Scottish justice or “due deference” to French-Zionist lobby? The Reynouard case hangs in the balance
On 21st September, a Scottish Crown prosecutor asked an Edinburgh court to show “due deference to France” and extradite a man who is accused of no crime under Scottish law. H&D’s assistant editor Peter Rushton reports from the court. This article and related material also appears at Peter’s Real History blog and now also in Spanish by clicking on this link.
The revisionist historian Vincent Reynouard was appearing at Edinburgh Sheriff Court for a full hearing of his extradition case. This was almost exactly ten months after his arrest in the Scottish fishing village of Anstruther, where Vincent had been working quietly as a private tutor and completing his most important historical revisionist work concerning the so-called “massacre” at Oradour.
He was arrested in a raid by Scottish police, working with Scotland Yard detectives, at the request of French prosecutors who wish to jail him for revisionist videos concerning both Oradour and the alleged homicidal ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz.
None of these revisionist works contravenes Scottish or English law, but the UK authorities were heavily lobbied by the Jewish charity ‘Campaign Against Antisemitism’ and by the ultra-Zionist peer Lord Austin (formerly Ian Austin MP).
The sheer absurdity of this situation – the criminalisation of a scholar – was brought home to me by two incidents (one trivial, one serious) at the Edinburgh Court while waiting for Vincent’s case to be heard.
A sticker for the Edinburgh branch of the St Pauli supporters’ club was displayed in the lavatory at the Court. Supporters of St Pauli (a football club based in Hamburg) are notorious worldwide for their violent ‘anti-fascism’ and Marxism. It is impossible to imagine that a sticker promoting any violent ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ group (from, for example, supporters of a club such as Lazio, Chelsea, Millwall or Oldham) would have been allowed to remain on display at a court!
The other incident was more serious. Vincent’s case was being heard in a courtroom that specialises in extradition, which of course meant that more than two hours were taken up (before Vincent’s case began) by a long procession of procedural, pre-trial discussions of a range of unconnected defendants, including alleged gangsters from Eastern Europe.
By far the most serious of these procedural discussions involved a defendant appearing by video link. This was the notorious ‘Real IRA’ terrorist and assassin Antoin Duffy (aka Anton Duffy), who in 2015 was jailed for 17 years for conspiracy to murder two ex-UDA members (Johnny Adair and Sam ‘Skelly’ McCrory) exiled in Scotland after their expulsion from the UDA.
Duffy is still serving this sentence in a top-security Scottish jail, but he is also now wanted by police and prosecutors in the Irish Republic, to face charges of murdering Denis Donaldson, an MI5 agent inside the IRA, who was killed in 2006. This is why Duffy was appearing on the same day as Vincent, in the Edinburgh extradition court.
H&D cannot yet comment on the latest specific charges – but it is beyond dispute (based on earlier convictions and years of police and MI5 covert surveillance) that Duffy is one of the UK’s most dangerous terrorists. Extradition procedures are designed for those accused of actual crimes: yet this week in Edinburgh (and in fact for the past ten months) Vincent Reynouard – a scholar, not a criminal – has been subjected to these same procedures.
As we have also seen with persistent abuse of the Terrorism Act by the UK authorities, those who simply seek to tell the truth about European history are persecuted by UK authorities who choose to follow the instructions of shadowy international lobbyists rather than UK law.
Nevertheless, there are reasons to be optimistic about Vincent’s case. He was very ably represented by his solicitor Paul Dunne and advocate Fred Mackintosh KC (who also practices as a barrister in England). It should of course be emphasised that Vincent’s defence is (rightly and properly) based on legal arguments, not on his historical and political views per se. As in any other such case, it should not be inferred that either Mr Dunne or Mr Mackintosh is in any way sympathetic to Vincent’s opinions, or indeed that either of them have any views or expertise on historical or political matters. They are experts on extradition law, not on historical revisionism or national socialism.
Due to Vincent having already spent ten months in jail (for something that isn’t even a crime in the UK!) the initial French warrant has been discharged.
This initial warrant was based on his having already been convicted and sentenced (in his absence) by a Parisian court. But he is no longer extraditable on those grounds, because that sentence has (in effect) already been served in Scotland, while Vincent awaited this extradition hearing.
Having dealt with the discharge of the first warrant, Mr Mackintosh proceeded to address the second.
Since it involves new charges (rather than a prior conviction) the ‘ticklist’ of the old European Arrest Warrant (now operating in revised form post-Brexit) doesn’t apply. Mr Mackintosh therefore pointed out that the traditional extradition principle of “dual criminality” operates in this case.
In other words, the Edinburgh Court must be satisfied that the conduct of which Vincent is accused would potentially be criminal in Scotland as well as in France.
The judge should (Mr Mackintosh continued) draw inferences as to Vincent’s “intent”, by looking at his overall conduct, and by studying the entire transcripts of his videos, not merely accepting the prosecutors’ interpretation of certain phrases taken out of context.
He highlighted one video, on which the prosecutors had based a large part of their case, and emphasised that the judge should study the full translated transcript carefully. This was a video published on 22nd February 2020, whose title translates as “The Jewish Problem – what solution?”
Vincent’s counsel did not dispute that his videos contain what has been termed “Holocaust denial”, that some of them address the “Jewish problem”, and that one in particular “denies” the historicity of the “Oradour massacre”.
But Mr Mackintosh’s central argument as to why Vincent should not be extradited began with a judgment in 2015 by the European Court of Human Rights, in the case of Perinçek v. Switzerland.
The relevant aspect of this judgment (which involved a Turkish political activist accused of “denying” the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War), is that the European Court spelled out the very different laws among European states regarding “denial” of genocide.
