National Action founder Alex Davies jailed for remaining in banned neo-Nazi terrorist group

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

The founder of banned fascist group National Action (NA) has been jailed for eight-and-a-half years.

Alex Davies, 27, of Swansea, had been found guilty of remaining a member of the terror organisation after it was proscribed on 16 December 2016.

It was the first right-wing organisation to be banned by the Home Office since WWII, which was sparked by the group congratulating white supremacist Thomas Mair for murdering Labour MP Jo Cox.

Fellow members of NA included Jack Renshaw, 26, jailed for at least 20 years in 2019 for plotting to kill his local MP Rosie Cooper with a sword, and Christopher Lythgoe, 35, who was locked up for eight years in 2018.

Davies, a former campaigner for Ukip, was described by the prosecution during the court case last month as the “biggest Nazi of the lot”.

He had set up the “continuity group” NS131 with the aim of getting around the ban on NA.

On Tuesday, he was jailed at the Old Bailey for eight-and-a-half years by Judge Mark Dennis QC – who ordered that he spend a further year on extended licence.

Judge Dennis said: “I’m satisfied the defendant played an active and prominent role in concert with his trusted associates in trying to disguise the continued existence of the organisation in defiance of the ban.”

Addressing the defendant in the dock, he added: “You are an intelligent and educated young man but you have held, over a period of many years, warped and shocking prejudices.”

During the trial at Winchester Crown Court, prosecutor Barnaby Jameson QC described how the group had “terrorised” towns across the country with its call for an “all-out race war”.

The group was a throwback to Hitler’s Germany and based its logo and image on the Sturmabteilung – the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, he told the court.

Davies, who formed NA while at Warwick University in 2013, told an undercover reporter at the time that he did not want to say what he would do to Jews, because it was “so extreme”.

In 2016, he travelled to Germany – where Nazi idolisation is illegal – to pose for photos by holding an NA flag and giving the Nazi salute in the execution chamber of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Following the ban, NA split into regional factions and Davies set up NS131 – which stood for National Socialist Anti-Capitalist Action, as the numbers correspond to the last three initials’ positions in the alphabet. The Home Office also later banned it.

In his defence, Davies claimed that NS131 was not set up as a continuation of NA and had different aims and processes, and he was only “exercising his democratic rights”.

Davies was the 19th person to be convicted of membership of NA. Co-founder Ben Raymond, 33, of Swindon, was sentenced in December to eight years in prison and a further two years on extended licence.

Among those convicted of membership since December 2016 have been British soldier and Afghanistan veteran, Finnish-born Mikko Vehvilainen, and former Met probationary police officer Ben Hannam.

One of the group’s associates was convicted of making a working pipe bomb, while another, Jack Renshaw, of Skelmersdale, Lancashire, later admitted plotting to kill MP Rosie Cooper with a machete.

Renshaw’s plot – for which he was sentenced to life with a minimum of 20 years – was only foiled after a NA member blew the whistle on his former friends, reporting the plan to counter-extremist group Hope Not Hate, which passed the information to police.