Connor Scothern. (West Midlands Police)
A British teenager jailed for belonging to a far-right, neo-Nazi terrorist group that plotted to wage a “holy war” against Black people, Jews and the LGBT+ community and Jewish people had his sentence halved Friday (November 20).
Connor Scothern, a 19-year-old from Nottingham, was convicted alongside three others – including a Miss Hitler beauty queen – for being members of National Action.
Scothern, a member of its Midland Chapter, was handed an 18-month sentence at a young offenders institution at Birmingham Crown Court earlier this year.
But his lawyers have successfully argued that he should not have received the adult term for a crime committed as a youth, the Nottinghamshire Post reported. To not do so, they said, “was not only wrong in principle but was also unlawful.”
Justice Jeremy Baker withdrew the original sentence, swapping it for a nine-month stint in a young offenders institution.
He nevertheless expressed “scepticism” at Scothern’s claim that he had begun to lose interest prior to National Action being proscribed by the Terrorism Act 2000 in 2016.
Neo-Nazi National Action is ‘virulently racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic’, officials say.
The Neo-Nazi group, founded in 2013, is described by the Home Office, the government department responsible for migration and security, as “virulently racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic”.
Across social media, members have celebrated the deaths of queer people during the US Pulse massacre as well as rally for the reintroduction of Section 28, stonewalling all “promotion of homosexuality” in schools.
Scothern was aged just 15 when he joined National Action, where the internet and social media have helped facilitate the spread of white extremist ideology and violence.
He owned more than 1,000 stickers of Adolf Hitler and his mobile phone was stuffed with vile memes, such as one showing a pile of ash with the words “dead jew child”.
Local National Action leaders praised Scothern during his trial, with one nothing he had “driven himself into poverty buying stickers and travelling to socials”.
Others described him as seeing National Socialism and calling for the “final solution” – the genocide of Jews – to end what he saw as a litany of grievances against minority groups in Britain.