Among those European countries that have signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, the Court noted:
“there are now essentially four types of regimes in this domain, in terms of scope of the offence of genocide denial: (a) States, such as Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Romania, that only criminalise the denial of the Holocaust or more generally of Nazi crimes (Romania in addition criminalises the Nazi extermination of the Roma, and Greece criminalises, on top of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes, the denial of genocides recognised by an international court or its own Parliament); (b) States, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, that criminalise the denial of Nazi and communist crimes; (c) States, such as Andorra, Cyprus, Hungary, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Malta, Slovakia, Slovenia and Switzerland, that criminalise the denial of any genocide (Lithuania in addition specifically criminalises denial of Soviet and Nazi crimes vis-à-vis the Lithuanians, but Cyprus only criminalises the denial of genocides recognised as such by a competent court); and (d) States, such as Finland, Italy, Spain (following the 2007 judgment of its Constitutional Court cited in paragraph 96 above), the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian States, that do not have special provisions criminalising such conduct.”
The European Court was clear, Mr Mackintosh said, that the UK had not chosen to make any form of “Holocaust denial” a specific criminal offence.
He added that in Vincent Reynouard’s case, the prosecution therefore had to satisfy the Scottish court that Vincent’s conduct (as alleged in the extradition warrant) met the test either for a S.127 Communications Act offence, or a breach of the peace (a common law offence).
The question of what behaviour can constitute a “breach of the peace” under Scottish law has been revised several times during recent decades – and is a matter on which Mr Mackintosh has special expertise, having for example written an article for Scottish Legal News on this very topic.
Such conduct must be serious enough to “cause alarm to ordinary people”, and it must “threaten serious disturbance to the community”. The relevant judgment was delivered in 2014 by Lady Clark of Calton, and Mr Mackintosh said that Lady Clark had reminded the lower courts that “for conduct to be likely to cause a reasonable person to suffer fear or alarm there has to be something further than annoyance and distress”.
Mr Mackintosh explained that the test of whether conduct “threatens serious disturbance in the community” necessarily involves considering the full context. He quoted several cases in Scottish courts involving racial and sectarian abuse at football matches, where a crucial element was that this abuse had been directed at (or delivered in close proximity to) rival supporters, in the incendiary context of a football match attended by supporters of opposing teams.
In a 1981 case against communist activist Mike Duffield, the Sheriff Court had ruled that shouting pro-IRA slogans while selling the Marxist newspaper Fight Racism Fight Imperialism and the pro-IRA newspaper Hands off Ireland was a breach of the peace, despite this being carried out at the stadium of Glasgow Celtic, where many fans hold similar views.
And on the other side of politics, there had been a breach of the peace case involving a National Front activist selling the Young NF paper Bulldog outside the Hearts stadium in Edinburgh.
But in all these cases – and especially bearing in mind recent clarifications of the law in Scotland – it was essential to assess the wider context of the words used – in Vincent’s case, words used in videos broadcast online.
There were eight such videos referred to by French prosecutors in the present warrant. The first related specifically to Oradour. The second, third and fourth presented detailed arguments as to why (in Vincent’s considered opinion) there had been no homicidal ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz, explaining that conventional ‘Holocaust’ history is based on specious evidence. The fifth and sixth discussed the “Jewish problem” or “what to do about the Jews”. And the seventh and eighth returned to the topic of Auschwitz, the ‘gas chambers’, and broader ‘Holocaust’ themes.
Mr Mackintosh emphasised that in the case of six of these eight videos, Vincent Reynouard had not been calling for any form of action. None of the content potentially qualified as personal abuse, and none of it could be seen as “threatening”. The videos amounted to a historical critique – which might well be controversial, but not illegal in Scotland.
In the case of videos 5 and 6, Vincent was responding to a correspondent. The prosecution had chosen to isolate certain phrases out of context, but Mr Mackintosh said that once seen in context it was clear that Vincent was stating his opposition to any policy of “exterminating” the Jews.
The test that the court had to apply was not whether “reasonable people” would reject Vincent’s views, but whether these views threatened “serious disturbance to society”. Were the court to accept the prosecution’s argument, it would amount to ruling that discussion of controversial arguments regarding the ‘Holocaust’ had become a crime in the UK. Mr Mackintosh said it was open to Parliaments in London and Edinburgh to make ‘Holocaust denial’ a crime, but they had (so far) chosen not to do so.
Therefore to be criminal, Vincent’s words would have to cross a further line, a further evidential test, in order to be regarded as a “breach of the peace”.
Mr Mackintosh then turned to the alternative test, S.127 of the Communications Act. For Vincent’s videos to be considered criminal in this context, they would have to be not merely offensive, but “grossly offensive”.
Prosecutors had rested much of their argument on the precedent of the Chabloz case, as tried in the London courts during recent years – not a binding precedent, but, they argued, very much a “persuasive” precedent in this case. [Chabloz has in recent years been excluded from British revisionist circles, due to her treacherous and malicious conduct in betraying Robert Faurisson’s final meeting to the ‘anti-fascist’ publication ‘Hope not Hate’. But her earlier actions have, as we predicted at the time, served as a precedent to threaten the liberty of Vincent Reynouard.]
On appeal, Chabloz’s conduct had been found to go beyond satire, having crossed the legal line into deliberate, malicious abuse. By contrast, Mr Mackintosh argued, the judge in the present case would find (if he examined the full transcripts of Vincent’s videos) that his arguments – even when highly controversial – were delivered as a calm, academic analysis, not as crude anti-semitic abuse in the Chabloz style.
Mr Mackintosh referred to the leading S.127 case in relation to interpretation of what is “grossly offensive”, namely the Collins case, and the judgment of Lord Bingham.
This had made clear that what is “grossly offensive” has to be assessed in the context of the standards of an “open, just, multiracial society” – a contemporary context that is “reasonably enlightened, but not perfectionist”.
