National Action: Nazi Alex Davies guilty of fascist group membership

A man has been found guilty of being a member of a banned fascist group.

Alex Davies, 27, from Swansea, was accused of being a member of National Action (NA), after it was banned in December 2016.

A jury found him guilty after it heard NA had not disbanded after its ban, but morphed into regional factions.

During his trial at Winchester Crown Court, he was described as "probably the biggest Nazi of the lot".

He will be sentenced at Central Criminal Court, The Old Bailey on 7 June.

Some members of the group had celebrated the murder of the MP, Jo Cox and advocated a so called, "race war". 

Davies co-founded NA in Swansea in 2013, before leaving to study at Warwick university, in Coventry, a university he was subsequently forced out of due to his extremist views.

Prosecutor Barnaby Jameson told the court Davies had set up a group called National Socialist Anti-Capitalist Action or NS131, which was also banned by the UK government.

Mr Jameson described it as a "continuity faction" of NA that covered the southern part of Great Britain.

Saying it was "expanding and recruiting", he called Davies a "terrorist hiding in plain sight".

Mr Jameson said NA and NS131 used the same colours, encrypted internet provider and ideology - a throwback to Nazi Germany - as well as the same leader, and regional structure.

He added: "Who was at the centre of all this? The founder, the galvaniser, the recruiter, one Alex Davies of Swansea. He was probably the biggest Nazi of the lot."

It was put to Davies in court: "You are a neo-Nazi, yes?"

He replied: "Sure."

Mr Jameson continued: "The defendant was an extremist's extremist.

"This was an individual who had his first contact with counter-extremist authorities when he was 15 or 16 - those organising the Prevent project.

"And when in contact he sets up an organisation (NA) in 2013 concerned with the revolutionary overthrow of the democratic order."

He added Davies said to an undercover reporter he did not want to say what he wanted to do to Jews "because it was so extreme".

He continued that Davies was "an individual who went on tour to Germany to Buchenwald to give the Nazi salute in the execution chamber that was a flagrant and provocative breach of German law."

Analysis, by BBC home affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford

When National Action burst on the scene, everything it did was designed to shock.

Alex Davies and his propagandist Ben Raymond borrowed ideas from the Islamic State group, and posted about a "White Jihad."

Davies had been involved with the BNP in South Wales as a teenager, but decided to become even more extreme and radical, even while being referred to the government's counter-extremism Prevent programme.

The result was a very small, but extremely dangerous group of neo-Nazis who seemed to have almost no limits on what some members were prepared to consider, including attacking MPs.

The organisation was eventually banned in December 2016.

It has taken five and a half years for Counter Terrorism Policing and the Crown Prosecution Service to mop up those who tried to keep the group going after the ban.

Alex Davies was the last of those to come before the courts, and this case should be the end of a particularly nasty episode of extreme right-wing politics in the UK.