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This investigation was first published in the May 2024 print edition of Byline Times
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United Hull’s support of survivors of child sexual exploitation seems, on the surface, to have been a strange course for the group to take.
According to this newspaper’s research, United Hull was founded by several former football hooligans linked to Hull City FC. It was originally set up as a street protest group, aiming to force the local police to reopen an investigation – Operation Marksman – into an alleged paedophile ring operating in the area that had not been fully addressed by the force. It was a story similar to the systemic policing failures to tackle paedophile gangs in Rochdale, Telford, and Rotherham.
Over the years, the extreme politics of United Hull’s leadership and members became increasingly apparent.
The far-right Patriotic Alternative rally, which multiple United Hull members and a leader attended, was a turning point.
Dubbed “Britain’s largest far-right white supremacist movement” by The Times last year, Patriotic Alternative has become one of the most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the country.
Special Investigation: ‘The Far-Right Is Cynically Taking Advantage of Child Sexual Exploitation Survivors’
Andrew Kersley spent five months speaking to survivors of child sexual exploitation and experts on the ‘grooming’ of vulnerable women by far-right groups to understand why it is happening
Earlier this year, Byline Times revealed that the Equality and Human Rights Commission threatened the group with legal action after one of its campaigns – ‘Operation White Christmas’ – asked people to donate only to white families in need.
In the aftermath of the Patriotic Alternative rally, a United Hull leader who eventually stepped down said that he was “first and foremost a street protestor and a patriotic campaigner”. But he was not a singular example of far-right tendencies within the group.
In Facebook posts, United Hull members discuss patrolling night clubs to hunt predators, protesting and “guarding” proposed sites for migrant accommodation, and the need to “form an army like the IRA and defend our country”.
One United Hull member, Sam Melia, was jailed for two years in March this year on charges of stirring up racial hatred. A fan of Oswald Mosley and Adolf Hitler, and an organiser for Patriotic Alternative, the judge said he was an antisemite with Nazi sympathies.
Another United Hull member, Alek Yerbury – who has been subject to a slew of negative press for his resemblance to Hitler – has posted multiple times in United Hull’s Facebook group, including organising details for multiple protests at asylum seeker accommodation. Yerbury was also a leading member of Patriotic Alternative, before leaving in February last year to ally himself with a new group of hardened far-right activists in Yorkshire with hopes to form a “new EDL”, according to Hope Not Hate.
United Hull has also taken part in livestreams with Sharon Binks, an organiser for a group called Justice for Women and Children. It also has links to the far-right, with Binks’ praise for far-right figurehead Stephen Yaxley-Lennon previously the subject of a BBC Newsnight investigation.
Special Investigation: ‘Muslim Grooming Gangs’ – An Old Conspiracy Mainstreamed by Today’s Politicians and Press
Part Three: In 2020, a two-year study of crime data and academic research by the Home Office concluded that ‘group-based offenders are most commonly white’
Yaxley-Lennon, known as ‘Tommy Robinson’, is one of the most prominent far-right campaigners in Britain, even being appointed as a ‘grooming gangs’ advisor in 2018 to the then UKIP Leader Gerald Batten.
Yaxley-Lennon and other UKIP leaders were the original founders of another far-right group, Hearts of Oak. With the help of UKIP’s Lord Malcom Pearson, it recently funded a landmark civil case by a Rochdale abuse survivor against her abuser, as a result of which she was awarded £425,000 in damages.
In 2019, a Rochdale-based abuse support group, Shatter Boys, said it was approached by Lord Pearson and other UKIP figures with promises to introduce them to millionaire donors and to fund an open-top bus that could raise the alarm about ‘grooming gangs’ in the area. At the time, the charity’s founder, who refused the request, said “I think their fight is about Islam”.
The interconnectedness of the network of these far-right groups reflects the extent to which those holding extreme beliefs have used the issue of child sexual exploitation in recent years to further their own ends.
Sexual Abuse and the Far-Right
Holly Archer, one of the most prominent survivors of the Telford sex ring, who has written a biography of her experiences I Never Gave My Consent, last year revealed how she returned to Telford to see the far-right Britain First group campaigning about child sexual abuse.
She said the group’s then Acting Leader, Jayda Fransen, “handed me a leaflet with a picture of my book on it, and quotes that had been twisted and misconstrued to make me say the most racist things… They’d made it about immigration. About all these migrants ‘coming over here to rape our girls’. I felt a rage inside me that I didn’t know what to do with”.
Another prominent survivor of child sexual exploitation, Caitlin Spencer, has said she was pressured to say that Muslims were to blame for widespread child abuse. When she later challenged far-right narratives, she said she received virulent personal insults and was even lectured about her experiences of abuse online.
The experts Byline Times spoke to raised the same concerns about the furthering of a far-right anti-Islam agenda.
For Waqas Tufail, a Reader in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University and an expert on child sexual exploitation, the problem is clear: “The far-right don’t care about these survivors, they want to exploit them for political ends.”
Special Investigation: Society’s Reluctance to Acknowledge the Scale of Child Sexual Abuse and a Lack of Political Support for Its Survivors is Keeping the Vulnerable At Risk
Part Four: The far-right is able to present itself as ‘filling the gap’ left by a lack of services with its own range of ‘support’ for survivors
This is given further weight by the track record on child sexual exploitation of individuals in the far-right movement.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was sentenced to six months in prison after he filmed outside, and shared restricted details of, a CSE case being heard at Leeds Crown Court in 2018, risking undermining the entire legal process.
He defended close friend and ally Richard Price when Price was convicted of making four indecent images of children in 2010, claiming that he had been “stitched up” and calling for his release.
A previous investigation by Hope Not Hate uncovered at least 20 cases of members and supporters of the English Defence League (EDL) being convicted of child sexual exploitation offences. This included Robert Ewing, who murdered schoolgirl Paige Chivers in 2007 after developing an “inappropriate sexual interest” in her.
The failure to deal with sexual abusers in its own midst, however, has not hampered the far-right’s focus on the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ narrative.