Searchlight can reveal that a Reform UK election candidate is actively involved with a neo-Nazi organisation.  One of their most prominent county council candidates recently attended a Summer camp in Lancashire run by Patriotic Alternative.

In this year’s Lancashire County Council election, Portuguese businessman Joe Custodio was Reform candidate for Preston North West. But a photograph published on Facebook by Heritage and Destiny editor Mark Cotterill reveals that Custodio was present at the recent Patriotic Alternative Summer camp in East Lancashire.

Custodio stood against one of the Labour Party’s best known local government figures, Preston City Council leader Matthew Brown, and was only 86 votes away from being elected to what is now Lancashire’s ruling group.

Known in his native Portugal as Joaquim Custódio, he moved to the UK in 2017 and now runs a graphic design company producing websites.

Custodio has also backed the far-right Portuguese party Chega, whose ranks include many supporters of the Salazar dictatorship as well as other racists and fascists. Chega is allied to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly the National Front).

But even for a Chega supporter, Mark Collett’s Patriotic Alternative is on the extreme nazi fringe.

Terrorism offences

Several PA activists have been jailed for offences including terrorism and inciting racial hatred.

Sam Melia, husband of PA’s deputy leader, was given a two-year jail sentence and was described by the judge at his trial as having the mindset of “a racist and a white supremacist. You hold Nazi sympathies and you are an antisemite.”

Collett himself first came to public attention when he was exposed in a TV documentary Young, Nazi and Proud, where he expressed his admiration for the Third Reich and for Ulster terrorist Johnny Adair.

Yet Custodio was happy to attend Collett’s nazi camp, in the company of fellow Preston resident Mark Cotterill, editor of Britain’s leading racist magazine Heritage & Destiny.

Only last week Searchlight revealed that Kai Cunningham, a leader of the openly pro-nazi White Vanguard, was also a prominent activist in Reform UK’s East London branch and had addressed a branch meeting in Rainham. He was suspended from the party.

Custodio posed for pictures next to Cotterill (third from right) and another notorious fascist Michael Woodbridge (third from left) who set up a support group for convicted racists (including terrorists) and has a long record in numerous far right groups since the 1970s.

National Action

Before it was banned, Woodbridge was involved in training sessions near his home in Wales for members of the terrorist group National Action.

After attending a Holocaust denial conference in London in 2015, Woodbridge told journalists that the Holocaust was “used as a propaganda weapon to justify the war against Germany.”

Also in the PA camp photo next to Custodio was Benny Bullman (centre), one of the ‘stars’ of the racist music scene and a leading official of the oldest UK nazi group British Movement.

Bullman is banned from several European countries. He is lead singer of Whitelaw, whose songs include ‘Fetch the Noose’ and ‘We’re Coming for You’.

Their album covers celebrate fellow fascists such as Sir Oswald Mosley and Blood and Honour founder Ian Stuart Donaldson.

Is Custodio planning to defect to PA? Or does his close connection with Collett’s Hitler and Mosley fan club simply indicate the extent of racism and nazism inside Nigel Farage’s party.

As we revealed several months ago, Mark Collett has spoken about his intention to infiltrate ‘clean skin’ PA agents into Reform UK.

If he hoped that Custodio would be one of them, Searchlight isn’t the least bit sorry to have wrecked his plan.