Odious group praised Jo Cox killer and thinks Hitler was ‘too merciful’
NATIONAL Action was the first far-Right group to be banned by the Government under a crackdown on extremists.
Home Secretary Amber Rudd said the secretive group, which flourished on social media, was ‘racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic’.
National Action championed Thomas Mair, 54, the white supremacist who received a whole-life sentence for the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox in June 2016.
Speaking at the time, Miss Rudd said: ‘National Action is a racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic organisation which stirs up hatred, glorifies violence and promotes a vile ideology, and I will not stand for it. It has absolutely no place in a Britain that works for everyone.’
An entry for National Action in the official list of proscribed groups says it is a ‘racist neo-Nazi group’ that was established in 2013 and has branches across the UK which ‘conduct provocative street demonstrations and stunts aimed at intimidating local communities’.
The document adds that the group is ‘virulently racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic’ and promotes the idea that Britain will ‘inevitably see a violent race war’. The organisation ‘seeks to divide society by implicitly endorsing violence against ethnic minorities and ‘race traitors’.
Its website also carried images celebrating the terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando in which 49 revellers were murdered and another depicting a policeman’s throat being slit.
The Home Office said: ‘The images can reasonably be taken as inferring that these acts should be emulated and therefore amount to the unlawful glorification of terrorism.’
National Action’s activities and propaganda materials are particularly aimed at recruiting young people.
It has also claimed Hitler’s major fault was showing ‘mercy’. Spokesman Jack Renshaw called for Jews to be ‘eradicated’ during a secret meeting of farRight nationalists. Police said 22 suspected members or associates of National Action were arrested in 2016.
One member Zack Davies, 26, was jailed for life last year for attempting to behead an Asian dentist in Mold, North Wales, in a racially motivated attack.
Before National Action was banned, Hitler-loving Essex University politics graduate Benjamin Raymond, 28, acted as the group’s joint leader and public face.
Appearing on BBC radio two years ago he said National Action supported Nazism and agreed that Adolf Hitler was ‘absolutely’ a role model.
Once pictured with a rifle, he has said: ‘There are non-whites and Jews in my country who all need to be exterminated.
‘As a teenager, Mein Kampf changed my life. I am not ashamed to say I love Hitler.’