How many convicted armed robbers does it take to make a community safer? According to Ashlea Simon, the answer is apparently ‘as many as possible’.
The recent spate of racist vandalism in Salford has been appalling. Residents of houses identified as HMOs (sometimes wrongly) have had to flee as their windows are smashed and defaced with abusive graffiti, including swastikas. In one particularly grim example, a pig’s head was left outside a property.
These criminal acts are, as is so often the case, beamed to the world by a small group of ‘citizen journalists’. These figures are typically careful not to explicitly endorse the attacks, but provide their viewers with gratuitous footage of the damage with commentary that paints the violence as a reflection of local sentiment.
But one local resident has seemed particularly gleeful: Ashlea Simon, former deputy leader of Britain First, who now leads her own splinter group, All For England (AFE). Simon is local to Walkden, where much of the vandalism took place, and since July has conducted a campaign of identifying and filming supposed HMOs on social media.
While retaining a modicum of deniability, Simon has been keen to claim credit for raising the issue of HMOs in her area and is happy to admit that the vandalism has targeted the very HMOs she has “exposed” in recent months:
“People contacted me and said, “Look, Ash, there’s this HMO here. Will you come and report on it?” And that’s what I did. And one of the first ones I ever did was in Kersal – that was actually the first one that got smashed up, that everyone would have seen. That was one of the first HMOs I exposed.”
Simon likes to claim that she speaks for her area, and that AFE is defending the community against unvetted men being housed in Salford.
But just who are the men that Ashlea Simon surrounds herself with? Are AFE members just salt-of-the-earth locals with legitimate concerns? Let’s take a look at the membership of Simon’s group:
Among the fine, upstanding citizens that have concerns about local housing is David Totton, a notorious Salford gangster. Totton is infamous in the area for having survived a gangland shooting in 2006 which saw him shot in the face – but which ended in the deaths of the two hitmen sent to kill him after they were disarmed and shot with their own guns.
Just months after that incident, Totton was jailed for 4.5yrs for his part in a brutal assault on two car park attendants at a casino after he and two friends were asked to leave the premises. The attack left the attendants – one of whom was just 18 years old – with a jaw fractured in two places and the other with bitemarks on his ear.
In 2015, Totton was banned from every pub in central Manchester for driving his car into the front of a nightclub after an altercation with the door staff.
Among the other community-minded types drawn to Ashlea’s movement are Paul Cox and Mark Smith. Cox and Smith are old friends, having formed a bond during their career of supplying Class A drugs around the area.
In 2016, the pair were jailed for 7.5yrs and 9 years respectively for their role in the enterprise, in which £200,000 worth of cocaine was found at 15 properties.
The above was not Cox’s first brush with the law – he was also jailed in 2010 alongside ANOTHER member of AFE, Neil Hudson, for their roles in an armed gang that targeted fellow criminals for robbery.
Their attacks on other criminals in one case involved carjacking a vehicle and beating a man to obtain information on where stolen cash was hidden. The court also heard that Cox and Hudson had planned an attack on a security firm that delivered money to ATMs, though had not gone through with it prior to their arrest.
Hudson also pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine with intent to supply.
Hudson and Cox’s tactic of targeting violent criminals for robbery is clearly risky, and other members of AFE saw fit to use a less dangrous strategy for robbery.
Group member Ashley Pollard was jailed in 2019 for his membership of an armed robbery gang that specifically targeted businesses with female employees, seeing them as soft targets. The gang attacked nine shops and a travel agent, terrifying their largely female employees.
Describing the group as “not intelligent”, the judge noted that the group’s attacks targeted the very community that Ashlea Simon’s group now claims to be defending:
“What staggers me is these are your local shops, they are part of your local community, and you don’t care”
This was not Pollard’s first brush with the law. Aged just 17, he was jailed for 12 months for threatening a firefighter with a knife while the latter was in the process of putting out a fire.
Another member of the group with a penchant for brutalising shop workers is Daniel Cooke. Cooke was jailed in 2019 for a terrifying attack on a branch of B&M in which he threatened a male and female employee with a ‘zombie knife’, leaving both victims traumatised.
The judge noted that Cooke and his co-defendant had an “appalling” criminal record including previous convictions for robbery, burglary and drugs offences.
While Ashlea Simon likes to portray herself as the voice of her community, it could not be clearer that she and her crew represent the thuggish, criminal fringe of society.
Residents of Salford have a lot less to fear from HMOs than they do from Ashlea’s lads, who have proven track records of violently attacking, robbing and exploiting local residents and flooding the area with drugs.
Prefer to listen? Click the play button to hear the audio version. Harry Shukman Reform UK is staffed by oddballs and enigmas, but none odder…
