One of America’s most notorious racists has been allowed into Britain to speak at a conference staged by unrepentant nazis, several of whose followers have been jailed for terrorist offences.
Jared Taylor, founder of American Renaissance, is to be star speaker on Saturday at the Patriotic Alternative conference being held at a so-far undisclosed East Midlands location.
Serious crimes
PA is headed by Mark Collett, whose admiration for nazis and Ulster terrorists was revealed by a Channel 4 film, and Laura Towler, who makes no secret of her admiration for the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.
Towler’s husband Sam Melia recently served a jail sentence for inciting racial hatred, and many other PA activists have been jailed for serious crimes.
Former prison officer Ash Podsiad-Sharp, is serving an eight-year sentence for terrorism offences including possession of what the court described as a “murder manual”, and PA’s “fitness guru” Kris Kearney, was jailed in 2023 for terrorist crimes involving the manifestos of several mass murderers.
Like Collett, Kearney is an open admirer of Adolf Hitler.
Respectable image
Taylor has tried to have a more respectable image and has in the past distanced himself from Jew-baiters, which has led some of the antisemitic fringe to attack him for “selling out” to “Zionism” (their code word for Jews).
He also has a rocky relationship (including for personal reasons) with David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who for years has been Collett’s closest American mentor.
Duke is known to be seriously ill, and the cynical Collett might have decided it’s time to ditch him in favour of a new celebrity friend.
Taylor has recently begun to associate with more radical fringe groups. Last month he spoke in Texas at the first conference of Patriot Front, a white supremacist breakaway from the neo-nazi Vanguard America.
Earlier this year a US federal court ordered Patriot Front to pay $2.7 million to a black man who was attacked by their members during a march in Boston, Massachusetts.
Infamous nazis
The last time Taylor spoke in the UK was in 2013 at a meeting in London jointly organised by Adrian Davies and Jeremy Bedford-Turner. His audience included some of Britain’s most infamous nazis such as Martin Webster and Keith Thompson.
Davies, the far right’s favourite barrister, is one of Taylor’s main UK contacts and has spoken at American Renaissance events in the USA, where other British guests have included former BNP leader Nick Griffin and ex-NF London organiser Michael Walker, one of British fascism’s few self-styled “intellectuals” who used to edit Scorpion magazine.
Another “intellectual” magazine editor close to Taylor is Mark Cotterill of Heritage and Destiny who seems likely to have been the AR leader’s contact with PA. Cotterill has become increasingly close to Collett, and PA’s deputy leader Laura Towler spoke at Cotterill’s Heritage and Destiny conference in Lancashire last month.
Taylor’s right-hand man Sam Dickson visited the UK last year during a period of racist rioting. He held meetings with his old friends Davies and Cotterill, and with former BNP MEP Andrew Brons, but is not known to have had any dealings with Collett.
In 2019 Taylor was deported from Switzerland and for a time banned from the entire Schengen Area because of his extremist activities. For more than five years he was banned from Twitter (now X) but has been reinstated as part of X owner Elon Musk’s policy of indulging the far right.
Challenge to the Home Office
Taylor’s appearance at next Saturday’s PA conference is a challenge to the Home Office and a test of the Labour government’s supposed resolve to fight the far right.
If anyone deserves exclusion from our country, it’s surely a man like Jared Taylor who has spent the past 35 years promoting virulent racism and who now plans to speak at a conference packed with impressionable youngsters, several of whose leaders have already been convicted of inciting racial hatred, including terrorism.
