John Kingsley Read

John Kingsley Read

John Kingsley Read (1937ndash 1985) was chairman of the British National Front (NF) from 1974 to 1976 and a founder of the National Party.

A former member of the Conservative Party and chairman of the Blackburn Young Conservatives, Read left to join the NF in the early 1970s.

A strong orator, Read rose quickly through the NF ranks, his style drawing comparisons to Barry Goldwater, to whom he also bore a passing physical resemblance. [M. Walker, "The National Front", Glasgow: Fontana, 1977] After securing the support of potential rival Roy Painter, Read was elected Chairman of the National Front on 21 October 1974 in a victory for the 'populist' or neo-Imperialist wing of the party over the supporters of John Tyndall who had an overtly National Socialist (i.e. Nazi) background. Tyndall refused to accept his defeat and attempted to overturn it through the courts, eventually succeeding in 1976. Another expellee, Andrew Fountaine, who would later be an opponent of Tyndall, denounced Read as an alcoholic. [J. Bean, "Many Shades of Black - Inside Britain's far Right", p. 217]

Read then quit the party along with many of his followers to establish the more respectable National Party (NP). The party was initially successful, winning two seats on Blackburn Council (one of them Read), but they failed to build on this early success after their other councillor was disqualified for election irregularities, and Read eventually left active politics to retrain for local community work instead.

After the murder of a young Sikh man in a suspected racist attack, Read remarked during a speech at an NP meeting of 'One down, a million to go', which effectively ended his presentation of a more moderate stance. Great play was made of this by both the National Front and the Anti Nazi League, but Read denied having made the comment - nevertheless he was found guilty and fined by local magistrates for it.

Read died in 1985 and upon his death was claimed by Searchlight magazine to have been working as a mole for them. This was disputed by Nick Griffin and many others who assert that Kingsley Read had been working with the knowledge of other leading members of the NF to feed false information to the magazine deliberately, although John Tyndall was convinced that Kingsley Read had been a double agent. [J. Tyndall, 'An Enemy Agent is "Exonerated"', "Spearhead", August 2002, p. 11] Kingsley Read's legacy continues to be debated as a result of this still unsettled confusion, and in the confusing world of Britain's far right -where claim & counter-claim are sporadic - the truth may never well be known.

He subsequently became a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher and her policy of privatisation, and is rumoured to have re-joined the Conservative Party before his death in 1985.fact|date=January 2008

Elections contested

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