Founder of National Action Jailed for Membership of Banned UK Group

The founder of National Action, Alex Davies, arrives at Winchester Crown Court in England on April 20, 2022. (Andrew Matthews/PA)

The founder of National Action (NA), a fascist organisation that is banned in the United Kingdom, has been jailed for eight years and six months.

Last month Alex Davies was convicted of being a member of the organisation after it was proscribed by the then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd in December 2016.

His trial at Winchester Crown Court was told NA was banned after it posted on Twitter congratulations to the man who murdered Labour MP Jo Cox and, in an attempt to get round the ban, Davies set up another group, NS131, which stood for National Socialist Anti-Capitalist Action.

Davies, 27, was jailed at the Old Bailey in London on Tuesday by Judge Mark Dennis QC who said, “I’m satisfied the defendant played an active and prominent role in concert with his trusted associates in trying to disguise the continued existence of the organisation in defiance of the ban.”

Dennis told Davies, “You are an intelligent and educated young man but you have held, over a period of many years, warped and shocking prejudices.”

Prosecutor Barnaby Jameson, QC, told the trial NA had called for an “all-out race war” and spread terror in a number of towns around Britain.

Alex Davies with a megaphone at a National Action demo in York, England, at the end of May 2016. (West Midlands Police/PA)

Davies, who is from Swansea in south Wales, told the court he had been a member of the British National Party (BNP), the British Movement, and UKIP as well as the Hunt Saboteur Association.

He told he became “politically homeless” after the BNP “imploded” in 2014.

In December last year the co-founder of the group, Ben Raymond, 33, from Swindon, was jailed for eight years after being found guilty of being a member of a banned terrorist group.

Counter-terrorist police officers said Davies and Raymond had together spread an “ideology of hatred” which was “incredibly dangerous.”

The anti-Islamophobia group, Tell MAMA UK, welcomed the sentence for Davies on Twitter and wrote, “National Action are a threat to all minorities across the UK and beyond.”

Davies is the 19th member of the organisation to have been convicted of membership.

Among the others who were convicted were Ben Hannam, a former probationary officer with the Metropolitan Police, and Mikko Vehvilainen, a former British Army soldier who had served in Afghanistan.

In March this year Assistant Commissioner Matt Jukes, head of the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit, said 41 percent of counter-terrorism arrests in 2021 had been associated with the extreme right and three out of four disrupted terrorist plots also involved the far-right.

PA Media contributed to this report.