EXPOSED: Ex-National Action and BNP members active in Anne Marie Waters’ For Britain Movement

• HOPE not hate can reveal that Sam Melia, a candidate for Anne Marie Waters’ For Britain Movement, was also active in the nazi organisation National Action, now banned as a terrorist group

• The party has recently received an influx of former BNP members

• Waters has again been backed by Morrissey, former frontman of The Smiths, as she campaigns for the Lewisham East by-election

HOPE not hate can exclusively reveal that The For Britain Movement, the Islamophobic party run by anti-Muslim activist Anne Marie Waters, fielded a former member of the nazi group National Action (NA), now banned as a terrorist group, as a candidate for Leeds in the May local elections. Melia is also active with the far-right youth movement Generation Identity (GI).

Despite Waters’ insistence that For Britain is not “far right”, the party has also accepted well-known former activists of the racial nationalist British National Party (BNP), some of whom have been campaigning for Waters in Lewisham East ahead of the 14 June parliamentary by-election.

HNH have previously exposed the sordid racism of the party’s local election candidates, who Waters claimed were selected after “strict vetting”.

Despite this, Morrissey, the former singer of The Smiths, again endorsed Waters and her party on Tuesday, describing her as “like a humane version of Thatcher”.

Waters has announced that she will speak at Saturday’s upcoming march to Whitehall in support of jailed anti-Muslim extremist Stephen Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson).

Now-Banned Nazi Group

Sam Melia, who represented For Britain in the Farnley and Wortley ward in the May local elections, was snapped at a NA street march in Darlington, County Durham, in November 2016.

NA is an extreme far-right network with its roots in the youth movement of the BNP. The group embraced open nazism from its outset and was proscribed under anti-terror laws by then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd in December 2016. Despite this it has continued to operate using a variety of different names, as exclusively revealed by HNH.

Pictured alongside Melia at the Darlington march was Wayne Bell (AKA Wayne Jarvie), a violent antisemite currently jailed for conspiracy to commit violent disorder and notorious for celebrating the murder of Jo Cox MP by white supremacist Thomas Mair.

Melia claimed he was “proud” to represent For Britain as one of its six candidates in Leeds, the prime focus area for the party in May’s elections. He received 162 votes, coming tenth of eleven candidates.

He has also posted in support of the Swedish nazi group Nordic Resistance, and made a series of antisemitic remarks, in the official For Britain members’ Facebook group.

Melia also attended the shambolic April conference of far-right youth group Generation Identity (GI), as well as a March event organised by the group in Hyde Park, London, and has promoted GI events online. HNH has previously exposed former NA member Jacob Bewick to be active within GI.

Melia makes his living as a woodworker, and advertises his work on his Facebook, including the below item adorned with the neo-Nazi “life rune”. Commenting is Stuart Nicholson, another For Britain Leeds candidate who was dropped by the party after HNH exposed him to be promoting Nazism online.

The New BNP?

Despite her repeated claims that For Britain is not “far right”, Waters’ party is attracting former members from a number of racist groups, including from the BNP. UKIP leader Gerard Batten has undercut Waters’ support by taking UKIP in an increasingly Islamophobic direction, but former BNP members remain barred from joining his party.

For Britain’s 16 May meeting in Loughton, Essex, was compéred by former BNP elections chief Eddy Butler. Butler was expelled from the BNP in 2010 after unsuccessfully challenging Nick Griffin for the party leadership.

Sat next to Waters at the head of the meeting was former BNP district councillor Patricia Richardson, as well as Sam Swerling, a longstanding (and now former) member in the Conservative Monday Club and current Vice-President of the Traditional Britain Group (TBG), a London-based organisation that hosts far-right gatherings, dinners and conferences. Waters spoke at the TBG conference in October 2017.

Waters posed for photos surrounded by former BNP members, including Butler, former BNP councillors Susan Clapp and Julian Leppert, and Jeffrey Marshall, the BNP’s former East London organiser.

Others now active in For Britain include former BNP candidate Robert Baggs and former police inspector and BNP candidate Michael Barnbrook, who has been campaigning for Waters in Lewisham. According to Clapp, “even some of the old NG [Nick Griffin] bodyguards from southend have joined”.

It is not hard to see why former BNP members might be attracted to Waters, who, at the Loughton meeting, said the following:

“[…] if we don’t bring down the EU now, your children and grandchildren will be living in a war-torn society. Which they will, they will […] the EU and it’s compliant national governments is behind this mass immigration from the Middle East and from Africa, who are bringing tribal warfare, bringing machete violence, on to the streets of European cities. The EU is behind that”.

She has also begun using language reminiscent of the BNP, for example using the term “indigenous Europeans”.