One of the very few seriously active British members of the Ku Klux Klan died on 10 January aged 88. Ian Christie was originally from Dundee, but migrated south to Leeds after serving a short prison sentence and recovering from alcoholism.

Christie’s drink problems were probably related to his political odyssey from the Communist Party to the violent nazi fringe. Within a few years of joining the BNP in the late 1980s he was convicted and fined in 1991 for sending threatening letters to Dundee’s council leader and the leader of the local Jewish community.

Dire consequences

He learned nothing from this light sentence and in 1998 was jailed for three months after sending another threatening letter, this time to the Lord Provost of Dundee, signed with a made-up name on behalf of the Klan, and warning of dire consequences for the Lord Provost if he went ahead with renaming a Dundee library in honour of Nelson Mandela.

Christie’s lawyers argued in mitigation that the offences were related to his suffering from depression and alcoholism, but by this time he had been a BNP activist and organiser of the party’s Dundee branch for about ten years and had already had one rap on the knuckles from the courts. And he wasn’t a foolish teenager. By the time he was jailed for his second similar offence, Christie was 60 years old.

Violent criminals

During Christie’s time with the Klan, its small number of British members including the violent criminal Dave Appleyard, Leicester NF activist Mick Shore, London BNP candidates Linda Miller and Bill Binding, and the veteran nazi Gordon ‘Tom’ Callow were often close to the terrorist gang Combat 18.

Soon after his release from prison and his move to Leeds (and by this time teetotal) Christie teamed up with his fellow Klansman Don Black, owner of what was then the most important racist resource on the Internet, the Stormfront bulletin board.

False name

Black, based in Florida, was closely linked to another famous Klansman David Duke, and Christie became moderator of Stormfront’s British section. Though no longer living in Dundee he used the pseudonym “Taysider” for his Stormfront work.

After leaving the BNP in the early 2010s and with Stormfront becoming much less relevant as social media took over its role, Christie continued to be in contact with fellow nazis worldwide without joining another political party.

His most public activity during his 80s was as a Patron of the Lancashire-based nazi ‘intellectual’ magazine ‘Heritage and Destiny’.