In other words, Mr Mackintosh emphasised, the words complained of had to cause gross offence, not simply “to people who care about the Holocaust” and who, for whatever reasons, hold different views to Vincent, but to broader society.
Were ‘Holocaust denial’ or disputing the historicity of Oradour to be deemed criminal per se, the question would necessarily arise – what about the Amritsar massacre, what about the Armenian genocide, and many other controversial historical subjects?
Mr Mackintosh concluded his argument by addressing the question of proportionality. An extradition court is required to consider whether the alleged offence is sufficiently severe to attract a custodial sentence. For example, recent instructions to the lower courts had emphasised that defendants should not be extradited for minor public order offences.
He noted that even in the Chabloz case – where the defendant had been convicted for gross offensiveness which was of a very different character to Vincent’s videos – this had not led to custodial sentences.
It would therefore, Mr Mackintosh argued, be both wrong in law and disproportionate for the Edinburgh Court to extradite Vincent Reynouard to France.
In his argument, the prosecutor (Advocate depute Paul Harvey) insisted that Vincent’s videos did pass the evidential test for the Court to regard his conduct as either (or both) a breach of the peace, and/or “grossly offensive” under S.127.
He invited the judge to consider Vincent’s words in one of the video transcripts, where he had stated that “there is a Jewish problem”, and that in his analysis of this problem he would “go further” than Adolf Hitler. “Naturally, the Jews exploit the situation: to dominate, even to subjugate us.”
Mr Harvey described these words as “the most appalling anti-semitism”, and asked the judge to view all of the videos complained of in the French warrant, in the light of this “anti-semitism”.
Questioned by the judge on this point, Mr Harvey said that (in the prosecutors’ submission) each video should be looked at as a separate breach of the peace offence, but should also be interpreted overall as a “course of conduct” by Vincent.
The mere fact that the UK had no special provision criminalising “Holocaust denial” did not in itself absolve the defendant. When expressed in the terms used by Vincent, Mr Harvey insisted that “Holocaust denial” could be interpreted as criminal under UK as well as French law.
Quoting the case of Rangers fan William Kilpatrick, who had posted on Facebook endorsing the sending of “bombs and bombs” to Celtic manager Neil Lennon, Mr Harvey argued that under Scottish law, intending or inciting a specific action was not necessarily relevant to whether certain words were a “breach of the peace”.
Mr Harvey maintained that some of Vincent’s words in the video could reasonably have led to his being charged with a breach of the peace under Scottish law, because they were calculated to provoke a disturbance of public order.
In fact, he argued that Vincent’s words were potentially a more serious crime than breach of the peace in a football stadium: because they could be viewed online at any time, anywhere in Scotland. Incitement to specific criminal action did not, the prosecution argued, have to be proven.
Mr Harvey added that Vincent’s “crimes” had to be looked at in the context of the very different cultural context in France, and the more serious risk of “anti-semitism being incited”. While the words Vincent used could, Mr Harvey argued, be prosecutable even in Scotland, the Court should take account of the fact that in a French context, they were even more serious.
Unsurprisingly, the prosecutor rejected the defence argument that Vincent’s words were calm, academic discourse. He said they were comparable to the Chabloz case, where it had been established that once a clearly anti-semitic motive had been established, espousal of “Holocaust denial” was ipso facto grossly offensive.
Mr Harvey accepted that (under UK law) not every instance of “Holocaust denial” was criminal, but he maintained that in the cases of both Chabloz and Vincent Reynouard, denying the “Holocaust” did amount to “gross offensiveness”, and therefore contravened S.127.
The prosecutor said the judge would need to apply the proportionality test very carefully. Unlike, for example, a drugs or theft case, Vincent’s criminal conduct was highly context-specific, where the appropriate sentence might differ enormously between Scotland and France. The judge should therefore “respect and give due weight” to French circumstances involving their history, and even present day “racial relations”, which meant that a French court “is justified in taking a severe approach to this”.
Given Vincent’s long and repeated record of “criminal conduct”, Mr Harvey concluded that a custodial sentence in France was not only possible but highly likely: “I urge you to show due deference to France and their different traditions.”
In a brief reply concluding the hearing, Vincent’s counsel Fred Mackintosh said that if the judge accepted the prosecution’s argument, it would amount to saying that any “racist” statement on Facebook or YouTube, regardless of context, would be a breach of the peace. He urged the judge to reject this argument and to recognise that “Holocaust denial” when expressed in Vincent’s terms, is not a crime in Scotland – neither a breach of the peace, nor grossly offensive.
The judge said that he aimed to have read all relevant material and considered the arguments fully, in time to pass judgment on 12th October.
Clearly, the Vincent Reynouard case has become a vitally important test of whether historical revisionism will be criminalised in the UK via a ‘back door’ route, without any honest and open discussion in Parliament.
We shall make a further assessment of the broader context soon. But it should be recognised by all concerned that there will be no surrender of the basic principles involved. In the UK, Spain and Canada, European traditions of free historical inquiry are under attack. We shall defend those traditions, by any and every method that proves necessary.
Vincent Reynouard reports from his Edinburgh jail on the eve of his extradition trial
Scottish justice will soon decide whether to extradite me to France or release me. Knowing that, if I am extradited, I will probably spend years in prison, we can say that my fate will be decided on September 21st.
My lawyers are optimistic. Indeed, having served the entire prison sentence which earned me the first arrest warrant, only the second remains. Paris is asking me to judge me for several videos. However, to be extradited, these videos must constitute crimes in both France and Scotland. My lawyers’ argument is clear: my comments do not transgress UK laws.
My opponents invoke the precedent set by the conviction of singer A. Chabloz in 2018. However, A. Chabloz was convicted for having composed, performed and broadcast “grossly offensive” songs. In question here were the vocabulary chosen, the tone adopted and the criticisms formulated against the Jewish people in general. My videos are totally different. Although they may shock and offend, they are never grossly offensive and, therefore, remain within the bounds of freedom of expression as conceived in the United Kingdom.
