by Keith Richmond
Andrew Brons, the newly-elected British National Party MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside, is, like his leader Nick Griffin, usually suited and booted when on public parade. His is now the apparently acceptable face of the far-right in Britain today.
But the truth is that Brons is a long-standing neo-Nazi, a man with extremely nasty opinions and a conviction for abusing a community constable. In 1984 Brons told PC John Raj: “Inferior beings like yourself probably do not appreciate the principle of free speech.”
The BNP like to describe Brons, 62, as a “veteran British nationalist”. In fact he joined the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, founded in 1962 by Colin Jordan and John Tyndall on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. The anti-fascist organisation Searchlight, which has been keeping tabs on Brons for years, reports that in a letter to Jordan’s wife Brons talks about one NSM member who “mentioned such activities as bombing synagogues” – Brons adds that while “I realise he is well-intentioned, I feel our public image may suffer considerable damage as a result of these activities.”
Brons left the National Socialist Movement to join the British National Party – formed in 1960 after a merger of the National Labour Party and the White Defence League, run by John Bean and Andrew Fountaine, and separate from the current BNP – which later merged with the League of Empire Loyalists to become the National Front.
He joined the NF’s national directorate in 1974 and, when Tyndall quit in 1980, became its chairman. Brons edited the NF journal New Nation with his friend Richard Verrall, author of the book Did Six Million Really Die, and at a rally in London in 1981 calling for “rights for whites” he argued for compulsory repatriation. He ended his speech by saying: “If they’re black, send them back.”
Brons left the National Front in 1986 to concentrate on his job as a politics lecturer at Harrogate College but, on retirement, began to write articles for the British National Party’s magazine Identity.
Searchlight thinks he has been a member of the BNP for about four years and says: “If the BNP wanted to distance itself from Nazism, the last person it should have chosen as a candidate is Andrew Brons, a man with a long Nazi pedigree.”
