Secret police files reveal truth about ‘far right violence’

Even the so-called ‘conservative’ press has joined ‘anti-fascists’ in a festival of propaganda during the past week, alternately warning of ‘far-right violence’ and celebrating its apparent defeat.

But by a strange coincidence, an official inquiry into the operations of undercover police officers has simultaneously revealed some of the truth behind this hype. H&D has spent some time examining the records of this inquiry, including testimony given at a hearing in London on 24th July this year.

During 1990 and 1991, an undercover police officer codenamed HN 56 was deployed to infiltrate the British National Party (BNP). It would be a criminal offence to reveal the true name of HN 56, but while inside the BNP he used the pseudonym Alan Nicholson and was known as ‘Nick’.

This officer worked in coordination with the Security Service (MI5) as part of a top secret police unit known as the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). The names and birth certificates of dead children were used to create fake identities for SDS officers, who were then infiltrated into ‘extremist’ organisations. This strategy was first adopted after riots outside the US Embassy in 1968, during the Vietnam War. MI5 and the police became aware that they lacked intelligence on new and violent far-left groups, so this infiltration strategy was developed.

According to journalistic and anti-fascist hype, the early 1990s was a time when ‘far-right’ violence against non-Whites was increasing, especially in London. Had ‘nazis’ been behind this ‘racist violence’, the obvious place to find evidence would have been inside the BNP.

HN 56 – given the fake identity of Alan ‘Nick’ Nicholson – was sent to join the Loughton branch of the BNP. A decision to point him in this direction was taken by his superiors in August 1989. After several months of training he began his mission in April 1990, hanging around for about six weeks at a pub in Loughton, regularly frequented by BNP members and sympathisers, before filling in an application form for BNP membership. Perhaps surprisingly, he was not given a fake passport in his cover name, though he was given a bank account in this name, a driving licence, and other fake documents.

The most telling section of his testimony to the inquiry was that he thought he had been chosen to infiltrate the ‘far right’ because he was physically tough and had a black belt in karate:
“I think there was a perception that if you are going to get a smack on the head, it was probably if you were on the right-wing rather than the left.”

Sir John Mitting, chairman of the inquiry, asked HN 56:
“So a perception that you were more likely, yourself, to become a victim of violence, if I can put it that way?”

“Yes.”

“If deployed into a right-wing group.”

“Yes, I think so.”

Later in his testimony, HN 56 adds: “Well, the thing about the British National Party was if they ever showed up anywhere there was always opposition, generally. It often would result in violence. …Disorder in the sense of – they would not be instigators. It would be on them, generally.”

He is then asked by the inquiry chairman:
“So you thought that you were going to find disorder in which members of the BNP would be set upon?”

And HN 56 replies: “Yes, for example when they held an annual meeting, you know, the venue would have been a closely guarded secret, only revealed maybe a couple of hours before to forestall any invasion by people who wanted to disrupt it.”

One regular concern when infiltrating the ‘far-right’ was that an agent might be uncovered by the anti-fascist organisation Searchlight, who might believe he was a ‘genuine’ BNP activist.

HN 56 testified to the inquiry: “Occasionally the [SDS] managers would quiz me on aspects of my proposed cover identity. The anti-fascist Searchlight organisation would investigate people who associated with extreme right-wing groups and while they were unlikely to warn any of the groups, there was always the possibility that an undercover officer or the unit could be unmasked by them. There were no organised civilian groups looking at the extreme left-wing in quite the same way.”

He added that at the time of his deployment he was expecting to spend four years as an undercover officer: “this made sense because of the preparation time required and the need to develop a credible legend.”

Rather naively, HN 56 told the enquiry that the rationale for his mission was that “the aim of the BNP was a reduction in immigration, being a voice for white people which they deemed had no voice, and ultimately white supremacy. I did not think these aims were subversive but they were criminal and likely to lead to public disorder. I obtained information about their aims from the BNP newspaper and within John Tyndall’s book [The Eleventh Hour].”