Many of my relatives are therefore optimistic about the outcome of this hearing. For my part, I am neither pessimistic nor optimistic, because I have learned not to hope for anything and not to fear anything. The reason is always the same: I trust in Providence. So far, she has protected me in my mission. I am therefore convinced that the decision of September 21 will be the most likely to serve the revisionist cause. Certainly, for me, it will undoubtedly be the occasion for new trials, but the trials are there so that we improve by overcoming them.
I will therefore accept the final truth, whatever it may be, and will continue to place the revisionist cause above my personal destiny, because revisionism serves the Common Good and, as a National Socialist, I have always advocated the primacy of the common good over particular interests. Therefore, I will not back down now. My personal destiny is of no importance.
Some will call me a fanatic. However, when we see how the anti-revisionists treat us, we understand that only diehards can endure the fight on the front line. If I wasn’t one, I would have given up a long time ago. Providence raises up the right people where they are needed. Our adversaries being fanatics, She opposes fanatics to them. It’s in the natural order of things.
So I calmly wait for September 21st. In the calm of my cell, I continue my activities of reading, writing, meditation and drawing. After ten months, a daily routine was established. I hardly notice that I am in prison anymore. I’m like on a ship where life unfolds peacefully. For the past few weeks, I have been the oldest on my wing. I know the staff and the inmates know me, because I am a somewhat unusual prisoner.
I should have been released on August 10th, once my prison sentence was fully served. However, the Scottish justice system decided to keep me in prison on the grounds that I could take advantage of my release to escape again. Knowing what I have done since October 2021, this fear is understandable. I would add that, even if this extension of my detention were illegal, I would not claim any compensation, because I did not suffer – far from it – in Edinburgh prison.
Besides, in Edinburgh prison, the deprivation of liberty as it affects me is entirely relative. Certainly, my body is held in a penitentiary establishment, but my mind remains free. Here, I read a lot: I discovered authors like Denis Marquet (on spirituality) and Jacques Ellul (on technique). I corresponded freely with wonderful people. I was able to exercise every day, including three times a week in a well-equipped gym. I enjoyed an excellent diet that many people would envy. Finally, I improved my drawing techniques, especially watercolour.
In my eyes, I am much freer than the citizen forced to get up every morning to do an uninteresting job. My freedom is a thousand times greater than that of people without an inner life, glued to their screen and slaves to social networks.
As for the prison guards, they were very kind to me, probably because they think that there is no legitimate reason for me to be in prison. Not long ago, in fact, a guard told me: “You have been in prison for almost a year, because France does not respect the right to freedom of expression!” I think she was expressing the thoughts of the guards in general…
It is true that, from this vantage point in Scotland, we observe, incredulously, the climate of hysteria which reigns in France around real or imagined anti-Semitism. The causes of this frenzy are undoubtedly multiple.
First of all, I think a lot of Jews are worried. In this changing and crisis-ridden world, they fear a new persecution, even a new “Holocaust”, on the grounds that they would always have been the scapegoats. The associations which represent them therefore act to eradicate anti-Judaism from society. However, knowing that, in our part of the world, “racism” has become the capital sin, the government – whoever it may be – is obliged to support this action.
To this is probably added another fact: at a time when the Rassemblement National (RN – National Rally) is considered, rightly or wrongly, as a force capable of influencing politics, attacking the ultra-right induces Marine Le Pen increasingly to dissociate herself from the ideals of the national right. And as we always end up becoming what we say, whether by conviction or by strategy, then the more the government attacks the ultra-right, the more the RN becomes normalised .
Finally, I think that for some, hitting the ultra-right is another way of attacking the RN, with a view to preventing a possible electoral victory for Marine Le Pen. Indeed, when a government has no positive record to its credit, its only political strategy consists of presenting itself as the ultimate bulwark against the foul Beast. He can then say: “See, the foul beast is not dead. Don’t be fooled; the de-demonisation of the RN is only apparent. If Marine Le Pen comes to power or even comes close, the ultra-right will take the opportunity to resurface.” In my eyes therefore, these various causes contribute to the ambient hysteria.
As for me, I represent an intellectual danger for the government, because I demonstrate that the crimes attributed to the Foul Beast are propaganda lies. My action appears all the more dangerous to him because I denounced a particularly fragile myth: the alleged massacre of women and children in the church of Oradour by the ‘barbaric’ Waffen SS. Without denying the deaths of these people, I demonstrate that the circumstances of this tragedy were very different.
However, if the myth of Oradour falls, some might wonder about Auschwitz. The link will be all the more natural since, since 2017, the challenge to the official History of Oradour has also been repressed by the anti-revisionist law. People will then say: “The myth of Oradour was protected by the same law which prohibits contesting the existence of the gas chambers of Auschwitz; therefore, are these gas chambers also a myth?”
The guardians of Memory cannot therefore retreat: they must defend tooth and nail the myth of Oradour. Hence their interest in silencing me. This doesn’t bode well for me. However, here again, my personal destiny is unimportant. I don’t expect anything down here. The reward will come after this earthly life. This is my conviction (which I do not impose on anyone). Therefore, I am calm.
H&D will report further on Vincent Reynouard’s case and additional reports will appear in English at the Real History blog and in French at Vincent’s own blog Sans Concession.
IRA scum off our streets!
Editor’s note: The following is a report from one of our Scottish subscribers who attended the Loyalist counter-demonstration in Glasgow city centre on Sunday 23rd July.
A number of H&D subscribers were amongst a crowd of several hundred Scottish Loyalists and British Patriots who were counter-demonstrating against a pro-IRA march through Glasgow city centre on Sunday.
