The Northants English Welfare Society and Stephen Osborne

I've written before about the Northants English Welfare Society (NEWS), which is fronted by a neo-Nazi who operates under the pseudonym of "Walter Greenway". In another post I mentioned that somebody had found my blog by entering the search term "walter greenway northants english welfare stephen osborne".


Who is Stephen Osborne? Well, I came across this page on the NEWS website:

Here's a closer look at the photo - notice the golliwog perched proudly atop the shelves:

The same man appears to be present in this photograph of a Northants English Welfare Society protest:

("Refugees not welcome"? And neo-Nazis like Walter Greenway are welcome, I suppose...?)

It would appear that NEWS is not the only far-right group that Mr. Osborne has been involved with. in the 2011 local elections, the BNP's candidate for Westone was one Stephen Osborne - and as Westone is a borough of Northampton, the odds are pretty high that this is the same Stephen Osborne who is now involved with the Northants English Welfare Society.

One post on the NEWS blog shows Stephen Osborne, along with someone called Robert Osborne, as children:

I mention this because the aforementioned Walter Greenway also had an old-fashioned photograph of a child as his avatar:

Could it be that "Walter Greenway" and Stephen Osborne are one and the same? It's a possibility...

The failure of the Steadfast Trust's English Community Groups

Late last year I wrote a post with a rundown of the various English Community Groups that had been set up at the behest of the Steadfast Trust. With this organisation currently on ice, we should not be surprised that its ECGs are in pretty poor shape themselves:

The Ipswich ECG appears not have made any moves since 6 January.

The Portsmouth ECG seems to have frozen up a week before its Ipswich cousin.

The Southampton ECG - a group so obscure that I didn't even know it existed when I wrote my last rundown - let out its death rattle at the same time.

The Essex ECG,  I believe, closed its doors in late 2014.

The Dorset ECG merged into the English Volunteer Force, a not-particularly-significant EDL splinter group.

The Northants English Welfare Society is still active - but it seems unlikely to attract widespread support, given that its frontman Walter Greenway is an unabashed Nazi sympathiser. Incidentally, "Walter Greenway" is a pseudonym, and the man in question also appears to go under the name "Gamlegorm the White". I am unsure what his real name is, but a short while back I received hits from someone searching for "ragnar northants english welfare society", "gamelegorm the white walter greenway" and "walter greenway northants english welfare stephen osborne". Make of that what you will.

 A typical posting from the Northants English Welfare Society.

Recently, however, there has been one more nail in the coffin: ECGL.org, the official website of the Leicester ECG, has closed down as a result of its domain expiring on 17 September.
For a bit of background, the ECGL - the most prominent of the ECGs - was founded on 2011. In March last year it announced that it would rebrand as a nationwide group called English Advocates.

This is where things get a little fiddly. The ECGL Facebook page changed its name to English Advocates and the group's Youtube channel rebranded as "Ethnic English", but the ECGL website remained and the old group was, officially, still active. Ingram (or one of his cohorts) even restarted its Facebook presence as a separate page.

But that second ECGL Facebook page closed as well. Now, with the closure of the website, all that is left of the English Community Group Leicester is the English Advocates page - which is basically just Lee Ingram ranting:

Lee Ingram argues that living in England is as bad as living in war-torn Syria.

I took the opportunity to archive the ECGL website just before it went down. Of particular interest is the photo gallery, where I found this image...

Hmm, wonder what those papers they're distributing could be about...?

Well, it just so happens that the site offered a closer look:

Now, what does that stack of fliers on the left say...?

Ah, yes. Woden's Folk.

For those unfamiliar, Woden's Folk is a neo-Nazi cult that believes Hitler to have been an avatar of the god Woden. The cult is eagerly awaiting the return of Woden/Hitler, in the belief that he will save the Aryan race from the dark forces of Judaism. Lee Ingram and his pals, for reasons of their own, felt that this cult was worth promoting.

If you're reading this, Lee, please don't insult my intelligence by claiming that you were unaware of the cult's neo-Nazi beliefs at the time. We're talking about a group with "Woden" in its name. That alone should have been more than enough to set off alarm bells.

