If you thought that the sordid world of UKIP was, well, as sordid as it might get, then you are sadly mistaken.

The latest extraordinary development is the distribution in Wellingborough, which goes to the polls in a Parliamentary by-election on Thursday, of a leaflet calling for a vote for the UKIP candidate, Geoff Courtenay. He is the miserable specimen who once argued, publicly, that calling someone a p**i was the same as abbreviating ‘sandwich’ to ‘sarnie’.

“Now you may think there is little chance of me winning this seat and becoming your MP…” the leaflet says, and this is certainly the case given that neither Courtenay, nor anyone else, has actually been nominated to stand for UKIP in the constituency.

Echoes here, of course, of Paul Golding’s screw up with the Britain First candidacy in Rochdale, where it was announced that BF were running only for Golding to forget to get the nomination papers in on time.

So, what is going on? Well, perhaps not so much incompetence as sabotage, if we consider this alongside the party’s other by-election campaign in Bristol, Kingswood. There, a UKIP candidate was duly nominated but has since gone on the missing list. Curiously, that candidate is not Ben Walker, who lives a mere 20-odd miles from the constituency, but Mr Nick Wood, an unknown parachuted in from 150-mile away Surrey. Even so, Wood has refused to be interviewed and didn’t show up for a BBC televised debate.

The theory circulating amongst party dissidents is that the last thing that UKIP Chairman Ben ‘Rogue Builder’ Walker can risk at the moment is loose cannon candidates (let alone himself) having to field questions about recently departed Deputy Leader Rebecca Janes’s resignation salvo of allegations about Walker’s behaviour (“he just wanted to get me into bed…”) or about the mysterious trust (sole trustee Ben Walker) which now appears to control the company which owns UKIP.

So, the theory goes, Courtenay was not nominated – though he ploughed on blissfully unaware of being stabbed in the back – and Wood has been given strict instructions to keep out of sight, or at least out of range of potentially embarrassing questions.

And now Walker’s plans for the Leader succession look set to cause havoc. His favourite, the lightweight anti-net zero and pro-car campaigner Lois Perry, who he has presented as a shoo-in, will be challenged after all by Ann Marie Waters, the anti-Muslim bigot who rejoined the party only last year and is its Justice Spokesperson.

Rivals: Ann Marie Waters and Lois Perry

Walker has made it clear he will block Waters if she is elected, while she is telling people that if she wins, she will immediately sack him and replace him with one of her supporters, as would be her constitutional right. She does not appear to realise, however, the significance of the mysterious Walker-run Trust, or why that might make him defend his position like a demented ferret.

There could be blood on the mat.

Out of all the gloom, some good news: David Irving, the pretend historian and cheer leader for the Third Reich, is on his deathbed and is not expected to last much longer. And before we get any lectures on poor taste, remember this: Irving is an evil swine who spent much of his life minimising the holocaust, whitewashing the nazis and attacking the reputations of those who fought against them. The world will be a better place for his passing.

26 years ago today we lost Baron Moss, one of the great unsung heroes of the British anti-fascist movement. Baron was one of the leadership committee of the 62 Group which decided to launch Searchlight as a newspaper in 1964. And it was Baron who brought together Gerry Gable and Maurice Ludmer to relaunch it in 1975, since when it has been published continuously. A great man and a truly great anti-fascist. This obituary, by Gerry, was published in Searchlight in 1998.

NSD’s leader Alek Yerbury (left) denied all knowledge of irregularity, but Scott Pittsy (centre) quickly pointed the finger at Darren Edmundson (right) of rival outfit Patriotic Alternative for the missing cash 

THERE HAS BEEN serious friction down at RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, where rival groups are campaigning against government proposals to house asylum-seekers on the former air force base. On the one hand is the original Save Our Scampton group, set up in March, and on the other the RAF Scampton Real Action group organised by the neo-nazi National Support Detachment of Hitler lookalike Alek Yerbury, and its hangers-on.

RAF Scampton is the former base of the Dambusters squadron, and opposition to its use for accommodation has been complicated by the possibility this would scupper plans for a £300 million regeneration project to turn it into a major tourist attraction – and employer for the area. The scheme, including a Red Arrows visitor centre, a heritage trail and a “living aviation” museum, is predicted to draw up to 200,000 visitors a year.

The campaign has seen camps set up at various gates to the base, with Yerbury’s gang setting up a camp in August. But things turned nasty in November when an online GoFundMe appeal, set up by the NSD but expected to fund the campaign generally, was emptied with over £2000 apparently going missing. Thomas Winter, of the SOS campaign, told the local press: “The missing money was supposed to be for the camp … It’s really upsetting, I can’t stand thieves.”

Yerbury denied all knowledge and appeared to suggest there had been fraudulent activity: “As I have had nothing to do with the administration of any of the fundraisers or finances, I am not in full possession of the facts at this point.”

