it, succumbs to a blood infection which invades his body, forcing involuntary tics in the shape of goose-steps and Nazi salutes, one of the broadly comic moments.

The roles are ciphers for debating positions, making the show more an acting out of a seminar on Germany’s past than a journey into emotion. Which is not a bad thing. The device of the painting forces the cast and the audience to think about what their own stance would be as the players constantly break the fourth wall.

It is not to diminish it to say it would make a perfect outing for an A-level class, or a catalyst for heavy argument in the bar afterwards — the modern German theatre loves polemics.

The actors are superb, from Jane Horrocks’s chilly art expert confirming the authenticity of the work to Angus Wright’s would-be buyer, whose angular features – like a movie Nazi — seem to reinforce his admiration for the artist.

John Heffernan stands out as the feeble-minded brother whose self-justification for cashing in on the painting’s sale mirrors the “but they built the autobahns and ended unemployment” excuses his grandparents might have made. The writer deftly balances gallows humour with poignancy probing Germany’s soul.

by Richard Pembroke

The Traditional Britain Group has seen some significant changes over the last 18 months, with expanded internet activity, including a strategic refocus on social media – probably overdue considering the increasing use of the internet by other far-right and extremist groups. These moves can, perhaps, in part be attributed to some significant changes in the leadership of TBG, brought about not by the kind of fractious and factional jostling that has plagued, for example, the Conservative Party, but rather by the more routine depredations of the Grim Reaper.

The deaths of first the group’s founder and president Lord Sudely and then vice-president Sam Swerling (a former Monday Club president and serial far-right party member), made September 2022 to September 2023 what some sympathisers have lamented as an ‘annus horribilis’ for TBG. (Though one wag on the left recast this as an ‘anus horribilis’ on the not unreasonable grounds that ‘they were both arseholes’).

We referred above to “other far-right and extremist groups”, and this raises the question of which of the two descriptions best fits Traditional Britain. Despite the government issuing, in March, a redefinition of the term ‘extremism’, this is at present unclear, as no official list of extreme organisations has been published as we go to press. Our guess is that TBG will be left off the list, when it belatedly arrives, and be classified by the Tories as ‘respectably’ right-wing.

However, TBG does appear, over the last decade, to have acted as a hub and host for other organisations and individuals that might easily be described as ‘extreme’, for example Generation Identity, Patriotic Alternative and various members of the US alt-right – all of which have been represented at the group’s annual conferences and other related events.

The most contaminating of these relationships is arguably that with Patriotic Alternative (PA) which, pending an official ‘extremists’ list, the government has already identified as a group that is very much in the counter-extremism spotlight. The Traditional Britain Group has both voiced support for PA, through social media, and provided a platform for its leaders. At their annual Christmas Social in 2019, Laura Towler was invited to speak on the newly created Patriotic Alternative, of which she was co-founder and second among equals behind Mark Collett (who himself attended the 2017 Annual Conference).

There appears to have been some disagreement, however, among the TBG leadership regarding forging such a direct and obvious link, and all references to Towler’s invitation and speech have now been removed from the Traditional Britain website. Though despite Patriotic Alternative coming increasingly under scrutiny from various state agencies, TBG has continued to support the organisation in recent months through its various social media platforms, as data clearly shows.

For example, in respect of the prison sentence handed down to Laura Towler’s husband – former National Action member Sam Melia, who was found guilty of intent to stir up racial hatred – Traditional Britain has shared posts by both Towler and Collett on their Telegram channel.

TBG purports to champions free speech and truth, but it’s a claim that feels a bit thin when mapped against the group’s support for Putin and his repression of dissident voices. On social media, a post was recently shared apparently presenting the ‘true’ facts behind opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s arrest, and some unevidenced (undoubtedly bogus) claim that Navalny was a CIA agent. Another shared post was in relation to the 2018 Salisbury nerve agent poisonings, the implication being that these did not really take place.

It’s never in-your-face or outright advocacy for Putin, but a steady trickle of counter-information indicating a form of veiled support. As recently as March 2024 the group was posting statements from Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, in relation to leaks of Nato military conversations. It’s perhaps worthwhile quoting this comment by the group published on their website to provide further context to these recent Russian social media postings:

“We at the Traditional Britain Group wish the sad pathetic Cold War warriors, here and in Washington, would shut up and get on with something constructive. Russia is NOT ‘the enemy’ nor are we at war with Russia. We should be making supreme efforts to be friends with Russia which has overthrown communism and restored Christianity.”

TBG founder Gregory Lauder-Frost

This position becomes even clearer when examined against the context of the group’s annual conferences and invited speakers with pro-Russian leanings, alongside connections between Traditional Britain founder and vice president Gregory Lauder-Frost and Putin advisor Alexander Dugin (Lauder-Frost was until recently listed as the UK head of Arktos, publisher of works by Dugin, and has contributed to a website run by Dugin).

