What my insight on far right reveals about unrest that sparked riots

The assault was so bad that an off-duty cop in a nearby house emerged when he heard my head being beaten off a fence. He pulled his gun. They ran, but only after one final kick to my head, and stamping on my friend’s face. I awoke in hospital, teeth kicked out, lucky to be alive. Two were charged and convicted.

Every investigative reporter worth their salt has a handful of themes which run through their work, nearly always related to their own life. For me, it’s the Northern Ireland conflict, political extremism, the far right, and social evils like poverty. That night, when neo-Nazis tried to put me in a graveyard, it started my lifelong exploration of the far right and what makes extremists tick.

I’ve been a reporter for more than 30 years, and dedicated huge amounts of time to unmasking the far right at home and abroad. I’ve written countless investigations and made documentaries, all with one intent: to warn that sooner or later festering far-right violence would spill on to the streets of Britain, and nations like America. As recent years in the USA, and current events in England and Northern Ireland show, I was unfortunately right.

Sadly, I’ve sometimes endured TV commissioners and newspaper executives who refused to understand the “newsworthiness” of investigating the far right. I hope they feel foolish today. Ironically, some now write hand-wringing pieces over the media’s failure to address the causes of the riots.

Not all the extremists I met were neo-Nazis – though many were – but every one of them adhered to dangerous and divisive far-right ideology.

Terrorism

After university, I was a cub reporter, learning my trade and specialising in crime, terrorism and security. I began investigating links between the neo-Nazi group Combat 18 and loyalist paramilitary organisations like the Ulster Volunteer Force and its breakaway Loyalist Volunteer Force. For those unaware of the far right’s intricate codes, 18 references the letters A and H, first and eighth alphabetically. AH stands for Adolf Hitler. Combat 18 grew out of the early British National Party. It has carried out multiple acts of violence against ethnic minorities.

Due to death threats, I moved to Scotland in the mid-1990s, and continued my investigations. Contacts within loyalist paramilitary groups connected me with the UVF in Glasgow. We met in a pub near the Clyde. I talked to them about their agenda.

It was clear they were chiefly motivated by sectarian hatred, and their business was mostly supporting Protestant gunmen in Northern Ireland. But there was a second theme to their bigotry: immigrants in Scotland.

I felt deeply uneasy that this cocktail of hate was simmering away in the city I’d made my home.

Shortly afterwards, far-right terrorist Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma, killing 168 including children. McVeigh was executed for the worst act of terror on American soil prior to September 11. He was inspired by the book The Turner Diaries – a fictional account of a white race war written by Dr William Pierce, head of what was then America’s most dangerous and largest neo-Nazi organisation, the National Alliance.

I secured an interview with Pierce. He was blood-chilling, a sneering, calculated, Hitler-worshipping anti-Semite. Pierce – and similar figures in organisations like the Ku Klux Klan and Britain’s Combat 18 – promulgated “leaderless resistance”: the doctrine that small groups of “lone wolf” terrorists can operate at a more deadly level, and be more difficult for police and intelligence services to surveil, infiltrate and destroy, by using a closed “cell structure”.

In other words, if multiple groups of one, two or three extremists act alone, murdering and bombing, they can spark race war, bring down democracy, and establish a Nazi dictatorship where Jews and people of colour are either killed or deported. That madness was their philosophy.

I discovered that Pierce and the National Alliance were in close contact with far-right extremists all over the world, including the BNP.

Nail-bomber

BY February 1999, I was The Herald on Sunday’s investigations editor, focused on organised crime, Irish terrorism, the growth of Islamist terror, and far-right extremism.

Within weeks, the London nail bombings began. It was my job to investigate. Neo-Nazi David Copeland was eventually arrested. A lone wolf, like Timothy McVeigh, he operated according to the doctrine of leaderless resistance.

Over three dreadful weekends, Copeland detonated bombs in racially-diverse Brixton and Brick Lane, and Soho’s Admiral Duncan pub, a popular LGBT bar. Four died, including an unborn baby, and 140 were injured.

Copeland got life. He’d been a BNP member and read The Turner Diaries.