Around 300 hundred Irish Republicans and their supporters – including a number of SNP and Labour party members – marched through the centre of Glasgow to commemorate the 42nd anniversary of the Maze Prison hunger strikes of 1981, where ten IRA/INLA criminals starved themselves to death.
Police arrested five people altogether, including three from our side, who have been charged in connection with public order offences during the march.
The march, which was organised by the extreme left-wing Cairde na hÉireann (Friends of Ireland) group started at 2pm on Wishart Street, near the Necropolis, and was met by staunch Loyalist opposition right from the start.
Cairde na hÉireann was formed as a split from the West of Scotland Band Alliance (WoSBA) in 2004. The WoSBA supported dissident Republican groups like the Real IRA/ 32 County Sovereignty Movement, while Cairde na hÉireann stayed ‘loyal‘ to IRA/Sinn Féin. Their aim is a “32 County Socialist and a Republican United Ireland”
A statement on the group’s website about the events on Sunday read: – “Today, Cairde na hÉireann members and supporters gathered to hold our annual commemoration march to mark the 42nd anniversary of the 1981 Hunger Strike. The heroic sacrifice of the 10 H-Block Martyrs remains an inspiration to the Irish diaspora across the world and is marked accordingly wherever Irish people and their multi-generational descendents gather. Despite Police Scotland deploying an extraordinary number of personnel, several loyalists, football hooligans and neo-Nazis were allowed to throw bottles and other missiles, spit at and abuse marchers, and attempt at various times to have the commemoration stopped. In this last endeavour, they failed.
Republicans will continue to commemorate our dead and generation-defining events such as the Hunger Strike and no amount of abuse, threats or violence will deter us.
Cairde na hÉireann thank everyone who attended today, particularly for their dignified restraint under severe provocation.”
The march met further Loyalist resistance as it headed along John Knox Street onto Duke Street and down High Street before turning into Ingram Street in the Merchant City.
As the Republican march went towards Queen Street and George Square Loyalist counter-demonstrators were kettled in outside a pub by Police Scotland. Then onto St Vincent Street where another group of Loyalists were waiting for them.
Chief Superintendent Mark Sutherland, Divisional Commander for Greater Glasgow, who allowed the pro-IRA march to take place said: “Five people have been arrested and charged in connection with public order offences following a planned procession, and counter-protest, in Glasgow City Centre on Sunday, 23 July 2023. “They are expected to appear at court at a later date and reports will be submitted to the Procurator Fiscal. “Officers acted swiftly to prevent escalation and disperse those intent on causing significant disruption to the public in the George Square and St Vincent Street areas.”
H&D salutes all those Loyalists who attended the counter-demonstrators in Glasgow on Sunday. The IRA and their left-wing supporters must be opposed every time they venture onto the King’s Highway. No Surrender!
End of an era for Scottish National Party
The death of Winnie Ewing, aged 93, marks the end of an era in Scottish politics.
It was Mrs Ewing’s shock victory at the 1967 Hamilton by-election that elevated the Scottish National Party from the political fringe and began its journey to become the dominant force in Scottish politics. She lived to see the SNP’s rise and the election of three successive party leaders as First Ministers of a devolved government at Holyrood – Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf.
But by the time of her death the SNP was in crisis and the second (and most successful) of those leaders, Nicola Sturgeon, was under arrest.
Moreover, just after Winnie Ewing’s death on Wednesday this week, her son Fergus Ewing – a Member of the Scottish Parliament – was threatened with expulsion from the SNP group at Holyrood after voting against the party’s coalition partner, Scottish Green Party co-leader Lorna Slater.
Canadian-born Ms Slater is being criticised by the Tories (and now by Fergus Ewing) for her promotion of a deposit return scheme involving a refundable 20p deposit on drinks containers. Problems and delays with this scheme have caused massive costs to Scottish businesses.
Fergus Ewing was already critical of many trendy policies pursued by the SNP under Sturgeon and Yousaf, and also strongly backed by their Green allies, including the highly controversial gender recognition law. He backed Kate Forbes, Yousaf’s opponent in this year’s SNP leadership election.
The Ewing family and Ms Forbes remain engaged in a battle for the SNP’s identity. They are of course not racial nationalists in any way, but they represent a form of very mild civic nationalism, as against the likes of Sturgeon and Yousaf whose vision of the SNP is environmentalist, left-liberal, and pro-‘trans’.
A third group of more old-fashioned left-wingers has partly broken away from the party to create Alba, led by Sturgeon’s predecessor Alex Salmond, but this has become irrelevant due to Salmond’s well-publicised character flaws and Putinism. Most of the SNP left-wing remains loyal to Sturgeon and Yousaf, despite continuing scandals that beset the party.
During the first half of the 20th century, some forms of Scottish and Welsh nationalism had something in common with fascism, but this tendency had been suppressed by the time Winnie Ewing put the SNP on the map.
Coincidentally, her victory at Hamilton in November 1967 (and the consequent explosion of the SNP onto Britain’s political scene) came just nine months after the creation of the National Front in February 1967, and four months before the NF’s first parliamentary by-election campaign. In 1989, halfway through her twenty years as MEP for the Highlands and Islands, Mrs Ewing caused controversy by joining the European parliamentary group then called the Rainbow Group, which included various types of nationalists including Italy’s Northern League (Lega Nord, now known as Lega).
But by contrast to the NF, the SNP were never racial nationalists and in recent years they have become the most shameless promoters of racial and cultural degeneracy. Winnie Ewing was no doubt genuinely appalled by some of this, but her own career effectively started the rot. In this sense her life’s mission was a failure, and the likely defeat of the next Scottish independence campaign will seal that failure, whether or not SNP leaders end up facing criminal charges.