One is reminded of the support for Hitler by various individuals and groups in the 1930s, especially Oswald Mosley and Unity Mitford. It is perhaps relevant in this context to bring things full circle and to highlight a recent comment posted by Lauder-Frost in relation to a number of online posts on a genealogical web site, highlighting the well-documented Nazi sympathies of Unity Mitford. “The ‘sources’ on this page are almost obscene,” Frostbite barked. “Totally non-academic and axe-grinding”. A subsequent icy dialogue confirmed that he was indeed mounting a defence of Mitford.

Despite the clearly acknowledged support for Putin on its website and indirectly through speakers at its conferences, Russia-oriented posts on its social media pages are sporadic relative to the constant stream of posts related to migrants, Islam and gender identity issues. It’s possible that this could be part of a broader strategy on the part of Traditional Britain to use social media to attract bigots who may be less inclined to become followers and supporters of Putinism.

Such context provides an indication of both the current and future direction of Traditional Britain alongside its various formal events, the most recent and high profile of these being the 2023 annual conference which followed their well-established pattern of high-status venues and a programme of speakers who are ideologically aligned with the views of those on the far-right yet embedded within the political cultural or academic establishment.

Crystal Ballroom Gazing

The October 2023 conference was held in the plush surroundings of the Crystal Ballroom of the four-star St Ermin’s hotel in Central London. Along with a panoply of high-profile speakers, this suggests an organisation in good health considering the potential cost implications. However, despite having a seating capacity of 180 the conference attracted far fewer attendees than this, and one can only assume therefore that the source of its income to finance such conferences comes from its various levels of membership and donations.

The line-up of speakers for the conference included political figures from Germany and Austria – Stefan Korte of Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Johannes Hübner of the Austrian Freedom Party – complemented by some homegrown British provocateurs including the misogynistic, openly racist podcaster Carl Benjamin alongside academic Neema Parvini, artist Alexander Adams and demographer David Coleman. With respect to the European speakers in particular, one can detect a quite clear anti-Nato bent, significant during these times of Putin’s continued aggression.

That Lauder-Frost is pro-Putin is clear from statements put out by him on the TBG website as well as his contributions to Geopolitika, a Russian site administered by Dugin and subjected to US sanctions in 2022. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that some of Traditional Britain’s visiting speakers have been scrutinised by the authorities when entering the UK.

Take for example, John Laughland, a pro-Russian apologist and commentator, who addressed both the 2019 and 2022 conferences. In relation to the latter, Laughland was questioned by counter-terrorism police and border control when entering the UK in October of that year, and had all his electronic devices confiscated.

It was a similar tale with the 2023 conference. One of those who had difficulties with border control was Stefan Korte who, when travelling by car from the continent, was stopped at Dover and taken in for questioning. Korte has worked for and with AfD regionally, nationally and at European level, and his pro-Russia/anti-Nato stance was most likely the reason why he attracted the attention of the UK Border Force.

Stefan Korte – the West provoked Putin

Korte’s conference speech covered several areas, but the primary thrust was that an eastward expansion of Nato had precipitated Putin’s actions in Ukraine. The message conveyed was that any nuclear deployment against Ukraine would therefore be the responsibility of the US and its allies rather than Russia – though according to Korte an alliance of conservative patriots will ultimately prevent such an outcome.

We have seen Korte networking with various European far-right political factions over the last few years. In 2019, for example, he travelled to Lithuania on behalf of the AfD and spoke as a guest speaker at an event organized by the right-wing radical association Lietuva yra čia (“Lithuania is here”). His speech was not a success and drew criticism from the Lithuanian conservative politician and former defence minister Rasa Jukneviciene, who accused AfD of being a puppet financed by Russia.

In respect of Traditional Britain, as recently as 2021 both Korte and Lauder-Frost were invited by a group of Lithuanian MPs to attend an anti-vaccination rally in Vilnius.

If proof was needed regarding the official Traditional Britain position on Russia, the following was published in a TBG newsletter distributed in 2023, several months prior to the October conference…

“The TBG remain completely opposed to any involvement whatsoever in eastern European affairs and the eternal and complex squabbles there, especially when it rebounds upon our people, as it is currently doing economically. Our government are responsible for the economic crisis in the UK, not Russia.

“Our people have been completely brainwashed by USA/NATO propaganda in this matter, a demonstration of the preparatory ground work governments make before going to war. The BBC in particular, produces brazen anti-Russian propaganda 24 hours a day similar to the old Soviet Cold War propaganda which the Americans have maintained to the present day as though the communists were still in power.

“Our government has done its best to close down or block as many alternative news outlets, agencies, reports and opinions, so there is no chance of anyone getting the full story and the full facts.”

The Russian connection with speakers invited to address the 2023 conference continued with Johannes Hübner of the Austrian Freedom Party, who has also spoken at previous conferences. Hübner is of special interest in respect of a series of e-mails leaked in February 2023, connecting him to a Kremlin-linked lobby group that was offering financial incentives to a number of European politicians to promote pro-Russian policies.

According to reports from European sources Hübner was offered €20,000 to deliver a speech in the Austrian parliament arguing against the imposition of sanctions against Russia, plus a €15,000 bonus should the vote go Russia’s way. Details of the group’s activities came to light via hacked and leaked emails belonging to its coordinator, Russian parliamentary staffer Sargis Mirzakhanian, who ran the International Agency for Current Policyin the years following the annexation of Crimea.

