Neo-Nazi Alex Davies guilty of belonging to banned terror group National Action

The other co-founder of the neo-Nazi terrorist group National Action was today (May 17) guilty of remaining a member of the proscribed group.

Alex Davies, 27, from Swansea, created the terror group alongside Benjamin Raymond (jailed for eight years in December 2021 for the same offence) in 2013.

Davies formed the National Action offshoot NS131 and had praised the System Resistance Network; both groups, alongside Scottish Dawn, all faced the same fate: proscription.

National Action (proscribed December 2016 – who never hid their desire to rebrand, writing on VK in 2016, “We will fight this in the courts or disband and organise under a new name”)

Scottish Dawn (proscribed September 2017)

NS131 (proscribed September 2017)

System Resistance Network (proscribed as a National Action splinter group in February 2020)

Tell MAMA documented the racist, homophobic tactics of NS131 and the System Resistance Network in the summer of 2017, documenting the links between National Action and the System Resistance Network in September of that year. Unfortunately, as noted above, the proscription took several years to occur.

An offshoot of the System Resistance Network, later proscribed, was the Sonnenkrieg Division; more broadly, other neo-Nazi groups proscribed include The Base (the US-bad neo-Nazi group with links to the infamous Atomwaffen Division).

Alex Davies is the twenty-fifth person convicted of links to the banned group.

Davies received two Prevent referrals (aged 15 and 19) in his teenage years and boasted that ‘nothing’ came of them. Political activities pre-National Action include membership in the youth wing of the neo-fascist British National Party and, later, an active member of Ukip.

He made headlines in 2016 after sharing a photo of himself performing a Nazi salute in the execution chamber at Buchenwald concentration camp – instigating a police and security service investigation in Germany.

A Mirror investigation into National Action in 2016 resulted in Davies leaving Warwick University.

Later jailed, other noted members of National Action include Alice Cutter, Mark Jones, Garry Jack, Connor Scothern, and the paedophile Jack Renshaw who went on to plot the murder of his local Labour MP Rosie Cooper and ex-Met Police probationary officer Benjamin Hannam. In late 2018, six convictions for membership of National Action occurred – those guilty were 27-year-old Daniel Bogunovic, 22-year-old Adam Thomas, Claudia Patatas, 33, 24-year-old Joel Wilmore, Darren Fletcher, 28, and 27-year-old Nathan Pyke. In addition, Christopher Lythgoe and Matthew Hankinson received prison sentences months earlier, with the police arresting Lythgoe as they investigated the plot to murder Rosie Cooper MP and a female police officer.

A leading figure within National Action before prescription, Wayne Bell (aka Wayne Jarvis, who has a history of violence), used Twitter and the Russian platform VK to post hundreds of violently racist, extremist material that included direct calls for the murder of Jewish communities. He also daubed neo-Nazi graffiti in his local area of Castleford before receiving a prison of four years and three months in May 2018.

In 2017, an ITV investigation detailed how former members of National Action were meeting in secret in training camps that fused ideological lectures and ideological violence – with sessions tailored toward boxing, street fights, and dealing with a knife attack. One former member of note cited in the ITV was Garron Helm (jailed in 2014 for sending racist tweets to the then Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger).

The embryonic stages of National Action focused on the West Midlands, aligning closely with the tiny yet enduring neo-Nazi British Movement with one form of street militancy: stickers in public spaces. Taking inspiration from “autonomous national socialist movements” in Europe, National Action took its tactics to universities in 2014, for example, for recruitment purposes directly and via any media exposure it generated. Other racist agitations included an anti-halal demonstration in Coventry and desecrating the Nelson Mandela statue in Trafalgar Square with a banana during a protest.

The racist attempted murder of the Sikh dentist Dr Sarandev Bhambra by the neo-Nazi Zack Davies, who claimed membership of National Action, made headlines in 2015, and whilst they denied his membership, the leadership of National Action used Davies in their memetic propaganda on VK years later.

The racist militant agitations peaked in 2015 with violence in Liverpool (as they worked with Polish neo-fascists) and Dover, with members of National Action aligning with other small fascist groups to attack anti-fascist protesters on both occasions. On Holocaust Memorial Day that year, members held a racist flash demo proclaiming “Hitler was Right” as a different banner read “Refugees not Welcome”.

Members, of course, stockpiled weapons (including knives, crossbows, pump-action shotguns, and baseball bats) according to counter-terror police. A serving British soldier later identified as Mikko Vehvilainen – was jailed for eight years in 2018 for membership in the terror group and possessed “an arsenal of weapons and swastika bunting”. At the time of their conviction, Jack Coulson, aged 19, pleaded guilty to terror offences related to building a viable pipe bomb.

Four members of National Action went to prison in 2018 after vandalising Aston University in the West Midlands with various racist propaganda stickers in the summer of 2016. Alexander Deakin, the Midlands regional organiser, also belonged to a closed Telegram page named after the white supremacist terror group the Ku Klux Klan (named the Triple KKK Mafia) involved 21 members with a secondary group of seven members called Inner. Deakin would boast about how he got “redpilled by forums, spending years arguing online, and then finally deciding to take action when this group [National Action] impressed me”.

From violent training camps to small MMA training sessions, National Action always incorporated the promise of violence – to engineer in recruits (and indeed core members) the thrill of violence to accompany their uncompromising genocidal beliefs. Its leadership carefully cultivated and policed the uniform of it members to foster group image.

As the academic Graham Macklin noted of their tactics, National Action positioned themselves as an unrelenting “revolutionary national socialist group, they consciously conceived of themselves as a youth-oriented ‘vanguard’ movement whose role, as political and spiritual elites, was to channel ‘hatred and rage’ and to ‘use it to shatter the decaying power of the enemy.”

The security services expressed their concerns about a growing cohort of young people drawn to far-right extremism in March (notably teenagers) – an age demographic National Action recruiters often sought out.

UPDATE 07/06: He received an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence