RACIST PRODUCED FAR-RIGHT PODCAST FROM TINY VILLAGE
BLINK and you could miss Gelli – half a dozen houses, a postbox, a chapel and a defibrillator on the banks of the Afon Syfni stream. A quieter place it is hard to imagine. So when armed police turned up to raid a one-bedroom cottage in the Pembrokeshire hamlet just before Christmas 2019 it’s fair to say it caused something of a stir.
If the police raid surprised locals, the reason for their presence shocked them – their neighbour James Allchurch had been running a far-right racist podcast right under their noses.
Allchurch had lived in the little rented cottage in Gelli for four or five years by the time police came knocking. People living in the area say the 51-year-old kept himself to himself and didn’t go out much, nor did he seem to have many visitors. Unemployed, with mobility problems, and taking regular doses of testosterone, he would occasionally pick up shopping for the older residents.
Behind closed doors and unbeknown to those living around him Allchurch was spending upwards of 12 hours a day producing material for his podcast which was originally called Radio Aryan but was later renamed Radio Albion. He may have been James in the village but online he used the alias Sven Longshanks, a reference to King Edward I who was known as Edward Longshanks and was responsible for expelling Jewish people from England in 1290.
The podcasts came to the attention of counter-terrorism police in the north of England. Following a lengthy investigation, Allchurch was charged with 15 offences under the Public Order Act of distributing audio material to stir up racial hatred. Each charge related to a particular episode which had been uploaded over a two-year period. Allchurch denied the charges, and the case went to trial at Swansea Crown Court in March this year.
Jonathan Rees KC, prosecuting, told the court the defendant used discussions about stories in the news to “espouse his hateful views on racial supremacy, black people, other nonwhite people, Jewish people and the race war”.
The barrister characterised Allchurch’s podcasts as being “highly racist, anti-Semitic and white supremacist in nature” and said “the very purpose of Radio Aryan was to spread his propaganda about racial conflict”.
During the trial the jury listened to a total of nine hours of recordings of Allchurch’s podcasts in which he and his guests repeatedly used racial slurs, repeated anti-Semitic tropes, and propagated racist ideology while discussing topics such as grooming gangs, immigration, history and crime. Each episode started with the song Rule Britannia while many were accompanied by provocative and often racist and insulting cartoons drawn especially for the podcast. Allchurch praised Hitler’s book Mein Kampf and told his listeners to “make sure that your friends are all white, make sure they know about the truth”.
In one episode Allchurch suggested creating “safe spaces” outside cities for “indigenous Britons” and questioned whether gas chambers were really used by the Nazis during the Holocaust. He described the idea of integration as “nonsensical”, said London was “full of savages” and referred to immigration as “white genocide”.
At trial Allchurch said race and ethnicity was “central” to his world-view and he stood by his belief that there are “measurable, statistical differences” between races – though he denied being racist, saying he thought “we should celebrate our differences”.
He described himself to the jury as an ethno-nationalist and a British nationalist whose wider family was European – and people in American and Australia with European ancestry – and he denied intending to cause offence or spread hate, saying he only advocated for “nonviolent protest against multiculturalism”.
He claimed the podcasts were only intended for those who already believed in nationalist ideology and he said he used humour, exaggeration and allegory to make his points.
The podcasts featured a number of guests including American neo-Nazi Daniel Kenneth Jeffries.
Another guest was Swansea neo-Nazi Alex Davies, who was jailed at Winchester Crown Court in June last year – Davies is understood to have been on bail when he appeared on the podcast. At his trial 27-year-old Davies, a former philosophy student and Ukip activist who harboured ambitions to become a councillor and who was committed to a race war, was described as being a “terrorist hiding in plain sight”. While at university he founded National Action which was one of the most extreme farright terror groups seen in Britain since the Second World War. Its members openly called for a “race war”, and one expert said the group was so extreme “you can’t go any further”.
After a lengthy period of deliberation the jury found Allchurch guilty of 10 of the charges he faced, and not guilty of the other five. The prosecution barrister told the court the defendant should be sentenced on the basis he had carried out a “campaign” designed to stir up racial hatred.
Emily Baxter, for Allchurch, said they were her instructions that prior to 2009 the defendant had not taken a great interest in politics – but unable to work due to injuries suffered in an industrial
accident and then in an assault, he had spent increasing amounts of time online where he found himself in an “echo chamber” of like-minded people and began talking “a lot to right-wing people in America”.
She said the podcasts which the jury had found to be criminal in content were only a small part of the overall output Allchurch produced on his website, and said the audience for the broadcasts had been limited in terms of number and type of listeners.
The barrister said the defendant’s views had “evolved” over the years and he now accepted many of the things he had said in the podcasts were inappropriate. She said Allchurch had expressed remorse and was now “careful about how he expresses himself and is more nuanced in his thinking”.
She added that Allchurch’s health and mobility issues – including bowel problems and the need for a regular testosterone prescription – meant that a period of immediate custody would be more difficult and she said there would be little benefit to the defendant or to the public in such a sentence.
Judge Huw Rees said Allchurch’s offending was so serious only a sentence of immediate custody was appropriate.
He said the defendant had an “agenda” of racial hatred which he propelled with propaganda and “carefully chosen words”. The judge said the content of the defendant’s podcasts were “vile” and were a “stain on our humanity”, and he called Allchurch’s race-based ideology “concerning”.
He said: “During the playing of these podcasts, it was immediately apparent that the recordings were plainly insulting or abusive, and that your sole intention was to stir up racial hatred, or at least racial hatred was likely to be stirred up as a result.
“The content of these podcasts was vile. Listening to them, as the jury had to, was a disturbing experience. It beggars belief, or at least it should be, that someone would want to speak these words at all, let alone feel the need to publish them for the consumption of others...
“Your offending amounts, in my view, to a stain on our humanity for our fellow human beings. Your ideology based on race, being pro-white and anti nonwhite, has been expressed by you as having some form of basis for protection of our society – it is no such thing. It is a concerning ideology, by reason of its consequences for communities and for parts of those communities.”
The judge said he did not believe Allchurch had expressed remorse for his actions, and he said though the defendant was plainly an intelligent man and “had an answer for every challenge” during cross-examination, the jury “saw through him”.
James Barnaby Allchurch was sentenced to a total of two-and-a-half years in prison.