National Action (NA) today (Monday) gained the dubious honour of being the first far-right group to be banned in the UK.
Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, described the neo-Nazi group as “a racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic organisation”.
But with an estimated membership of just 100, you’d be forgiven for not even knowing who they are:
1) They believe praising Hitler is only ‘a bit dodgy’
In a 2014 interview with The Huffington Post UK, a member of NA called Tom was asked about Hitler quotes in the group’s strategy document.
After replying “Oh God”, he hurriedly tried to explain the context while admitting it did come across as “a bit dodgy”.
“Those quotes are there for a very specific reason,” he said. “If you look at the NSDAP [otherwise known as the Nazi Party] they were a political movement that were successful. Unfortunately as nationalists, we can’t look at people like the Front Nationale in France or the BNP in this country and say we should emulate them because they haven’t been successful.
“What has been a successful nationalist movement? Oh, it was [the Nazis]. If you look at these people, they were concerned about the economy, usury, international finance.
“That’s why we’re using [the Nazis]. They used it and they were able to gain power.”
2) They want to ‘make Britain white’... but they’re not sure what ‘white’ means
Back in May of this year NA deputy leader Alex Davies was filmed being laughed out of Bath town square, after admitting he didn’t know what a white person looked like.
Davies was confronted by a woman and her daughter, and asked if the young girl should be “booted out”.
When it was revealed the teenager was in fact mixed-race, Davies admitted he didn’t know if she should be forced to leave Britain and could only respond that “she looks white to me”.
3) They think this is an effective protest
National Action defaced a statue of Nelson Mandela with a banana during a protest in Parliament Square in 2014.
The protesters also held up a banner that said: “Anti Racist Is A Code Word For Anti White”.
4) When they do manage to organise a march... it ends like this
Despite threatening that Liverpool will “go up in flames” and only “bullets will stop us”, a White Man March organised by NA ended with the group sheltering in a lost property office after being massively outnumbered by anti-fascism campaigners.
The event took place in August of last year and saw the group try and cancel the event 20 minutes before it was scheduled to begin.
5) Their view of history is... interesting
NA member Jack Renshaw is currently being investigated for inciting racial hatred over comments he made at a rally in Blackpool earlier this year.
Strikingly, he believes Britain was on “the wrong side” during World War II and the Nazis had the right idea because they “were there to remove Jewry from Europe once and for all”.
He also talked about “executing” the groups’ enemies, told supporters that the UK had a “Jewish problem” and said the white race was the “superior race”.
6) Their idea of a holiday is posing with Nazi salutes in a gas chamber
This picture from a now-deleted tweet shows two unidentified members of NA posing in a subterranean ante room of the former crematorium at Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.
Performing the nazi salute and holding a NA flag, the picture was captioned: “Oy vey, such horrors. Dem bois recently on tour in Germania.”
Nearly 50,000 people died at the camp under Nazi rule.
The tweet prompted outrage, particularly in Germany, where public displays of Nazi salutes are strictly forbidden under the country’s postwar constitution.
British police launched an investigation into the incident.
7) They launched a ‘Peado Hunt’ despite one of their member’s convictions against a teenager
National Action has launched a “laughable investigative journalism” series called ‘Paedo Hunt’, despite one of its own members being convicted of a sex crime against a vulnerable teenager.
NA adopted the hashtag - #occupypaedophillia - for its series in what it said was a “tribute” to the Russian vigilante group of the same name who lured gay men, under the pretence of a date, before torturing and humiliating them on camera. Six members of the group were jailed for up to six years last year.
National Actions’ targeting of paedophiles was somewhat “ironic”, according to the charity Hope not Hate, given ones of its own members, Ryan Fleming, is a convicted sex offender.
Fleming, who spoke at one of the group’s rallies in Newcastle in January, has a conviction for the false imprisonment and sexual assault of a teenager dating back to 2011.