National Socialist Movement (UK, 1962)
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The National Socialist Movement was a British Neo-Nazi group formed in 1962 by Colin Jordan on Adolf Hitler's birthday as a splinter group from the British National Party.
Impetus for the formation of the NSM came from a 1961 letter to Jordan from George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell stated that he agreed with the BNP, except over their lack of openness about Nazism. Jordan, feeling that a link-up with Rockwell could be beneficial, left the BNP to launch the NSM, and soon after formed the World Union of National Socialists with the American Nazi Party (and later other groups).
The NSM tried to organize an armed wing, Spearhead, which was shut down by the police when Jordan and John Tyndall were imprisoned, along with Martin Webster, Denis Pirie and Roland Kerr-Ritchie. The movement was effectively put on hold until Jordan was released from prison in 1963, when he assumed the leadership again.
The NSM was further weakened in May 1964 when Tyndall formed the Greater Britain Movement. Tyndall objected to the "non-British flavour" of the NSM, and bore a personal grudge against Jordan and Françoise Dior, Tyndall's former fiancée who hastily married Jordan while Tyndall was still in prison simply to avoid being deported from Britain as an undesirable alien.
The Movement entered its last phase of activity in 1965 when it launched a campaign against the "race traitor" Patrick Gordon Walker. The NSM used the slogan, "if you want a nigger for a neighbour -- vote Labour." The campaign highlighted the spiralling tensions. Membership fell to almost zero overnight after the arrest of several members accused of burning synagogues but the NSM momentum was brought to an abrupt halt when Jordan's wife Françoise Dior finally decided to leave him once and for all in March 1966, thus cutting off his main source of financing. Later he was imprisoned for attempting to arrest Harold Wilson for treason over Rhodesia.
The movement was further weakened by new race relations legislation. Jordan was arrested under the new laws and jailed for eighteen months in January 1967 for distributing "offensive literature" which was nothing more than a four page publication entitled "The Coloured Invasion" which consisted of extracts taken from the British press, mostly the Daily Telegraph, which put immigration into a bad light. As a result Jordan missed the launch of the new far right umbrella group the National Front that same year. It seems unlikely, however, that the NSM would have been invited to join because of the reluctance of both A. K. Chesterton and the Racial Preservation Society to admit open Nazis, and because the bad blood that existed with the BNP. The NSM finally collapsed without leadership, and the remnants of the group were reconstituted as the British Movement in May 1968, following Jordan's release.
The present NSM is not directly related to the British Movement.