The Steadfast Trust's English Community Groups were meant to represent ordinary English folk. Instead, they ended up as magnets for neo-Nazis. Had anyone voiced these concerns at the beginning of the project, they would doubtless have been dismissed as Anglophobes. However, as history has shown, those concerns turned out to be entirely valid.

Of course, the failure of the English Community Groups is just one of many casualties in the short history of Englisc nationalism. My report on the impending demise of the Anglo-Saxon Foundation turned out to be overoptimistic - the forum's domain was renewed for another year - but we need only take a quick look around the movement to find numerous other groups that have bitten the dust. English Shieldwall? Dead. Englisc Resistance? Dead. Steadfast journal? Dead.

Englisc nationalism will never gain a foothold amongst the English. Simple as that.

Traitor trash, invader or coloniser? Some nutter on my "crimes against the English"

I noticed that my blog was mentioned in this thread at the Green Arrow's forum, where a member calling himself "Gamlegorm the White" asks whether I am "traitor trash, invader or colonizer?" This because I am "hounding English patriots" and therefore, in his eyes, "an enemy of the English and supporter of the genocide of the English". He then expresses hope that I will "stand trial for [my] crimes against the English":

The discussion, which was started by Gamlegorm, was on the subject of "white/British/English welfare societies". Apparently Gamlegorn took exception to my posts on the Leicester English Community Group, the Ipswich English Community Group, and the Northants English Welfare Society (NEWS).

In fact, Gamlegorm mentions this last group right at the start of the thread, where he talks about the number of hits received by its site and Facebook on November 21 2014:

I can find no public post from this time where NEWS says anything about its web traffic, so it would appear that Gamlegorm has access to the group's private data. Which would imply, of course, that he is personally involved with NEWS.

Note the quotation in Gamlegorm's signature. I did a search on this line, and turned up a tiny handful of hits - all of them related to the Northants English Welfare Society or its frontman Walter Greenway. For example, we have this posting from the NEWS blog:

And this comment by Greenway on a Western Spring post:

It seems entirely likely that "Gamlegorm" is, in fact, NEWS frontman Walter Greenway. This impression is furthered by the wry amusement he shows when he notices my mention of Greenway:

Another poster, Pharmaphil, suggests that I am a "paid shill":

In fact, this blog may even be "a form of psyops":

Finally, Gamlegorm suggests the possibility of pressing charges against me for genocide:

Yeah,  good luck with that one, Gamlegorm.

Exposure: How does the Steadfast Trust's response stand up?

In my previous post I summarised how the Steadfast Trust had been presented by the recent Exposure documentary. Just to recap, here is the charity's response to the programme and its accusations:

"Tim Hawke has been suspended pending an internal investigation, and Darren Clarke suspended from our supporters' list.

The Trust does not share or support the offensive views expressed, some by people unknown to the charity. We cannot be held responsible for the views, actions or political affiliations of our supporters. 

We always work within charity law and all donations are used to further our registered objectives.  The Steadfast Trust is not and never has been political in its aims and we are perplexed by the suggestion it has become the focal pint for the far right. 

Tim Hawke attended the event to identify whether it could benefit from a grant, he disliked what he saw and told trustees he would not attend in future. 

We have criteria that English Community Groups must follow. Only a fraction of groups are sanctioned by us. Tim Hawke says 'burn the mosques' was a comment on the page of one group, and he decided the trust could not be associated with it. Mark Taylor's comments on skinheads were made in jest and the event referred to did not happen."

There are two points I will give to the Steadfast Trust here.

One, the documentary was misleading in making its allegation that the Steadfast Trust is "a new focal point for the fascist far right", implying that all the old members of the BNP, the NF and the rest are now rallying around Steadfast. While the organisation has certainly picked up supporters from such groups, and it is definitely the focal point for a specific subset of the far-right (the subset which I have termed "Englisc" nationalism), it is not a major focal point for the British far-right as a whole. That is a worthwhile distinction.