He told police: “My main intent was to spread fear, resentment and hatred throughout this country … My aim was political. It was to cause a racial war … There’d be a backlash from the ethnic minorities, then all the white people will go out and vote BNP.”

Copeland feared he was gay. I’ve met hundreds of neo-Nazis. They’re all virulently homophobic – as well as misogynistic, racist, and anti-Semitic. It’s struck me that perhaps these men – who all exhibit their masculinity in cartoonish, exaggerated ways – were riddled with self-hate over some aspect of their sexuality which they repressed.

My investigations into Copeland started to unravel the nexus between far-right extremists in Britain and nations like America, Germany, Sweden, Italy and France. Members of organisations like Blood & Honour – a British neo-Nazi group connected to Combat 18 – were close to organisations such as the National Alliance. There were even meetings between British and American neo-Nazis where the notion of lone wolves and leaderless resistance was discussed.

Think of this international nexus as points on a map, or communication nodes. Senior figures in British extremist groups keep contact with senior figures in American groups – sharing ideas, tactics and philosophy. Those ideas ripple down to the rank and file, along with the doctrine of leaderless resistance and lone wolves.

We would see this play out in Norway in 2011 when Anders Breivik acted alone murdering 77 people. Breivik, in turn, inspired Brenton Tarrant who partially live-streamed himself killing 51 people in attacks on the Muslim community in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Anders Breivik Image: PA

The far right often depends more on the “virus of influence”, than direct organisational connection. We saw that to some degree in recent rioting. William Pierce inspires McVeigh, McVeigh inspires Copeland; Breivik inspires Tarrant; online British extremists in 2024, inspire street thugs. Far-right extremism is an ideology which ripples across the West.

Scottish hate

AFTER the nail bombings, I got my teeth into far-right extremism in Scotland. I made contact with one of the country’s most influential extremists: Steve Cartwright, a prominent BNP member linked to Combat 18 and influential in Blood & Honour.

He’d engage me in lengthy, disturbing conversation featuring much Holocaust denial. Cartwright was central to the growth of white power music across Britain, Europe and America - a major recruitment tool of young extremists - and would rail against multiculturalism or, as he put it, ‘the multi-culty’.

Cartwright attended meetings of the American Friends of the BNP – founded by the BNP’s Mark Cotterill, who had been in the National Front. Meetings of this organisation attracted former KKK members.

Another far-right Scottish extremist I had the misfortune to investigate was Jim Dowson. From Airdrie, this former Orange Order member was once linked to a loyalist flute band accused of glorifying UDA paramilitary Michael Stone, who murdered three Catholics. Dowson was militantly anti-abortion. He later became the BNP’s chief fundraiser.

I first met him at his Cumbernauld council house in the late 1990s. Today, he’s supposedly worth millions. He was later linked to a number of websites which pumped out pro-Trump hoaxes tying Hillary Clinton to Satanism, paedophilia and other conspiracies.

Dowson was involved in Belfast’s ugly “flag protests”, and later given a three-month suspended jail sentence after pleading guilty to participating in unlawful public processions.

By now I was in semi-regular contact with Nick Griffin, BNP leader. He’s one of the most unpleasant individuals I’ve ever met. He’d been in the National Front as a teenager, and was involved in the white power music scene, but studied at Cambridge. In 1998, he was convicted of distributing material likely to incite racial hatred.

BNP Leader Nick Griffin 

Griffin wanted to do for the BNP what Marine Le Pen would do for the French Front National: shift its image from street thuggery to legitimate political party. Griffin, however, couldn’t escape his past. He’d referred to the Holocaust as “the Holo-hoax”, and said: “I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that six-million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the Earth was flat ... I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch hysteria.”

He has said that “organised Jewry has a massively disproportionate hold on the mass media”.

An officer who overheard Griffin take a phone call, while police searched his home once, said he heard Griffin “say to this unknown caller ‘they’re very civilised, more civilised than the [Metropolitan Police], no Jews or P**is’”.

While being interviewed by detectives, Griffin said the purpose of everything he did was summed up in one sentence: “We must secure the existence of our race and a future for white children.”

