Hiding at a village hall in Staffordshire, Mark Collett’s Patriotic Alternative today confirmed that they intend to abandon any attempt at “mainstreaming” racism.
Collett has given up electoral politics and intends instead to follow the extra-parliamentary road previously travelled by Colin Jordan’s British Movement, even though similar strategies have already led to the jailing of several senior PA activists for crimes including terrorism.
His choice of overseas guests was a clear sign of Collett’s intentions. Three weeks ago in Wirksworth Town Hall, Derbyshire, Collett’s rival Kenny Smith welcomed guest speakers from the German AfD and the Polish Konfederacja, parties which between them have well over a hundred members of national and European Parliaments.
Today, though they were meeting just a few miles away across the border in Staffordshire, at Hanbury Memorial Hall, Collett’s guests were from a different political world where activists are more likely to be found in a jail cell than a council chamber or parliament.
As Searchlight reported yesterday, one guest was Australian nazi and convicted criminal Blair Cottrell. Joining him today, in front of an audience that included veteran British nazis Mark Cotterill and notorious Holocaust revisionist Lady Michèle Renouf, was the Bavarian stormtrooper Sascha Rossmüller, from what used to be the NPD and is now (confusingly for British readers) called Heimat (Homeland).
Rossmüller has been an active nazi for over 30 years and was a leader in the “radical” faction that persuaded the NPD (for years Germany’s leading far right party) to adopt the name change. He helps edit the party magazine Deutsche Stimme and spent years as a full-time party employee. During internal faction fights within the NPD, Rossmüller spent several years as its national deputy chairman.
As with his Australian fellow speaker, Rossmüller has criminal convictions involving violence, in his case connected to the biker scene where for years he has been involved with the “Bandidos” gang.
He has also been an official of Roberto Fiore’s “Alliance for Peace and Freedom” which claims to be a pan-European nationalist alliance though many of its affiliates are only three fascists and a rottweiler.
Having Cottrell and Rossmüller on board may encourage Collett’s most thuggish members, including Cardiff football hooligan Joe Marsh, but will do little to stop the flood of defections by more politically minded extremists to the rival Homeland Party.