Two, the documentary's presentation of Tim Hawke's "burn the mosques" discussion is suspect. It begins halfway through the conversation, with the narrator summarising what came before; we are left to take his word for it. So, it is quite plausible that Hawke's words were twisted by the documentary.

Beyond these two concerns, however, the word which I would use to describe Exposure's segment on the Steadfast Trust is "unsurprising." I have written multiple posts on this blog analysing the Steadfast Trust and its satellite groups, and time and time again I have provided evidence that the charity (former charity, now - it has been re-registered) is knowingly associating itself with racist groups. I will recap some of my findings in this post.

Mark Taylor: the man behind the Steadfast Trust?

The documentary portrays trustees Tim Hawke and Mark Taylor as the two joint leaders of the Steadfast Trust; my own research suggests that this is the case.

If so, it would be reasonable to assume that - now Hawke is suspended "pending an internal  investigation" - Mark Taylor is in charge of Steadfast. Perhaps it was Taylor who drafted the above statement, Taylor who is currently manning the Steadfast Facebook page, and possibly even Taylor who will be investigating Hawke.

Mark Taylor

So, just who is Mark Taylor and what does he stand for? Well, RationalWiki has an article on Taylor which argues that he was the owner of a now-defunct YouTube account called "Seaxwielder"; I added my own thoughts to the evidence here.

To summarise: Taylor and "Seaxwielder" are both Steadfast activists; have both lived in Kent; have both used the pseudonym "Scyld"; and are both artists. Capping it off, "Seaxwielder" linked to Taylor's website Wyrdart.co.uk on his profile:

The likelihood that Taylor was the man behind this account is definitely worth our attention when we consider the racist material posted by "Seaxwielder":

This is far stronger than the prejudice shown by Hawke in the documentary. Taylor would appear to be the more overtly racist of the two men, which makes the charity's suspension of Hawke hard to take seriously. From my point of view the suspension appears to be a case of Hawke falling on his sword so as to save the charity's reputation.

The extremist connections of the Steadfast Trust

The charity's official claim is that it did not endorse the Maldon event, and finds the fascist presence "abhorrent":

I think it is true that the Maldon meet-up was never endorsed by the Steadfast Trust - certainly, I can find no mention of it on the Steadfast website. But this is irrelevant when we consider that the charity had, on multiple other occasions, knowingly aligned itself with racists.

Consider this posting, in which it openly invites members of the ASF and Woden's Folk to a Battle Abbey event:

I've written about Woden's Folk and its founder Wulf Ingessunu at length here. It is hard to say where to start when summarising the views of this neo-Nazi cult: the more you scratch the surface, the more absurdities you find.

Briefly, they believe that Hitler was a divine avatar who fought a "holy war" against "dark forces"; that the 1980s TV series Robin of Sherwood was a divinely inspired work of prophecy; that white people did not evolve from apes, but rather have a "vegetative basis"; and that the two world wars were caused by Loki. At least one member also believes that Mars was once inhabited by an intelligent lifeform which is currently worshipped by Zionists.

The ASF (Anglo-Saxon Foundation) is rather more straightforward: it is a racist forum filled with white supremacists. Here are some typical postings by three of the forum's regular members:

Supporters of this movement will tell me that it is unfair (nay, positively anglophobic) to dismiss the entire forum because of a few objectionable posters. But a cursory glance over the board will demonstrate that these objectionable posters comprise the entire membership: even the forum's owner, Seaxan, thinks that Jews should be expelled from England.

As I demonstrated here, both Tim Hawke and Mark Taylor are members of the Anglo-Saxon Foundation - in fact, Taylor used to be one of its moderators. They are therefore well aware of the levels of racism to be found at the forum; despite this, they are perfectly willing to invite the ASF members to their events.

Darren Clarke, one of the activists spotlighted in Exposure, posts at the ASF under the name "Edmundy". The Steadfast Trust suspended him from its list of supporters in the wake of the documentary. As with the suspension of Hawke, this smacks of damage control: the Steadfast Trust openly invited members of a racist forum to its event, so it can hardly be surprised that one of those members turned out to be racist.

We can find more evidence of Steadfast colluding with the ASF in the documentary itself, although the makers did not pick up on it. Remember the sequence showing a Steadfast stall manned by Taylor and Hawke...?