Throughout his entire infiltration mission, HN 56 only witnessed one violent incident, when a member of his BNP branch punched an ‘anti-fascist’ during a ‘Rights for Whites’ march in November 1990. This march was part of a campaign supporting the family of John Stoner, a local schoolboy who was stabbed and almost killed by a Bangladeshi gang in Bethnal Green, East London.

One of his problems was that whereas the type of left-wing parties and groups that SDS infiltrated “tended to have frequent and regular meetings and a well-defined group of members, the extreme right-wing was much less strictly organised and tended not to have regular meetings or a fixed membership beyond one or two active organisers.”

This observation probably reflects the state of East London BNP at that time, where a number of activists and organisers had only just been recruited to the BNP from the declining NF, and there was also a looser group of nationalists, some linked to football gangs and others to what later became Combat 18.

Perhaps due to a lack of intelligence among police and MI5 officers, HN 56 had been deployed to a branch that was declining – partly because the Epping Forest organiser had stepped down for family reasons – even while other branches nearby in East London were expanding. Among the few Epping Forest BNP activists who seems to have been befriended by HN 56 during his deployment was Rod Law, who was the subject of a detailed report submitted to Special Branch. Mr Law (who was of course entirely unaware of the fact that this apparent new recruit Nicholson was an undercover police officer) remained a dedicated nationalist and was elected as a BNP councillor for Loughton Alderton ward, Epping Forest, in 2006.

Despite the large amount of public money invested in his training and infiltration mission, it seems that HN 56 lost his nerve, leading to the premature end of his mission in early 1991.

He believed that he had been followed, once on foot and once in a vehicle, in late 1990 and thought that Dave Bruce, a senior BNP official, suspected him of being an infiltrator. There are some hints in HN 56’s testimony that he believed a BNP sympathiser within the police had given him away.

During his testimony to the enquiry last month, HN 56 was asked:
“Were you apprehensive about what the British National Party might do if they thought you were a police officer?”

He replied: “Very much so, yes.”

“What did you think they might do?”

“Beat the shit out of me.”

Even more absurdly, in his witness statement to the inquiry HN 56 said that he was concerned about his superiors having asked him to attend a BNP meeting in another area, because he thought this would seem suspicious for someone so new to the party and “I was concerned I could have been killed.”

Despite the failure of his undercover mission, HN 56 remained within London’s political police, then known as Special Branch, until his retirement in the late 2000s.

None of the Special Branch or MI5 documents released to the inquiry in association with HN 56’s testimony give any indication that the BNP was involved in organised violence. The documents identify a number of individuals well known to older H&D readers, including former Glasgow BNP organiser Eric Brand, who stepped down from this post for family reasons in 1990 during HN 56’s deployment. There is also a document recording BNP members’ visit to Belfast for the 12th July celebrations in 1990.

HN 56’s report from inside the BNP’s 1990 annual rally (held on 13th October 1990) refers to speeches by old comrades of ours including Steve Cartwright, Tony Lecomber (referred to in the report under his pseudonym Tony Wells), Steve Smith (now a senior activist with the British Democrats), and our late comrades Dave Bruce, John Peacock, Richard Edmonds, and John Tyndall.

It’s interesting to note that in this secret police report, most audience members at the BNP rally were described as “smartly dressed, apparently intelligent and relatively affluent. The notorious ‘skinhead’ element made up no more than 5% of those assembled.”

At this 1990 rally the advertised guest speaker Manfred Roeder had been banned from the UK by the Home Secretary (see our recent report on the tenth anniversary of Manfred’s death).

For some reason the name of the replacement guest speaker has been redacted from the report, although older H&D readers will remember that this was Karl Philipp, a German NPD activist and close associate of the historian David Irving. Mr Philipp’s speech focused on ‘Holocaust’ revisionism, and HN 56 summarises his argument as follows (note that these are the words of a secret police report, and that in this context they use normal and reasonable language to summarise revisionist arguments, whereas today in public documents the police would always adopt hysterical anti-fascist language about ‘Holocaust deniers’ and ‘hatred’):
“…The ‘bogey’ always thrown at nationalism and at nationalists, in attempts to stifle not only its growth but its acceptance as well, was the spectre of the Holocaust. Until this ‘bogey’ was laid to rest or put into its proper context (by accepting recent research by noted historians, such as David Irving and others, into the actual numbers and nationalities of those killed in the death camps, in particular Auschwitz), then this ‘bogey’ will always be used by those who see nationalism as a threat, to scare off people who would otherwise embrace the nationalist ideals.”