Murder

PAY attention to that phrase. It’s the infamous “Fourteen Words”, the slogan of white supremacists, coined by David Lane, who founded the American terror group The Order. Lane was sentenced to 190 years for racketeering, conspiracy and violating the civil rights of Alan Berg, a Jewish radio host murdered by The Order in a drive-by shooting with Lane the driver.

I once spent a weekend interviewing Griffin at his home in Llanerfyl, Wales. I realised he planned to take his loathsome ideology mainstream and wanted to show the reality of the man. His wife, a nurse, was almost as unsettling as Griffin. Hate radiated from her. His daughter Jennifer was then 15 – this was 2002 – and in the BNP youth wing. The far right like to get them young.

He told me about wanting to “repatriate ethnics to their country of origin”, and railed against the ‘“leftist elite’ – a talking point heard today from right-wing politicians and journalists. I often wonder if they care they’re parroting Griffin.

I questioned Griffin, whose father was a Tory councillor, about his “suits not boots” strategy: in other words putting well-educated, well-dressed BNP members like him front and centre, and keeping skinheads out of sight. I left Griffin feeding the pigs on his small-holding farm, returning to Scotland for a much-needed shower.

Griffin would later be elected to the European Parliament and appear on Question Time, normalised by the BBC. I’d stay in touch with Griffin over the years, questioning him about the tactics of the British far right as I watched it slowly make inroads into UK politics. In 2006, the BNP took nearly 230,000 votes in local elections, averaging 18% in contested wards, electing 33 councillors. In 2007, it took nearly 300,000 votes. At the 2009 European elections, the BNP took 943,598 votes.

It was now – at the then height of far-right expansion in Britain – that I undertook an investigation lasting 18 months. I began exploring the rise of the far right globally, travelling all across Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Russia and America. It was an experience which horrified even me – and by now I’d spent more than a decade in the neo-Nazi mire.

Grooming

IN Scotland, I uncovered that Steve Cartwright had helped bring the concept – first originated in America – called Project Schoolyard to Britain. This saw neo-Nazis handing out white power CDs to children at school gates.

This was an important and frightening development. Kids were being groomed. I began filming anything I could related to this, and eventually had enough material to air the documentary Nazi Hate Rock. It got me a Bafta nomination.

Let me make clear just how vile white power music is: there’s a song like “Jack-Hammered N****r P***y”, or “Freezer-full of N****r heads”.

I followed Cartwright to Italy with his friend Chris Telford, a well-known BNP activist, whose band Nemesis was playing at a huge white power concert outside Verona. They talked for hours about “the biological survival of the white race”.

Cartwright, then under Special Branch surveillance, boasted he “wasn’t afraid to hate”. In Milan, I met Francesa Ortolani, known as “Italy’s first lady of fascist music”, and watched her perform “Don’t Go Around with the Jews”. She told me she “hates black people”. She was one of Europe’s most downloaded white power musicians.

Later, in Sweden, I’d meet another woman idolised in the white power movement. She went by the name Saga, and was considered a far-right sex symbol. Adoring skinheads mobbed her in Stockholm. She told me her philosophy was “I just don’t want people that aren’t like me, around me”.

I watched her play a white power gig in northern England organised by Blood & Honour. White power is big in many of the towns where recent riots broke out. Like today’s riots, the gigs – held in pubs, clubs or hotels sympathetic to extremists – were organised by phone or online to stay one step ahead of the law. Saga gave Nazi salutes to the crowd, and skinheads gave Nazi salutes back. One neo-Nazi brought his eight-year-old child along.

In my documentary, you can watch two 14-year-old American girls, Lynx and Lamb, singing the song “Strike-force White Survival” in front of a baying crowd of US Nazis.

Although the British band Skrewdriver are considered the founders of white power music, America is the heartland. It’s where bands like Blue Eyed Devils release songs called Final Solution.

Project Schoolyard was invented by the US white power record label Panzerfaust. Its slogan is: “We don’t just entertain racist kids, we help create them.” My investigations took me to the isolated, armed compound of the National Alliance in West Virginia, America. By now William Pierce was dead, and the movement led by his protege Erich Gliebe. He once boxed under the name “the Aryan Barbarian”. His wife Erica, a former go-go dancer with the stage name Holly Caust, was the high priestess of the First United Church of Adolf Hitler. I spent a week with these people.

