Right for united front
anything but you can hear people talking.
“You hear people saying of them now, of Britain First, that they’re all racist and that’s what people would have thought of me then.
“I’ve never been a racist. I think back and I think, ‘You did make a big mistake there, joining that crowd.’”
There has only been one incident that caused William bother.
In 2008 the BNP membership list was leaked and William’s name was on it.
He works for a university and had used his work email address.
At the same time, a head engineer at Cambridge University had been outed as a BNP member and there were calls for him to be sacked.
William says his bosses were very fair and he explained that his BNP days were long behind him.
He believes his experience shows how people can become caught up in far right politics.
He said: “They pick up the problems on the street and tap into what are people saying.
“So, where there are concerns about immigrants and asylum seekers, they say they’re stealing jobs, which is rubbish.
“They say they’re here stealing off the state, which is also rubbish.
“The Jews came here fleeing the atrocities in Europe after the Second World War and we welcomed them.
“People are fleeing atrocities now yet not everyone seems to be able to welcome them and understand that they are also fleeing atrocities.
“We have some high profile cases at the moment in Glasgow of wee Giorji and the two Pakistani brothers, Somer and Areebs.
“The BNP wouldn’t tell you their side of the story. They would twist it and an ordinary guy in the street could believe them.
“Once you started digging a wee bit deeper and that tone of language, that is the real crowd.
“That is the crowd everybody thinks about and they appeared at meetings eventually but they weren’t there at the start.”
He added: “It was a huge mistake. But I’ve come full circle now. Those days are well behind me.”