Scott Pittsy, a Leeds-based activist who led a march through Skegness with Yerbury earlier in the year, was in no doubt what had happened. He pointed the finger squarely at Welsh Patriotic Alternative activist Darren Edmundson, the self styled Pembrokeshire Patriot, who in April narrowly escaped a prison spell for breach of a community order.

Pittsy posted on Facebook: “Keep your eyes peeled for this one Darren Edmundson the one who robbed our go fund me money after giving us 1116 from it took the other 1300 hides out at ptsd camp in Bath also ran by a group of clowns it’s just a place to get pissed and smoke there (sic) heads off look it up and see what the reviews say it’s a disgrace use veteran’s as a front and to get donations.”

Pittsy himself was arrested in October following allegations of racially aggravated harassment at the camp gates.

The police concluded that no further action need be taken: the money had been taken from the account by someone authorised to do so, presumably Edmundson – he then popped up in a Pembrokeshire paper claiming he had been exonerated. That did not stop more allegations, albeit largely unsupported by evidence, from being posted by other far-right activists.

First published in the Winter 2023/24 issue of Searchlight magazine

Reynouard Absconding risk means he is likely to remain in jail if he appeals

HOLOCAUST DENIERs are panicking after an Edinburgh court judgment that threatens to end their use of the UK as a base for pseudo-academic anti-Semitism. On 12 October, Sheriff Chris Dickson ordered the extradition of French nazi Vincent Reynouard (pictured below) who is wanted by French prosecutors to answer charges relating to a series of Holocaust denial videos, one of which was titled “What to Do About the Jews?”.

Ever since the 1970s there has been an organised movement pushing theories that Hitler’s death camps were a gigantic lie invented by an international Jewish conspiracy. Although the original generation of deniers is mostly dead or very old, the internet has given the next generation a bigger platform.

Reynouard, 54, is considered to be the most active of this second generation. He spent several years on the run from French courts. Living in Welling, southeast London at a home owned by the wife of his Belgian fellow nazi Siegfried Verbeke, he worked as a maths tutor. He fled to Scotland in 2021, fearing that the authorities were catching up with him. He then hid near St Andrews for two years until his arrest in November 2023.

Searchlight has heard that Reynouard will appeal the extradition ruling and his case might not be resolved for several months, but due to the likelihood of absconding he will remain in jail in Edinburgh.

Although they often pose as academic advocates of “free speech”, most Holocaust deniers unsurprisingly have a record of far-right politics. Reynouard was an active member of both the neo-nazi PNFE (one of whose members tried to assassinate French President Jacques Chirac) and the anti-Semitic, schismatic Catholic sect SSPX.

The other leading denier of his generation, Germar Rudolf, 59, was part of several German far-right groups, including the now defunct Republikaner, before starting to publish his conspiracy theories about Auschwitz. Rudolf worked with British nazi printer Anthony Hancock, notorious for producing some of the world’s most extreme anti-Jewish literature, as well as sidelines in fake passports and forged currency.

In the UK, the main Holocaust deniers since the 1970s were former National Front vice-chairman Richard Verrall and former British National Party (BNP) deputy führer Richard Edmonds. Their most prolific international crony was Ernst Zündel, who became right-hand man to Canadian nazi leader Adrien Arcand after emigrating from his native Germany in the 1960s.

For many years the deniers’ main international network was the US-based Institute for Historical Review (IHR), co-founded by an expatriate British anti-Semite, Dave McCalden, a prominent activist in the NF and its National Party breakaway before emigrating. The IHR eventually split into two factions, each led by men with a history of far-right activism.

At the end of the 1970s Mark Weber was editor of National Vanguard, magazine of the National Alliance, the most notorious and violent racist organisation in the USA. Its leader, William Pierce, wrote The Turner Diaries, a fictional blueprint for nazi terrorism, and worked closely with a real-life terrorist group known as The Order, which carried out bank robberies and murdered a Jewish broadcaster.

Weber later split from his partner in the IHR, Willis Carto, who went on to form a rival Holocaust denial magazine called Barnes Review. Like Pierce and several other US racist leaders, Carto had a background in extremist activity dating back to the 1960s.

It should not be surprising that the Edinburgh court has found Reynouard’s “history” to be thinly disguised anti-Semitism. Although there is no explicit law in the UK against Holocaust denial, the charges that Reynouard faces in France have been ruled to be extraditable on the grounds that they are broadly similar to UK laws against inciting racial and religious hatred.

His leading French supporters include Yvonne Schleiter, sister of the notorious French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson who died in 2018, one day after speaking at a conference in London alongside Reynouard and British nazis. Schleiter’s son Philippe was part of a faction that broke away from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s French National Front in 1999, and is now a leading figure in the Islamophobic party Reconquête led by Éric Zemmour.

Reynouard’s friends on the British far right are hoping to stir up anti Semitism among conspiracy theorists, especially in the context of the war in Gaza, but they are divided among themselves over the war in Ukraine.

Nevertheless, Searchlight expects that several of the usual suspects will use next year’s appeal in the Scottish courts as part of their effort to boost genocide denial and associated neo-nazi activity across Europe.