A former Miss Hitler beauty pageant entrant and her ex-partner have been jailed for a total of more than eight years for belonging to banned far-right group National Action (NA).
Alice Cutter was sentenced to three years and Mark Jones to five-and-a-half-years at Birmingham Crown Court for being members of the terrorist group.
Two other neo-Nazi “diehards”, Garry Jack and Connor Scothern, were also jailed; Jack to four-and-a-half years in prison, and Scothern to 18 months’ detention.
Jurors were shown messages in which Cutter, 23, joked about gassing synagogues, using a Jew’s head as a football, and exclaiming “Rot in hell, bitch”, after hearing of the 2016 murder of MP Jo Cox by far-right sympathiser Thomas Mair.
The waitress entered the Miss Hitler beauty contest as Miss Buchenwald – a reference to the Second World War death camp.
She denied ever being an NA member, despite attending the group’s rallies, where banners reading “Hitler was right” were raised.
Jones, 25, a former member of the British National Party and a rail engineer, was a “leader and strategist” who played a “prominent and active role”, the court heard.
The extreme right-wing group was banned in December 2016 by then-home secretary Amber Rudd, who described it as “racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic”.
Judge Paul Farrer QC told the four: “Following proscription [of National Action], you weren’t prepared to dissociate yourselves from the vile ideology of this group and therefore defied the ban and continued as members”.
Judge Farrer told Jones he had played “a significant role in the continuation of the organisation”, after its ban.
Cutter, he said, was a “trusted confidante” of one the group’s leaders, as well as being in a “committed relationship” with Jones.
All four defendants were “active” group members, even after the ban, prosecutors alleged.
Jack, 24, of Shard End, Birmingham, was at almost every meeting of NA’s Midlands sub-group.
He also had a previous conviction, from before the group was banned for plastering Birmingham’s Aston University campus with NA’s racially charged stickers, some reading “Britain is ours, the rest must go.”
Speaking ahead of sentencing, the director of public prosecutions Max Hill QC described NA members as “diehards” who “hark back to the days of not just anti-Semitism, but the Holocaust, the Third Reich in Germany”.
Scothern, 19, of Nottingham, was “considered future leadership material” and had distributed almost 1,500 stickers calling for a “final solution” – in reference to the Nazis’ genocide against Jews.
