A man who featured on a podcast by the far right group Patriotic Alternative Scotland has been convicted of inciting racial hatred.
James Allchurch — who allegedly said a politician’s daughter should be raped — was last month convicted of 10 of 15 counts of distributing material to stir up racial hatred via his online radio station, Radio Albion, according to reports. The material included references to hanging black and Jewish people.
His white nationalist platform broadcasted neo-Nazis involved in a group later proscribed as a terrorist cell, including one member later convicted of attempted murder.
It aired readings of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, numerous shows which deny the holocaust, and featured a picture of then-prime minister Theresa May with a noose around her neck.
At Swansea Crown Court, judge Huw Rees said Allchurch’s custodial sentence “will not be measured in months”, the BBC reported.
Patriotic Alternative Scotland last year featured Allchurch, from Pembrokeshire, Wales, on its P.A. Talk podcast, and following his conviction the far right group offered him support and condemned “draconian restrictions on freedom of speech”.
P.A. Talk podcast has previously broadcasted the far-right extremist and convicted criminal, Blair Cottrell, the former leader of the white supremacist Klu Klux Klan (KKK) as well as numerous Patriotic Alternative members linked to the banned neo-Nazi terrorist group, National Action.
Crane’s former co-host, Kristofer Kearney, last month pleaded guilty to disseminating terrorist materials.
A Scottish Greens spokesperson said of Allchurch’s comments: “This kind of vile and misogynistic bile has no place in our politics. It exposes the violence and hatred that is central to Patriotic Alternative and the far right.
“The growth of this kind of extremism should concern all of us. We all need to stand in solidarity with the communities they are targeting and against the bigotry and division that they seek to fuel.”
Patriotic Alternative Scotland has previously said it condemns violence.
Allchurch told The Ferret that rather than advocating rape, as his trial heard, he suggested it would take a politician’s daughter to be raped by a grooming gang before the state took action against such groups. The mention of hanging of black and Jewish people featured in a punk song he included in a podcast, but he said he would not have done so had he remembered its “offensive” lyrics.
Allchurch removed interviews with terror group National Action after it was banned and some of its members were convicted, he claimed. He rejected claims Radio Albion denied the holocaust “or its tragic effect on the Jewish community” but was airing “alternative views”.
While opposed to violence, Albion used mainstream “cartoon violence” to “express disgust at political figures”. Allchurch did not wish to be “abusive or insulting towards anyone”, and had removed much potentially offensive content from his platform, he added.
Allchurch on the Patriotic Alternative podcast
Allchurch featured in a 2021 episode of the P.A.Talk podcast. The stream is hosted by Simon Crane, a Patriotic Alternative Scotland regional organiser.
During the episode featuring Allchurch, Crane claimed he had met many people who had moved to West Lothian from England as part of a “white flight” to escape multiculturalism.
Allchurch blamed multiculturalism for increases in crime – with different races targeting one another – and alleged that Africans had low IQs and were prone to littering. There was neither litter nor crime in Latvia and Lithuania because ”they are still all European people”, he claimed.
Crane told The Ferret that Patriotic Alternative “does not believe in draconian restrictions on freedom of speech, they have no place in a free society and Mr Allchurch’s case predates PA”.
“I wholeheartedly object to attempts smear or myself with links to proscribed groups because I spoke to a man who spoke to a man over five years ago,” he added.
Radio Albion
Allchurch’s Radio Albion, which broadcasts Patriotic Alternative Scotland content including P.A. Talk, is a self-described provider of “news, views and music from the moderate nationalist community.”
Allchurch once interviewed the co-founders of National Action, who were later jailed when it was proscribed as a terror group. One founder held a manifesto by a Norwegian terrorist who murdered 77 people, and a guide to making homemade detonators.
Albion urged listeners to write in support of jailed neo-Nazis including a National Action member later jailed for life in 2019 for plotting to assassinate an MP, and for child sex offences.
Allchurch told The Ferret his platform encouraged its audience to write to a list of jailed far right figures “as it is the Christian thing to do”. Such people can “become ostracised from family and friends and they can become suicidal in prison, so a pen friend can be a big help,” he said, adding that Albion “made it clear” that writing to prisoners should not indicate support for their crimes.
He claimed Albion presumed innocence until proven guilty and condemned National Action after one member pleaded guilty to a murder plot. He had also removed the member’s name from his website’s “penfriend list”.
Albion kept the National Action podcasts online “for a short while after the ban” with a disclaimer warning people to have nothing to do with the group, he claimed.
Albion regularly aired podcasts from another radio network, featuring David Duke, a former leader of the US white supremacist Klu Klux Klan, alongside Patriotic Alternative founder, Mark Collett.
Albion also featured Matthew Heimbach, a leader of the US neo-Nazi organisation. The group helped organise the white supremacist 2017 protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, where an anti-racism protestor was murdered.