I wandered around the National Alliance warehouse – stocked with over a million dollars worth of white power CDs, Hitler mouse mats, posters of girls holding cans of Zyklon B poison gas under the words “Got Jews?”, and boots that left swastika footprints on a victim’s face.

There were sculptures and pictures of Hitler throughout. Gliebe played me recordings of hate calls to gay people. He and his wife put on “Klassic Klan Kompositions” with one song called “Move them N*****s north”. Gliebe found it “humorous”. Erica later told me: “I chose someone to mate with on their race.”

Genocide

THE National Alliance sold the computer game Ethnic Cleansing. I watched young Iraq war veterans playing the game, murdering Jews, Mexicans and African-Americans. The Nazis later took me into the woods to show off their collection of machine guns and pistols.

I went to Michigan to meet Shawn Sugg – star of America’s white power scene and friend to Steve Cartwright and Chris Telford. He had a taste for drinking and fighting, and thought himself an outlaw. He told me the “Fourteen Words” were the heart of his philosophy and then, without batting an eye, said: “You know, Neil, I used to think about genocide. We live on this crowded planet and I just thought ‘wouldn’t it be great it we got rid of some undesirables’.”

Back in Britain, I spent many weeks in Heanor, Nottingham, the nation’s skinhead capital, and home to white power band Whitelaw. Their leader Benny was a dead-eyed hatemonger who raged against LGBT people. Bassist Steve – a skinhead straight from central casting – had stickers on his guitar reading “My boss is an Austrian painter” or denouncing “race-mixing sluts”. Some of the band’s hangers-on were profound alcoholics, drunk from the moment they woke.

I went undercover into an illegal neo-Nazi gig in Germany, near Leipzig, to watch Whitelaw play in front of a crowd of Hitler worshippers. It was the most disgusting experience of my life. Whitelaw were on stage shouting “Death to ZOG” when riot police turned up, surrounded the building, covered the exits with attack dogs, and ringed the place with floodlights. ZOG means “Zionist Occupied Government” – that’s how neo-Nazis refer to Western democratic governments.

As violence escalated – tear gas was later fired – I hunkered down in the attic of the hotel where the gig was taking place and filmed riot cops and Nazis fighting. During the battle, I spoke to Henrik Ostendorf, a youth leader of the NDP – then Germany’s main far-right party.

Back then, the NDP had state parliament seats. It was later renamed Homeland, and this year sanctioned by the federal court as it “aimed to undermine or eliminate” democracy.

Ostendorf watched as fellow Nazis were arrested and told me: “A few years ago, we were the poor, poor Nazis, and everybody was laughing about us, ja? But now, we have the power. Never give up.

“Always be optimistic, and who knows, maybe in five years – 10 years – we will give the orders to these …” And he paused, sneering, and pointed to the police: “Soldiers. We are the light – we are the sun. And after the dark– the cold night – the warm sun has to come again. Hail the new dawn.”

Also in attendance that night was NDP regional deputy leader Klaus-Jurgen Menzel, who grew up during the war. As Whitelaw played their signature tune “Fetch the Noose”, he told me it was his role to “educate” the young neo-Nazis at the gig to be good, patriotic Germans.

Later, back in Britain, I’d spend the evening at the Union Jack-draped home of Whitelaw bassist Steve. He was shaving his head, polishing his oxblood DMs, and boasting about “P**i-bashing” and once beating some immigrants to a pulp. He told me: “For things to get better, they have to get worse, and to me that means I’d let every asylum seeker into this country who wants to come. I’d let them all in ‘cos that would cause enough unrest to give me my way.”

My blood chilled. I soon discovered the BNP was getting in on the music act, and had set up its own label Great White Records.

At its studios near Halifax, I watched Nick Griffin and his daughter laying down tracks. David Hannam, Great White Records manager, told me: “It’s solely aimed to help the BNP. Young people love anything that’s seen as rebellious – so when social workers and teachers and parents go ‘that’s taboo’, the hope is young people always like to rebel, and in our opinion if they’re going to rebel, we’d like them to do it our way and listen to our music.”