HN 56 said that the mood of the BNP was very optimistic, and that Richard Edmonds in particular had highlighted the excellent trend of local election results in East London.

Perhaps surprisingly, HN 56 gives a positive account of John Tyndall’s speech to the rally. He writes in his secret report that John Tyndall’s “speech, delivered professionally and in complete tune with those assembled, dealt firstly with the betrayal of this country, by successive governments, since the war. Indeed, he stated, the die was cast in 1939 when ‘cousin’ was set to fight ‘cousin’, instead of a mutual peace being agreed. …He further stated that the so-called ‘vanquished’ of the war, Germany and Japan, were now victorious because of their love of their countries and their adherence to the tenets of nationalism, while the so-called ‘victors’ were now enfeebled by the betrayal of their subsequent governments. …How is it, he went on, that the governments at the time of the Second World War allowed young men to die defending their country from foreign invasion only for successive governments since then to let the creeping invasion of ‘aliens’ take place and to nearly lose our country to them. He, too, closed his speech on the subject of the police. He said that Sir Peter Imbert [Metropolitan Police Commissioner] was no more than a ‘puppet’ dancing to the tune of the British Board of Deputies [the UK’s main Jewish organisation]. He said that Imbert, having recently been summoned to appear before the Board, later stated that he would ‘wipe racism off the streets’. By racism, Tyndall said, he means us – the BNP.”

HN 56 concluded that “the BNP must view this rally as a great success. The whole feeling of it was that of a celebration of recent successes of the party in book publicity and electoral support. Without doubt the two election results in Tower Hamlets have shown Party members that people are prepared to vote for them if they work hard to get the message across. The results have given them a sense of purpose in belonging to a Party which can attract the support of the public and consequently more members to its ranks.”

Later that year a separate source with access to higher level BNP discussions (well above anything HN 56 could have learned) reported that party strategists Dave Bruce, Richard Edmonds and John Morse had decided that the BNP would focus on the 1991 council elections in East London rather than wasting resources on any General Election that might be called by the new Prime Minister John Major, who had replaced Margaret Thatcher in November 1990. A similar high-level source reported to Special Branch on the BNP’s purchase of computer equipment to assist production of the newspaper British Nationalist.

HN 56 was clearly paranoid about the likelihood of his fellow officers having ‘blown his cover’ to the BNP, and about the likelihood of BNP activists inflicting violence on a police infiltrator even if we discovered one. East London was a very different place to East Belfast!

But he was correct to discern that the party was (justifiably) feeling optimistic about its electoral progress during the early 1990s.

After being on the political margins for most of the 1980s, in May 1990 the BNP polled 8.7% in Holy Trinity ward, Tower Hamlets, where its candidate was Steve Smith.

Steve then polled 8.4% in a Park ward by-election in July 1990, followed by his colleague Ken Walsh polling 12.1% in St Peter’s ward in September 1990.

The progress was obvious, and continued in the two years following the failure of HN 56’s infiltration mission.

Barry Osborne polled 20% in Millwall ward in October 1992, and a year later Derek Beackon won the same ward to become the BNP’s first elected councillor, a result which shocked the political establishment and the liberal media.

These years of progress are a sad contrast to the present-day marginalisation of racial nationalism.

Yet we should look back on those times not with sadness or resignation, but with optimism.

The rapid progress of racial nationalism in those years can be achieved again, provided that our movement can regain the will, determination, and intelligence to mobilise the undoubted potential for our cause that exists throughout our Disunited Kingdom.

We can learn many things from the belated testimony of HN 56 to last month’s inquiry. H&D will continue to scrutinise and report on official documents relating to our cause, as and when such documents become available to us.