Police were called after a misled hotel cancelled a far-right conference on its premises.
Officers worked with The Villa hotel in Levens to bring the national conference of fascist group Patriotic Alternative (PA) to an end yesterday.
Police were called at about 10.20am and said they attended the venue “as a proactive, preventive measure to prevent any breach of the peace”, following concerns raised by members of the community.
A force spokesman said: “no offences occurred and no arrests took place”.
The Villa Hotel said “it does not support or is in any way associated with the Patriotic Alternative group” and that it was “led to believe that the purpose of the event was for other reasons”.
It added that it “immediately intervened and contacted the police to stop this event from continuing and worked with them to bring it to a closure.”
Anti-far right and research group Flare said that they informed the hotel shortly after 9am that “their facilities had been booked under false pretences”.
It added that “PA are a fringe group whose views most people would be disgusted by, but exaggerated and premature claims of their demise only serve to demobilise opposition”.
PA’s leader, Mark Collett, a Nazi-sympathiser and Holocaust conspiracist, writes in his book The Fall of Western Man that “when it comes to the notion of white guilt, nothing is pushed more strongly” than the “alleged extermination of six million Jews at the hands of the German people”.
He also describes Hitler’s Nuremberg propaganda rallies as “something that one would have been proud to be a part of”.
The party campaigns for non-whites to leave Britain, for an end to laws surrounding hate speech and would ensure “no public body will promote any alternative as either equal or superior to the traditional family” of mother, father and children.