Notice that one of the t-shirt designs on sale features the URL www.englisc-gateway.com. This is the address of the Anglo-Saxon Foundation. The charity was deliberately promoting Seaxan's racist forum.

Another hate group with which Steadfast has aligned itself is the Northants English Welfare Society. I examined this organisation in depth here, demonstrating that its frontman Walter Greenway is a Nazi sympathiser and rabid anti-semite. This is just one of his pro-Nazi postings:

The charity once named the Northants English Welfare Society as an organisation which "can benefit from help in the form of financial grants and advice / assistance from the Steadfast Trust". For an idea of how close Steadfast is to Greenway's racist group, just look at this joint stall:

As we can see, the racism and fascism demonstrated at the Maldon event were not some isolated occurrence. The Steadfast Trust has a proven history of knowingly aligning itself with racist groups, including outright pro-Nazi organisations.

The supporters respond

The Exposure documentary provoked the ire of Steadfast supporters even before it aired. One anonymous blogger hailed the documentary as "desperately pathetic", even though it wasn't due to be screened for another four days. A number of news websites summarised the documentary prior to its broadcast, resulting in comments such as these:

After the documentary was aired, heated discussions broke out on the Steadfast Trust's Faebook page; most of the comments have now been deleted.

At least one supporter lost faith in the charity after seeing its seedy underbelly:

Others, however, began defending the Steadfast Trust, sometimes with conspiracy theories. These two decided that the racists seen in the documentary were probably actors hired to discredit the charity:

"Æthelflæd Seaxmaiden", however, took a different tact and declared that trustee Tim Hawke is actually a plant who was deliberately sabotaging the charity. She also smugly dismissed the undercover cameraman as a "red", although quite how she can have deduced his views on economics is unclear:

The aforementioned Northants Enbglish Welfare Society chimed in with support. Ironically, this posting from a neo-Nazi group was followed by a comment from Lee Ingram arguing that the Steadfast Trust should issue a statement clarifying that Nazis aren't welcome:

Poor, naive Lee. He seems genuinely unaware that the Steadfast Trust has been deliberately inviting neo-Nazis to its events: if it took a principled stand against racists, it would lose most of its support base.

Speaking of Lee Ingram, his "English Advocates" Facebook page expressed its outrage at the affair, pleading that the Steadfast Trust is "a tiny charity... with no Government funding" - as though this means that it is somehow beyond criticism:

Note the implication that Nazi sympathisers within the English nationalist movement are part of a conspiracy. This is a curious sentiment coming from English Advocates, a page that has previously linked with approval to the openly neo-Nazi website Metapedia:

Finally, possibly the most interesting post comes from the Stormfront member Atrociter. I've written about this man before - he once claimed to have spent the day with a Steadfast trustee, indicating that he is pretty close to the charity.

He was apparently in the Maldon group shown in the documentary, and complains that Exposure never showed them joking about a white man wobbling on his bicycle being a "human sacrifice" (this, apparently, is meant to justify their hostility towards a passing mixed-race family). He also makes the reasonable point that the Islamic extremism seen in the same documentary was a graver concern than the Steadfast Trust, before unexpectedly showing his support for the fundamentalist Hindu group:

He also shows some familiarity with the undercover reporter:

Ironic that a Steadfast Trust supporter can object to the charity being associated with white supremacy... while posting at Stormfront.

In conclusion, Exposure may have represented the Steadfast Trust unfairly in some cases. In other cases, however, it was much less harsh than was deserved - think of how much mileage it could have got out of the Steadfast/Woden's Folk connection, for starters.

I'd say that while certain aspects of the documentary are questionable, it was broadly accurate as a whole. The Steadfast Trust has a history of knowingly aligning itself with neo-Nazis and similar extremists, and has now paid the price. I won't shed a tear.

In the next post in this series, I will talk about the second charity examined in the Exposure documentary: Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh.

Walter Greenway and the Northants English Welfare Society

I had been meaning to move on from the weird world of Englisc nationalism, but I just keep on finding more and more bizarre groups attached to this loose movement. This time, I've stumbled across the Northants English Welfare Society.