It remains unclear whether the sums referenced were to be paid directly to the two politicians or were budgets for the entire project. In one of the leaked letters, Mirzakhanian reports that he received information “regarding the price tag for the vote” from an unnamed European politician.

Whatever the real details may be of the financial deal, Hübner and a politician in the Italian parliament, Paolo Tosato, did go on to present resolutions against Russian sanctions on their respective parliament floors, though neither was adopted. Hübner has denied all allegations against him, although he recently declared on the floor of the Austrian Parliament: “This policy of the European Union against Russia has caused considerable damage to the economy of the Republic of Austria.”

At the very outset of his somewhat rambling TBG conference address Hübner stated he was speaking as a private individual and not as a representative of the Austrian Freedom Party. Despite this his speech focused on many of the fears perpetuated by his party and in particular the tired trope of Europe being ‘invaded’ by economic migrants, many of whom ended up in the UK.

Hübner castigated Austria for failing to deal with the problem and suggested that his party would resolve the issue at the next Austrian election, where it is expected to gain a substantial number of seats, and indicated a strategy similar to that implemented in Hungary. 

The ‘fear of the other’ was a theme further developed by Professor David Coleman – advisor to Migration Watch and a member of that one-time promoter of eugenics the Galton Institute. In his conference address he revisited his 2013 assertion that declining birth rates and increased immigration would result in indigenous white Britons becoming a minority by 2066, an argument which appealed to the politely respectable and generally xenophobic throng.

Coleman’s presentation was very much as to be expected, namely a defence of an insular Britain, its traditions and culture under attack from immigration and the failed policies of successive governments. How could anyone argue with an academic with the status of the elderly and slightly bumbling professor, who came equipped with a supportive PowerPoint toolkit of graphs and numbers and a collection of ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ peppering his verbal flow, which endeared him to his captive audience.

One can only suppose that such characters – essentially wolves in sheep’s clothing – are a vital component of a ‘Traditional Britain’. As is Lauder-Frost, as were Sam Swerling and Lord Sudeley. It all appears to be part of the grand strategy of the faux-respectable wing of the far right.

An injection of the contemporary into this strategy came in the form of the predictably counter-intuitive narrative of podcaster Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad), whose ‘edgy’ reputation in far-right circles rests on a track record of conspiracy theory, anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish effluent. Despite being in denial and self-identifying as a ‘classical liberal’, his alt-right credentials are very much intact. Let’s not forget his input to a Day of Freedom rally in support of Tommy Robinson back in 2018, after Robinson was banned from Twitter for hate speech.

In May 2019, it was Benjamin himself who was suspended from Twitter and YouTube. Which lent him all the social media credibility necessary for him to be invited to speak at a Traditional Britain conference. His address demonstrated an almost paranoid fear of what Benjamin described as, “a communist insurrection against liberalism to destroy our country”.

One hopes that he will soon undergoing therapy, because he went on to describe practically every aspect of our society as being under attack from some unevidenced “anarcho-tyranny”, all underpinned by Benjamin’s personal brand of omniphobia embracing race, gender, religion, sexuality and political parties.

A depressingly skewed view of contemporary art, in respect of both its practice and funding, was provided by the artist and critic Alexander Adams, not a name known to many aside from viewers of GB News, where he has expressed similar views to those expounded at this conference, along with the occasional piece in Spiked and the Telegraph.

Culture warrior, Alexander Adams

The Arts Council, university departments, galleries – all became targets in Adams’ rather personalised attack on a progressive culture which positively embraces inclusivity and access for all. Several of the references in his speech were names from the history of twentieth century art and culture with associations with fascism: Ezra Pound, the Vorticists, Wyndham Lewis. Perhaps Adams sees these as cultural antecedents to his own work.

More recently, on his social media platforms, Adams has celebrated the birthday of Gabriele d’Annunzio, the Italian poet of the early twentieth century, commonly seen as closely associated with fascism. The work of novelist Knut Hansum, the Norwegian Nazi supporter, has also recently been highlighted on Adams’ new website. It must be a lonely dark corner that Adams currently occupies for himself in the generally radiant, inclusive world of modern British art – despite his work being exhibited in several major UK galleries including the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Neema Parvini was the remaining speaker, and he introduced his new book The Prophets of Doom, a reflection on “eleven thinkers who contradict the dominant linear and progressive view of history”. An academic who associates himself with the dissident right and is prone to quote Julius Evola, notorious for his Fascist-oriented philosophy, in the same way that Adams celebrates artists and writers with similar inclinations.

Neema Parvini – a stream of dissident right consciousness

Parvini was released from his academic role at the University of Surrey due to his far-right associations. He is published by the dissident right publishing house Imperium Press, owned by Michael Edward Maxwell, who was interviewed by Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett in 2022. The publisher is also associated with some explicitly white nationalist characters.

In his Traditional Britain presentation Parvini’s stream of dissident right consciousness embraced many pseudo-intellectual themes and predictably associated multiculturalism with grooming gangs, riots in Paris and supposedly out of control crime in US cities, perpetuating that ‘fear of the other’ encountered with other speakers at the conference.