Far right speaker at alternative economics conference

I was sent an email pretty much out of the blue advertising next weekends global vision conference on the economic meltdown and a sustainable future for humanity,


I had a click to find a number of interesting names.

In particular I noticed Alistair Mcconnachie. Mcconnachie has two faces, one is as a green economist, he heads the Bromsgrove group that promotes monetary reform and is highly active as a monetary reformer. These people argue that money is created essentially out of thin air by bankers, instead it could be created by the community.

Money could be printed to boost the economy and fund ecological reforms.

He has another face, as a member of the far right. He is critical of a multi-cultural society, he opposes increased immigration, he believes in reducing the number of asylum seekers in Britain using the subtle term 'crimmigrants' to describe 'illegal immigrants'. You can read his build the fences higher and throw them out approach here.

He was too right wing for many members of UKIP and after writing a letter on the holocaust, his membership was suspended. The Guardian claim he stated to one member of UKIP: " I don't accept that gas chambers were used to execute Jews for the simple fact there is no direct physical evidence to show that such gas chambers ever existed... there are no photographs or film of execution gas chambers... Alleged eyewitness accounts are revealed as false or highly exaggerated."

I wrote back to the person who had emailed me the link to the economics conference suggesting that I did not wish to go to a conference with such a figure speaking and had a pretty shocking reply:

I myself have some doubts concerning at least some aspects of the holocaust myth. I think all free inquiry research should be encouraged on this and other matters, so long as no intention to lay new foundations of hatred, nor bait up Jews, nor find all and only Jews guilty for the sins of Zionism and debt-created money system, etc ....

I have seen a pretty damning interview with Alistair in the ITP's newspaper Voice of St George...one far right site summarizes in the following terms:

The latest issue, #32, of The Voice of St George newspaper is out now - and it's a cracking read!

There's articles on Blair's Britain, NWO 'freedom of religion', ususry and debt, movement meetings, the media -- and a cracking in-depth interview with UKIP's ex-Scotland organiser Alistair McConnachie on immigration, the holocaust, the 'war on Terror', green issues and much more!'

I think it is dangerous for those in the green movement and the left to network with people like McConnachie.

Likewise while I am critical of social credit/monetary reform, it is not an economic panacea, nonetheless it is not absolute rubbish either.

The pretty mainstream or even neo-liberal commentator Samuel Brittan has defended the idea of 'printing money' as a way out of crisis. I think there is some limited scope for doing so, obviously take it too far and the currency crashes, the IMF march in and chaos results. Equally if banks simply produced cash out of nothing, they would not be in crisis at present...they could just manufacture some more money.

I have an extensive chapter on monetary reform in my book Babylon and Beyond.

Monetary reformers do need to reject racism though or they will rightly continue to be challenged for linking up with the outside anti-semitic right.

Social credit founder Major Douglas was an out and out anti-semite...nasty stuff and I regularly get attacked for pointing this out.


the paper, by Derek Wall, currently Principal Speaker of the Green Party, entitled “Social Credit: The Ecosocialism of Fools,” was a collection of untruths juxtaposed with emotive non-sequiturs. The gist of the paper was that Douglas and all social crediters were anti-Semitic. Therefore greens and all respectable academics should drop the subject if they did not want to blight their careers by being labeled ‘anti-Semitic’. With great difficulty I persuaded Mary Mellor to continue with the book, promising that I would research the allegations fully. The quality of the Wall paper was such that I felt certain it would never appear in a respectable journal. I was wrong. For whatever reasons, the editorial board of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism published the paper, under the same title, in September 2003 (Vol. 14, No. 3, pages 99-122).

If you can get to a copy of CNS you can judge whether my paper is a pile of shit or not....or shorn of references, there is a edited version here.

In it I note:


The British League of Rights established Bloomfield Books, which has promoted Douglas’s books along with Holocaust revisionist titles, the Protocols, a massive range of populist conspiracy texts and even Mein Kampf. The League of Rights also encourages supporters to subscribe to Spotlight. The Bromsgrove Group, an alliance of varied monetary reformers, as well as right wingers such as Don Martin from the League of Rights and Alistair McConnachie. James Gibb Stuart acts as convener. His book The Lemming Folk is a conspiracist’s bible, which promotes once again the populist message that the “money power” links capitalism and communism with its plan for world domination. The book, which has been promoted by the far right British National Party, also praises apartheid,

“it means separate development — not racism, or repression, or institutionalized violence, or the eternal social and economic subjugation of one race by another. It was adopted in South Africa some thirty years ago because a white minority saw it then as the only means by which they could preserve their culture and their identity.”

During the 1970s Stuart supported Rhodesia’s white government who he saw as a target for the conspiracy because of their financial independence. His associate Alistair McConnachie, suspended from the UK Independence Party, an anti-European Union group, after writing to the Scotsman newspaper to question the Holocaust, edits Prosperity, a social credit/monetary reform newsletter widely promoted in the green movement. McConnachie, who was a member of the Douglas Secretariat during the 1990s, and remains active in monetary reform circles, is reported to have stated, “I don’t accept that gas chambers were used to execute Jews for the simple fact there is no direct physical evidence to show that such gas chambers existed.”