Unionists fly the flag in Bellshill
With police investigations continuing, H&D cannot comment on the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon (former First Minister of Scotland) amid the continuing collapse of the Scottish National Party which she led from 2014 until earlier this year.
This entertaining shambles has already had an impact at the ballot box. This week in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire the SNP lost a council by-election to Labour, with a swing of more than 13% (enough to wipe out almost all of SNP’s Westminster seats if repeated at next year’s general election).
Labour of course are no friends of the Union either, but the Bellshill by-election was also good news for sincere patriots. As a recent Spectator article put it, the SNP is “sleepwalking into extinction”, facing “electoral nemesis”.
The British Unionist Party, formed in 2015 by activists from the Better Together campaign who successfully fought to preserve the United Kingdom in the 2014 Scottish referendum, won its first council seat in another North Lanarkshire ward in May 2022.
This week they contested Bellshill for the first time and despite a crowded ballot paper with no fewer than ten candidates, their candidate Billy Ross polled a creditable 4.3% finishing in fourth place. Mr Ross defeated the much hyped Alba Party (led by former SNP leader Alex Salmond), and various ‘protest vote’ parties. The anti-vaccination party Freedom Alliance and the much-diminished UKIP polled only 0.3% each: microscopic votes (just seven for Freedom Alliance and five for UKIP!) confirming their irrelevance.
This latest result for the British Unionist Party – combined with a strong set of results for Traditional Unionist Voice in last month’s local elections in Northern Ireland – shows that well organised smaller parties can make an impact even if they only win small numbers of seats.
Unionists can begin to influence mainstream politics, preventing major party leaders from pursuing their subversive and cowardly agenda of breaking up the UK.
After years in which republicans and fake ‘nationalists’ appeared to have history on their side, the tide is beginning to turn.
And for H&D readers, there is some reasonably good news from the ballot box at last! Patriotic parties in England are in steep decline, but there has been good news in recent weeks from Northern Ireland, and now to a certain extent in Scotland.
Reclaiming May Day for European workers!
May Day was a traditional European festival long before it was hijacked by American Marxists in 1889.
Linked to the ancient celebration of Beltane (marking the midpoint between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice), May Day is marked in Germany by Walpurgis Night and in England by traditional dances.
One of the most colourful celebrations of Beltane is in Edinburgh, which for H&D readers had a special significance this year because our comrade Vincent Reynouard has been in Edinburgh prison for more than five months. (An interview with Vincent will appear soon on this website and in the July-August edition of H&D.)
Racial nationalists have rightly begun to reclaim May Day as a European festival, and to assert the reality that we are the true champions of European workers.
The so-called ‘left’ has long since surrendered to the demands of global capitalism. Mass immigration is championed both in the name of ‘wokeness’ and to provide cheap labour, directly undermining the wages and working conditions of Europeans.
Meanwhile the so-called ‘right’ sometimes talks about resisting mass immigration, but in reality its reactionary ideology is in many ways worse than the ‘left’, and is even more devoted to the exploitative values of global capitalism: anti-nature, anti-worker, anti-White, anti-European.
On May Day 2023 H&D‘s comrades around the world asserted the eternal values of racial nationalism – the true interests of European workers.
New party set to emerge from Patriotic Alternative
After several months of discussions over whether and when Patriotic Alternative should register as a political party, PA’s national administration officer Kenny Smith and his fiancée Claire Ellis have resigned to create a new party. They are backed by six regional organisers: Si Crane (Scotland), Anthony Burrows (East Midlands), Fraser Patterson (SE England), Laurence Somerset (SW England), Jerome O’Reilly (Wales), and Connor Marlow (West Midlands).
Their new organisation will be known as the Homeland Party. According to a statement issued on Thursday evening, 32 of PA’s 54 officials are quitting to join Homeland.
However, despite speculation in ‘anti-fascist’ circles, PA’s deputy leader Laura Towler and her husband, Yorkshire regional organiser Sam Melia, are supporting PA’s founder and leader Mark Collett, and at least two of the departing ROs have already been replaced.
Unlike earlier splits this seems to be a genuine difference of opinion over movement strategy, not a question of personal bitterness or allegations of impropriety.
In a letter circulated to senior activists on 12th April, Kenny Smith said that he had been concerned about the direction of PA since last December. He wrote of a failure of political direction; “no focus on community politics”; and “no real effort to get registered as a political party”.
He drew the conclusion that PA’s “overfocus on online streaming” meant that PA had become “a glorified social club”.
At first in this 12th April letter, Kenny stated that he would not be “joining any other organisation, but a week later (having been approached by numerous senior figures in PA) he has created the Homeland Party and states that he has the backing of 32 of the 54 PA officers.
The PA leadership’s response has essentially been to emphasise “business as usual”. Mark Collett and Laura Towler (alongside Eastern England regional organiser Steve Blake) addressed an online gathering of more than 60 supporters hosted by Radio Albion on 20th April. Laura maintained that much of the “split” talk amounted to “Chinese whispers” and that outside Scotland only seventeen people had confirmed their departure from PA.
H&D has no reason to doubt the honesty of the leaders of either side in this split. No doubt Laura was being strictly truthful in stating this on Thursday, but equally there’s no doubt that those seventeen will by now have taken significant numbers of PA supporters with them.
There’s good reason to hope that this will not be the sort of bitter division that has scarred our movement in the past, and that even when two separate groups are established – PA and the Homeland Party – they will form part of a racial nationalist movement that moves towards unity rather than atomisation.
PA is moving to a new membership structure but still seems a long way from registering as a political party with the Electoral Commission.
In a live stream broadcast on Thursday night, Mark and Laura addressed three key issues:
– PA’s vetting system; they did not wish to “do away with” the vetting system but felt that it had been applied in too strict a manner that had alienated some potential activists. Mark Collett wanted a more flexible system, allowing regional organisers more autonomy to adopt the level of security vetting they found appropriate.
