Police in Cambridgeshire are investigating a secret meeting of neo-Nazis that took place in September this year.
Footage has emerged of the event, showing a crowd of white men with shaved heads singing along to a song with lines such as “We want our country back now”. The song also includes the claim that “we’re run by” a group whose name is bleeped out.
The phrase “Sieg Heil!” is repeated throughout the song, which was commonly used in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s under the Nazis to signify loyalty to the regime, and particularly its leader Adolf Hitler.
A neo-Nazi group held a secret rally for more than 350 people in Cambridgeshire. Police are now investigating. pic.twitter.com/9Goyq2hWRV
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) October 11, 2016
The three-day festival was apparently organised by the Blood and Honour group, a white supremacist organisation, under the guise of being a charity event in aid of Help For Heroes. The charity have denied any involvement in the event and told the BBC that they are “strictly non-political”.
Over 350 people attended the mini-festival on the weekend of September 24 – the anniversary of the death of Blood and Honour founder Ian Stuart Donaldson – with the BBC reporting that roughly three-quarters of those who were in attendance had come from overseas.
East Cambridgeshire District Council said that a temporary event notice was filed with the request of hosting a “private party with music”, and it was allowed to go ahead after no objections were raised.
Blood and Honour have been banned in many countries across Europe for their racist and pro-Nazi views.
The event took place just three months after a 52-year-old man with links to an American neo-Nazi group was arrested and accused of murdering Labour MP Jo Cox in June.
The man – Thomas Mair from Birstall, West Yorkshire – will face trial in next month, with a four-week trial expected to commence on November 14. The accusations against Mair will be handled by the terrorism case management list.
