A supposedly “independent” county councillor broke cover last weekend to speak at a conference in memory of the UK’s leading Hitlerites.

Pete Molloy, an ex-BNP activist and currently a Durham county councillor for Spennymoor, was speaking at an annual event run by the self-styled “intellectual” nazi magazine Heritage and Destiny who again tricked their way into a Preston venue for their latest conference on Sunday afternoon.

Molloy is a Liverpudlian who moved to Durham in 2009, and was ‘purged’ from the BNP in 2015.

Despite posing as an independent, he has never shifted from his extremist views, which became abundantly clear from his speech at the weekend when he boasted that he was still a ‘nationalist’ and had decided to run as an independent solely because he felt he had greater prospects for success.

‘White man’s country’

He encouraged others to stand as independent nationalists if they did not belong a party and stressed the importance of cooperation between nationalist groups.

In 2023 he was at the centre of row when he posted on Facebook that Britain was a “white man’s country”.

This was in response to a comment by actor Adjoah Andoh’s that those on of Buckingham Palace’s balcony after the King’s coronation were “terribly white”.

Two years earlier he had been investigated by the council for racist comments about Muslims and posting a link to a white supremacist Facebook page.

In his H&D speech he described the standards board investigation as “a kangaroo court”.

He was also found to have “bullied and disrespected” two Spennymoor officers.

Bullied officers

Molloy undertook to give a written apology to the council officers he had bullied and was instructed to take part in mediation and training in equality and diversity.

He told Sunday’s meeting “I went along to it just out of interest basically nothing more than to see what was getting said and stuff like that. It was an hour of my time I’ll never get back, you know, it was pointless but I done it.”

So that worked well…