The society's blog summarises its aims: "The Northants English Welfare Society exists to promote the social and cultural well-being of the English community, primarily within the English county of Northamptonshire, but also further afield."

And how does it go about promoting "the social and cultural well-being of the English community"? Well, here is a typical blog post from the group:

The video linked to at the top is an utterly unremarkable butter advert that happens to show a family consisting of a white man, a black woman, and mixed-race children. The Northants English Welfare Society considers this to be "brainwashing" and would apparently prefer that the media pretends that interracial families do not exist - which wouldn't be at all propagandistic, of course.

The group's official blog has also linked to a video entitled "White Independent Nation: A Western Spring." This is a podcast from Win-White.org that calls for an anarchist-influenced uprising from white pride activists, and hails the arrival "a second wave of racial politics pursuing or producing more of a Hezbollah, PLE-type strategy, ie Oriana Movement, WIN, Northwest Front, Western Spring, Nova, Europa, National Action, Sigurd, British Movement, Leicester Community Group and on the continent Casapa Italia, the Immortals in Germany and the grassroots of Golden Dawn, the NPD etc."

Meanwhile, on the group's Facebook page...

Given that the woman in the photograph is wearing a dirndl, I have my doubts as to whether she is actually English. But she is white, which is apparently good enough for NEWS.

The Northants English Welfare Society does not name its personnel on its website (Aside from references to "Mark", "John" and "Steve" and the events organiser "Richard"). However, RationalWiki claims that its official blog is "run by somebody apparently called Walter Greenway." The link its provides as a source for this statement is no longer relevant, but there is clearly a man known by that name who is involved in the group:

Note that the man in charge of the society's blog has the same profile image as Mr. Greenway:

Furthermore, Walter Greenway's IntenseDebate account is named "northantsenglishwelfaresociety". We can therefore conclude that he is a prominent individual within the organisation, and almost certainly its webmaster.


Walter is particularly active around the British Resistance blog. Here is one of his posts:

From this post, we can discern two main facts: one, that "Walter Greenway" is a pseudonym; and two, that he really hates Jews.

In fact, hatred of Jews is a recurring theme throughout his posts:

This antisemitism is hardly surprising when we consider that Walter Greenway is a Nazi sympathiser:

One of Walter's favourite Nazis is William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw:

He is also into holocaust denial, and doubts whether Anne Frank ever existed:

In fact, according to Walter, Jews have a tradition of faking atrocities against themselves that goes back at least as far as the twelfth century:

Jews are not the only ethnic group which Walter hates:

He is also a practising neopagan (funny how so many of these chaps who claim to represent the majority of English people subscribe to a minority faith):

(And yes, Walter, if you are reading this, I know full well that you lot prefer the term "heathen". That is exactly why I choose to refer to you as "neopagan" instead)

The Northants English Welfare Society blog contains a couple of posts about some kind of campaign against Tesco. This posting gives us an idea of how Walter expects the campaign to end:

Like so many of his neo-Nazi, bretheren, Walter thinks that civil war is brewing:

At this point, you may be wondering what's so special about Walter Greenway. After all, he's just another pseudonymous Internet Nazi with an utterly inconsequential campaign group behind him, right?

Well, here's the twist: Walter Greenway's Northants English Welfare Society is endorsed by a registered charity.

The Steadfast Trust, registered charity no 105806, has linked approvingly to Greenway's group from its Facebook page, counting it as an organisation which may someday receive financial grants:

That the two groups have worked together is demonstrated buy this photograph of a joint Steadfast Trust/Northants English Welfare Society stall:

This is not the only time the Steadfast Trust has aligned itself with neo-Nazis. I have already demonstrated how the charity specifically invited members of Woden's Folk - a neo-Nazi cult that reveres Hitler as a divine avatar - to one of its events.

The Steadfast Trust is already on thin ice with the Charity Commission. As it is becoming increasingly clear that the charity exists primarily to put a respectable face on racism, let's hope that the plug is pulled on the Steadfast Trust sometime soon.