– PA’s political direction; Mark resented the imputation that he is not interested in “community politics”; he points out that alongside his regular online streaming, he has himself been on the frontline in many demonstrations nationwide, including most recently the protests outside hotels taken over by “asylum seekers”;
– The paid position offered to Kenny; Mark and Laura said that as late as Monday and Tuesday this week, they had made offers to Kenny in an effort to retain his services with PA; however Kenny and some regional organisers appear to have lost confidence in PA’s national leadership.
PA leader Mark Collett has offered to accept any of the dissidents back into PA, but it seems likely that the outcome of these disagreements will be two separate organisations – one mainly focused on traditional politics including election campaigns, and the other working through podcasts, video streams and the like as well as public demonstrations.
In his own response to the PA crisis, also broadcast online to supporters, Kenny Smith emphasised the poor state of PA security when he was appointed and the undoubted fact that he had made dramatic improvements with the vetting policy, even though this was unpopular in some quarters.
Kenny points out that nationalism has become an “online world” where there is “a massive amount of fear”. He sees the vetting policy as an essential step in converting PA’s recruits into real world rather than online activists, and he stresses that this was never a matter of personal ambition or wages, but rather of acquiring the necessary authority to help taking the movement forward.
Part of the dispute within PA’s national leadership seems to be about the speed and scale of that conversion from the Internet to “real life”. On both sides, the proof will be in the extent to which “community politics” manages to put down real world roots, whether in electoral politics or in other forms of action.
H&D wishes both PA and the new Homeland Party well and looks forward to their complementary contributions to the essential cause of racial nationalism.
British patriots unite in anti-immigration protests
While Rishi Sunak’s fake ‘Conservative’ government attempts to repeat the traditional Tory con trick, British patriots have been increasingly active in taking to the streets for real anti-immigration campaigns. Yesterday in Cannock, Staffordshire, Patriotic Alternative held a protest march against the use of hotels and council facilities for illegal immigrants.
Members of other groups including the British Democrats, as well as unaffiliated locals, also attended.
In Cannock, following earlier protests across the UK, the protesters emphasised the difference between genuine refugees and economic migrants. Events have been held in very different parts of the country, ranging from Skegness to Liverpool, united in resistance to a policy that has been imposed on them by treacherous politicians and Whitehall bureaucrats.
As an earlier PA campaign stressed: “We were never asked!”
An especially positive aspect of recent campaigns has been the level of activism in Scotland: increasing numbers of Scots are rejecting the fake, ‘woke’ nationalism of Nicola Sturgeon’s declining SNP. One main focus of the current protests is Erskine, west of Glasgow, where the Home Office has dumped 200 young male asylum seekers in a local hotel. These migrants have no legal documentation and have yet to be vetted.
Understandably, locals are angry at having these illegal immigrants dumped in their midst. Especially in a council area where almost 400 indigenous Scots are registered as homeless.
Protests are taking place every Sunday at 12 noon near the Muthu Glasgow River Hotel, where the illegal migrants are being housed. Any H&D readers able to travel to Erskine are encouraged to attend.
UPDATE: H&D subscriber John Ings, who has been flying the flag for racial nationalism in Devon for many years, reports below on his long-distance trip to support the Cannock demonstration.
The Cannock protest on the 11th of March meant an early start, my alarm set for 0430 hours with a couple of pick-ups and a car change to allow for.
Once there, the police had arranged with the PA organisers a safe rendezvous site and an en masse march to the protest. Which was welcome as it helped against the cold weather.
It was a combined Patriotic Alternative and concerned locals event to raise the awareness of so-called, asylum seekers being housed in hotels. The eye watering cost to the taxpayers is well known of course, yet the finances are but one piece of the problematic jigsaw open borders cause, and I’m pleased that both the PA and local speakers did address the cultural and numerical aspects as well as the financial burden.
It was to our advantage that the protest was so well organised, as the flag waving PA protesters were able to walk into a charged arena to great applause and cheers from the locals and boos from the mentally-ill, unwashed counter-demonstrators. Who, by the way, seemed confused as to why they were there. Calling for things like “trans rights” for some reason. I’m not so sure the hotel-dwellers would be on the same hymn sheet as them.
It also meant that we could present ourselves as decent, concerned (and clean) people. I believe there were a few local hot-heads, but they were limited to shouting through the police line and were not part of the PA group. It does make me wonder if the authorities will learn a lesson from this and in future deliberately engineer physical confrontation in order to get their MSM anti-white propaganda. They certainly have past form for this tactic.
I never attended past National Front marches when at their peak and although this was not on the same scale, it certainly gave an appreciation of how energising they must have been: it did generate an adrenaline charged atmosphere.
Refreshingly, the locals were not cowed by the name calling by our craven low testosterone antagonists, and even cheered when our speakers mentioned white people’s concerns about the invasion. There was even crowd participation when called upon to respond.
There’s no doubt that the local support and a lively audience combined with the excellent PA speakers raised this protest to a more effective level.
I think we can gauge the measure of success by the cheers of the locals and that the MSM have ignored it. For me, I was pleased the usually apolitical public were excited and motivated by the protest, and this shows that old fashioned street activity is, as it always has been, the way to win. We just have to keep going and keep our optics positive.
It was a trek back home, but fuelled by pie and chips in the pub, well worth the effort.
Well done to Patriotic Alternative.
John Ings
Vincent Reynouard case latest: new warrant, delayed extradition hearing
French revisionist scholar Vincent Reynouard – who has been jailed in Edinburgh for almost four months despite not being accused of any crime under Scottish or English law – was handed further charges today while in the dock at Edinburgh Sheriff Court.
