Carshalton and Wallington’s National Front candidate and self-proclaimed Holocaust questioner is claiming that British society is ‘under threat’ while the traditional parties hold power.
Richard Edmonds, former deputy chairman of the British National Party, told SW Londoner that despite the reams of evidence in the public domain there is nothing to definitively prove what happened in concentration camps.
British Jewry organisation The Board of Deputies of British Jews have roundly condemned Mr Edmond’s views labelling them as ‘profoundly disturbing’.
Mr Edmonds said: “The allegation that the Germans murdered six million Jews in the Second World War has, as a matter of fact, got nothing to substantiate that allegation – I’m well aware this is a very contentious subject.”
The 72-year-old, who visited Auschwitz shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, said he wanted to see it with his own eyes because he refuses to take anybody’s word for anything.
A Mail on Sunday investigation revealed that Mr Edmonds attended a conference, dubbed a ‘secret meeting for Nazi sympathisers and Holocaust deniers’ for the London Forum on, April 12.
Mr Edmonds argued that the Holocaust is a subject he has researched for many years and said that he questions it rather than flat-out denying it.
“You are not going to get the truth about the Holocaust because anyone who attempts to bring it out is jailed,” he said.
Vice president of The Board of Deputies of British Jews Alex Brummer hit back at the ‘despicable’ claims.
He told SW Londoner: “It is astonishing and appalling that in the year that politicians and Jewish communities around the world are commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Belsen by allied forces a member of the National Front should seek to deny the Holocaust.
“I find it particularly despicable and cruel in that I lost my own paternal grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins in the Nazi death camps.”
Mr Brummer said that despite being a believer in free speech he’s in favour of making Holocaust denial a crime.
“As the generations pass and memories fade it would be highly damaging and destructive if such mendacious views became an acceptable part of the public dialogue.”
Asked what the National Front would do differently if elected, Mr Edmonds said: “We’d give Britain back its identity for a start.
“We would oppose globalisation, we would oppose the outsourcing of our jobs to the cheap labour companies in the Far East which are making our people very, very poor and we would oppose the mass immigration we’ve experienced the last 50 years.”
In 2012 he was inspired to run in the Croydon North by-election after witnessing the 2011 summer riots he described as an ‘absolutely disgraceful sight’.
“I blame the authorities, they lost control,” he said. “They were totally negligent in their duty toward the law-abiding people of the community.”
Image courtesy of South London National Front via YouTube, with thanks
