Mcconnachie in new far right meeting

Lancaster Unity note another Mcconnachie appearance....I am pleased to say I alerted quite a few people to him last week but had a number of comments from people who denied that he was on the right.

Apparently he will be talking to the fractious far right Swinton Circle in February.

It reminds me of the situation in the last 1930s when pacifists got together with social creditors and national socialists in groups like the British Peoples Party, famous for including Kim Philby's dad as a by-election candidate.




The wiki oracle notes:



The British Peoples Party was a far right political party founded in 1939 and led by ex-British Union of Fascists (BUF) member and Labour Party Member of Parliament John Beckett.

The party was under the patronage of Lord Tavistock, the heir to the Duke of Bedford. Made up of mostly former members of the BUF, its membership also briefly included Colin Jordan and St. John Philby, a former Labour Party member. The party supported an immediate end to the Second World War, and was vehemently opposed to usury, calling to mind some of the economic policies of Hilaire Belloc. The group also brought in elements of Social Credit, as Lord Tavistock had been a sometime activist in the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The party's activities were generally limited to meetings, the publication of a journal, The People's Post and the contesting of a single by-election in Hythe, Kent in 1939, where St. John Philby lost his deposit. The party was controlled by an executive committee consisting of Tavistock as Chairman, Beckett as secretary, Ex-Labour Party candidate Ben Greene (a noted pacifist, anti-semite and member of the Peace Pledge Union) as treasurer, and Viscount Lymington and former left-wing journalist John Scanlon also added. Sir Barry Domvile, leader of The Link, had also been amongst those to offer support to the party.

Activity further fell away during the war, as the BPP's pacifist line became increasingly unpopular.

Any way enough about the 1930s and Colin Jordan's political origins, lets fast forward to this kind of stuff in 2009.

Swinton apparently link in with a number of pro-aparthied and National Front fellow travellers, McConnachie has worked closely for a long time with pro-apartheid conspiracy theorist and monetary reformer James Gibb Stuart, whose mad books I had to read to research these people a couple of years back.

This is from today's Guardian diary:

Because it is always good to visit friends in the run-up to Christmas, time to drop in once more on the Swinton Circle, the strange bunch who straddle the hinterland between the far right and the Tory right. Always good to see them. They have been somewhat preoccupied of late trying to purge themselves of BNP types because they know that Cameroons have no truck with extremists, but the process has been difficult. Alan Harvey, the former chairman and one-time NF activist, has fallen out with almost everyone and now leads what he calls the "official" Swinton Circle. He and the other faction share a common loathing. That's about all. Still, life goes on and we see that in February, the Swintonites he left behind will have as their guest speaker Alistair McConnachie, who, in 2001, triggered resignations from Ukip by writing to the Scottish press saying the Pope had been duped over the Holocaust. Clarifying his position, he later wrote, "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." No one can guarantee similar controversy when he speaks, but we guess he won't be dull.