As with the previous charges, these have been issued by French prosecutors who are seeking Vincent’s extradition to be tried under the ‘Gayssot Law’, introduced in 1990 by a French Communist MP.
This bans the expression of sceptical historical views about the ‘crimes against humanity’ defined at the Nuremberg Trial and in the 1945 ‘London Charter’ that established that trial.
Most obviously, the Gayssot Law prohibits sceptical research into ‘Holocaust’ history, which is banned in several European countries, though perfectly legal in the UK.
Vincent Reynouard has previously been convicted several times of such ‘crimes’, and is best known for his investigation into the ‘Oradour massacre’ of June 1944. His published work about Oradour dates back to the 1990s, and he recently wrote a comprehensive investigation of this topic, now available (in French) from his website.
The latest warrant seems to reflect an admission by French prosecutors that they made an error in their initial warrant, under which Vincent Reynouard was arrested in Anstruther, Scotland, on 10th November last year. He has been held in Edinburgh Prison ever since his arrest.
An interview with Vincent Reynouard, by H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton, will appear in the May-June edition of Heritage and Destiny. Vincent will next appear in court for a pre-trial hearing on 20th April, and the full extradition trial is presently scheduled for 8th June, again in Edinburgh.
Updates on the Vincent Reynouard case will appear here soon.
Sturgeon’s ‘trans’ obsession wrecks Scottish ‘nationalist’ project
Nicola Sturgeon yesterday announced her resignation as Scottish First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party: she will remain in post until the SNP completes election of her successor, a process that will last for six weeks.
For several years Sturgeon (who took over the SNP from Alex Salmond in 2014) was rated as the most effective party leader in the UK – so much so that the Conservative Party succeeded at the 2015 general election by portraying then Labour leader Ed Miliband as a likely puppet of Sturgeon, in the event of a coalition government at Westminster.
When her embittered predecessor Salmond launched a rival party (Alba) two years ago, it proved a flop, failing to win a single election at any level.
But in recent months Sturgeon’s core project – Scottish independence, the SNP’s raison d’être – has seemed to be floundering. Opinion polls were starting to show that Scots would reject independence if offered a second referendum, and in any case such a referendum was not going to be offered until the present Tory government loses office in another couple of years.
Meanwhile Sturgeon had become obsessed by an increasingly weird ‘woke’ agenda, typified by the ‘Gender Recognition’ law that was passed by the Scottish Parliament but vetoed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. (Under the present devolution arrangements, Scotland has devolved powers in some areas, but does not yet have the right to allow a man to call himself a woman and demand access to female facilities.)
This political row turned into a scandal when a convicted rapist, Adam Graham, was found to have been moved to a women’s prison having decided that he is now a ‘transgender woman’ called Isla Bryson.
Eventually Graham/Bryson was transferred back to a men’s prison, but the First Minister (usually a fluent media performer) struggled to answer interviewers who asked her whether she regarded this convicted rapist as being a man or a woman!
Polls show that the majority of Scots oppose Sturgeon’s ‘gender recognition’ law, and she had failed to win over even a majority of SNP voters on this issue.
No doubt there were other reasons contributing to Sturgeon’s decision to quit (including personal factors), but there’s little doubt that the ‘trans’ issue derailed her leadership, which depended on holding together a broad coalition in favour of independence, rather than incessantly pandering to the ‘woke’ lobby.
Sturgeon seems to have made the mistake of believing her own legend, and revelling in flattery from her acolytes in the left-liberal media.
Her own favoured candidate for the leadership is Humza Yousaf – from a Pakistani family and theoretically a Muslim, but who fully supports Sturgeon’s woke agenda and is a fellow Glasgow MSP, responsible for Health and Social Care in her cabinet. If Yousaf were to win, it would mean that Scotland’s two largest parties were both led by Pakistanis. (Anas Sarwar has been leader of the Scottish Labour Party for the past two years.) Another possible pro-Sturgeon candidate, who might have had more chance of reuniting the party, her present deputy Keith Brown, a former Royal Marine commando who served in the Falklands War, ruled himself out.
While Yousaf is fully on board with the woke agenda, another candidate who has already launched her campaign is Ash Regan, who was among the leading rebels against Sturgeon’s pro-‘trans’ policy. Regan is an Edinburgh MSP: she resigned from Sturgeon’s government in protest at the “gender recognition” plans. Regan has advocated reuniting Scottish nationalism and bringing Sturgeon’s old enemies back into the party, but has no chance of winning the leadership and is more likely to end up in the wilderness herself, possibly in some future alliance with Salmond’s Alba party.
One likely candidate not standing is the initial bookies’ favourite Angus Robertson, who led the SNP contingent in the House of Commons before losing his Westminster seat in 2017 and restarting his career in the Scottish Parliament. Robertson was disliked for years by the SNP’s left-wing because of his role a decade ago in changing the party’s defence policy to a more pro-NATO stance. It’s likely that today’s left cares more about ‘culture wars’, and after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine there is little support for anti-NATO policies outside the fringe of the fringe (whether left or right). But Robertson remains personally unpopular among many of his colleagues, and clearly found less support than expected.
It now seems that the main challenger to Yousaf is Kate Forbes, Secretary for Finance and the Economy in Sturgeon’s cabinet and presently on maternity leave. Her biggest problem is that she is a practising member of the Free Church of Scotland, which takes a conservative line on ‘culture wars’ issues such as the ‘trans’ debate. Fortunately for Forbes, she was on maternity leave during the Holyrood vote on gender recognition last December, but social liberals and the trans lobby will doubtless vote for Yousaf. Ash Regan’s candidature will allow Forbes to present herself as a relative moderate and ‘compromise’ candidate on social issues, but for now Yousaf is the bookies’ favourite.
[NB: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the Free Presbyterian Church rather than the Free Church of Scotland.]
