EXPOSED: Britain First’s “March for Remigration” led by convicted people smuggler

HOPE not hate can reveal that Lee Twamley, photographed at the front of Britain First’s “March for Remigration” in Manchester this month, has served prison time for trying to smuggle Vietnamese migrants into the UK. 

In recent months, the flagging fascist group Britain First has tried to revive its fortunes by shifting away from elections towards public protests. Under the slogan “March for Remigration”, a euphemism for mass deportations, the group has held a series of events that have brought an assortment of neo-Nazis, misogynists, crackpots and convicts onto the streets of Nuneaton, Birmingham and, on 2 August, Manchester. 

This included Lee Twamley, snapped marching alongside Britain First leaders Paul Golding and Ashlea Simon at the forefront of the Manchester event, holding a Union Jack flag aloft. 

However, we can reveal that Twamley was previously jailed for 20 months as part of a Salford gang that tried to smuggle 11 Vietnamese migrants across the Channel to pay off drug debts. 

The gang made two bungled attempts to smuggle eight men, two women and a child across the Eurotunnel in hire vans, and were caught after failing to get insurance to drive in France. Twamley pleaded guilty alongside four others in 2016, the defendants receiving a combined total of seven years and eight months behind bars for their crimes. 

Twamley was also filmed slapping a woman in Piccadilly Gardens following the Britain First event, at which speakers had repeatedly invoked the supposed threat that illegal immigrants pose to women. 

Criminal Hypocrisy

Britain First portrays itself as a law-and-order movement, relentlessly linking UK crime rates to immigration and multiculturalism.

However, we have repeatedly revealed the extensive and shocking criminal history of its own members. Current and former Britain First activists have been convicted for theft, burglary, drugs offences, numerous kinds of violence (including domestic abuse), terror charges, child abuse and more. 

For example, while Golding rails against the supposed lawlessness of London under Mayor Sadiq Khan, his own brother Jamie — himself now a Britain First activist — unleashed an astonishing crime wave across London and Kent in the mid-2000s, culminating in his confession to 171 burglaries across the region. 

Despite endlessly decrying “imported rape gangs”, we have previously revealed that former Britain First activist Warren Gilchrest has been convicted of multiple sexual offences against children under the age of 13. Gilchrest is currently serving three years for his role in the racist violence in Manchester last summer.

We have elsewhere detailed Paul Golding’s own long list of convictions. The Britain First leader has also been caught on tape admitting to having violently assaulted his then-partner Jayda Fransen and another woman. 

You can find a sample of Britain First’s worst offenders here.