High Court to reconsider non-prosecution of neo-Nazi

The High Court is to hold a judicial review on Wednesday into the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to charge a white nationalist who was reported for making an “anti-Semitic” speech at a neo-Nazi demonstration in Whitehall in 2015.

The case concerns Jeremy Bedford-Turner, whose far-right London Forum group talks about “the astonishing role and influence of the Jewish lobby,” and says that “countering Jewish-Zionist power is vitally important”.

At the Whitehall rally, he called British politicians “a bunch of puppets dancing to a Jewish tune, and the ruling regimes in the West for the last one hundred years have danced to the same tune”.

He was prominent in an “anti-Jewish” demonstration in Golders Green on Shabbat last year, together with Bernadette Jaggers, a former National Front organiser in Essex. The Community Security Trust described it as
“sickening”.

The judicial review was granted by a judge in January, who said it “raises potentially important issues for society in this growing area of racist and religious hate crime”.

It follows a push for action by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA), after a five-month CPS investigation concluded that a jury would be unlikely to convict Bedford-Turner.

CPS officials had been examining whether Turner’s language amounted to “incitement to racial or religious hatred using threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour with the intention – or likely consequence – of stirring up racial or religious hatred”.

Turner is described by anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate as “a former violent National Front activist who went on to be an officer in the Royal Corps of Signals, becoming fluent in Pashtun and other tribal Afghani
languages”.

In a statement this week, CAA chairman Gideon Falter said: “It’s a disgrace that we have had to litigate for the Director of Public Prosecutions to reconsider the absurd decision not to prosecute this
brazen neo-Nazi. The question now is why the CPS seems to demonstrate such incompetence in dealing with cases of anti-Semitism.”