Griffin smiled, adding: “Music is a very effective way of getting our views across.”

However, his “suits not boots” strategy was shot to pieces in my documentary. In the film you can watch Scott McLean, the party’s former deputy chairman, at a Nazi cross-burning ceremony in Scotland where racist songs were sung and “jokes” made about Auschwitz.

Race war

MAKE no mistake, white power music is deadly. Devon Burghardt of Turn It Down, the Chicago-based anti-white power music monitoring group, told my documentary team about Benjamin Smith, who left two people dead after a two-state killing spree – his own version of a “racial holy war”. When the police finally caught him, his car was stocked with weapons, ammo, money, and caches of white power CDs.

After 2010, matters began changing. The unpleasant truth is that in Britain, the advent of the Tory government drew support from the BNP. At the 2010 Westminster election, the BNP took 564,331 votes. For context, the SNP took 491,386 votes. Come 2015, the BNP had fallen to just 1,667 votes at Westminster. The arithmetic is telling.

The English Defence League would draw much of its membership from the waning BNP.

Indeed, Tommy Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – the co-founder of the now defunct EDL, was a member of the BNP and now blamed for fuelling much of the recent far-right unrest across England and Northern Ireland by spreading disinformation.

The far right now became just as adept at using social media as they had music. During the recent riots, one far-right channel on the Telegram platform had 13,000 members.

Extremists plotted attacks on immigration centres, and swapped information on how to make petrol bombs. They used Telegram to mobilise rioters, sharing locations including the sites of mosques.

Telegram has since shut down the most noxious channels.

As Conservatives dismantled the asylum system and demonised refugees, the far right saw a way to regain the relevance it once had in the 2000s. It began a campaign of social media disinformation, claiming women or children were being attacked by male refugees “of fighting age”.

Last year, I reported how Erskine in Renfrewshire became a far-right flashpoint with the extremist organisation Patriotic Alternative targeting a hotel housing refugees. They were faced down by counter-demonstrations from trade unionists and anti-racist campaigners. As we saw during recent rioting, hotels housing refugees were also targeted.

During the Erskine protests, I spoke to Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett, a former BNP member once close to Nick Griffin. In 2021, the Jewish Chronicle reported Collett “promoted Mein Kampf to thousands of followers online”.

He was covertly filmed admitting he admired Hitler, and describing Aids as a “friendly disease” as “blacks, drug users and gays have it”. He told me: “We’re unashamedly pro-white and stand up for the interests of the indigenous people of these islands: white British people.”

Former PA member Kristofer Kearney had pleaded guilty to disseminating terrorist publications. He’s said to have been an active member of the neo-Nazi National Action until just before it was banned for glorifying the murder of MP Jo Cox.

I asked Collett about The Jewish Chronicle reports. He said: “I don’t care what The Jewish Chronicle says … I’m not interested in their hypocritical babble.” He said that “post-Trump, post-Brexit” words like “Nazi”, “bigot” and “racist” no longer had “an effect”, adding: “Those words are becoming increasingly meaningless.”

“There’s big change coming”, he boasted, saying that as an “ethno-nationalist” he “desires a largely ethnically-homogenous country”. Collett added ominously: “Protests will continue all over the country until this issue is solved.”

The future

ALL that you’ve read here watered the garden where the far-right riots grew. Today, we’ve seen the consequences of such propaganda and hate play out on the streets. Believe me when I say I know these people. They’re dangerous. They haven’t gone away and they will return. They always return.

The only way to ensure we never fall victim to their extremism again is to crush them so hard they never get up.

That doesn’t just mean draconian prison sentences for foot soldiers and ringleaders, but recognising that much of the far right’s rhetoric became normalised both by the Conservative and Reform Party, and large sections of the British media, over recent years.

For all their hate and cruelty, the far right could never have gained the traction we’ve seen this last week – never caused the mayhem they did – if so many in our press and political parties hadn’t happily parroted their talking points, for money and power.