A year-long undercover investigation by BBC Wales has prompted calls for a far right group to be banned and for the police to investigate some of its members who were secretly filmed making racist comments and saying migrants who refuse to leave the UK should be shot.
Broadcasting this week on BBC iPlayer and BBC One Wales at 9.00pm, the BBC Wales Investigates programme, Unmasked: Extreme Far Right, follows a year-long investigation into far right group, Patriotic Alternative.
Former Counter-Extremism Commissioner Dame Sara Khan believes the UK government should urgently change the law to make groups like Patriotic Alternative illegal.
A BBC journalist infiltrated the group using a fake identity, Dan Jones, someone who was sofa surfing in Cardiff and didn’t have a full time job. Posing as a new recruit to PA he covertly recorded at demonstrations, got casual work with one member of the group, attended their summer camp as well as their secretive annual conference where he recorded some of PA’s members and supporters using racial slurs and sharing extreme views.
He filmed one PA member saying he believed a race war was inevitable and the organisation should use a similar tactic to the Nazi party to gain power. Another who says he works for the Inland Revenue, saying that he wants to see a whites only world and how he gives deliberately misleading information to non-white people at his work who he calls his “racial enemies.” Another said he wanted to see migrants rounded up, put in camps and shot if they refused to leave. And at the group’s annual conference, a guest speaker from Australia – a convicted criminal, Blair Cottrell, told the undercover journalist and other members how he thought the only way to deal with black criminals is for them to be skinned and their bodies hung up at traffic lights to deter others.
Barrister Ramya Nagesh watched some of the footage for the Unmasked: Extreme Far Right programme and said that in her view: “There’s more than enough evidence for the police to investigate and refer to the Crown Prosecution Service.”
The group cannot be banned under current legislation as they do not advocate terrorism but Dame Sara, the UK’s first Counter-Extremism Commissioner, feels they are “creating a climate conducive to terrorism”.
Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett said they are not extremist, do not promote violence and peacefully campaign for the rights of what he calls indigenous British people. PA, considered to be the UK’s largest far-right group with about 500 members and thousands of followers online, says it exists to “raise awareness” of immigration and promote “family values.”
The undercover reporter known as Dan Jones has now left Patriotic Alternative.
When contacted by the BBC about Dan’s evidence, most of those secretly filmed refused to answer questions – but one accused the BBC of having an anti-white bias.
Mark Collett says the allegations in tonight’s programme will be investigated and action taken against members if they have broken the group’s code of conduct.
Unmasked: Extreme Far Right airs today (21 January) at 9pm on BBC One Wales and is available now on iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00279gm/bbc-wales-investigates-unmasked-extreme-far-right
