HOPE not hate feature | Mad or bad: Steve Fyfe BNP candidate and obsessive gunman

Mad or bad: Steve Fyfe BNP candidate and obsessive gunman

Searchlight Magazine April 2009 by Gerry Gable and Simon Cressy | Thursday, 23 April 2009

A man who regularly stands in elections for the British National Party has boasted about his disregard for “rules and regulations” controlling the use of firearms in the UK.

Steve Fyfe A man who regularly stands in elections for the British National Party has boasted about his disregard for “rules and regulations” controlling the use of firearms in the UK.

Steve Fyfe stood in a council by-election on 26 March, his fourth attempt to get elected to North East Lincolnshire Council. He also contested the last general election for the BNP in Grimsby, where he lives, and was third on the BNP’s list of candidates for Lothian region in the election for the Scottish Parliament in 2007, when the party rounded up anyone in the UK with a Scottish-sounding name to stand, in the absence of more than a handful of supporters in Scotland itself.

Clearly a valued activist, the 34-year-old is also the BNP’s Grimsby organiser and has been a BNP member for seven years. But his numerous postings on internet forums also reveal an unhealthy obsession with guns and contain hints that not everything he owns is legal.

After the Dunblane massacre in 1996, firearms legislation in the UK was tightened up and no member of the public can now own handguns or ammunition for them. Fyfe claims to have a shotgun licence, which enables him to own shotguns with a magazine capacity of no more than two shots. He also says he received a firearms certificate in March 2006, which permits him to own rifles, shotguns with a magazine capacity greater than two and certain types of airguns. He claims to own around £6,000 worth of legally held weapons and to be secretary of a gun club.

A firearms certificate is only granted to people whom the police consider fit to be entrusted with firearms without danger to public safety or to the peace. They must have a record of active membership of a target shooting club or permission to shoot over land.

The certificate imposes severe restrictions on the use of the weapons. In particular a certificate holder cannot permit other people to handle the guns unless they have their own certificate to cover them.

Yet on 11 August 2008 Fyfe, posting as sidneysausage, wrote on a gun trading forum: “However, I don’t do rules and regulations if there is absolutely no point in it whatsoever. If some of my friends want to ‘have a go’ they will bloody well ‘have a go’. Personally, I’ll take my friends out to the field where I shoot, somwhere [sic] out of view, with a nice, big backstop, up to 300m away and they can use as many rounds as they care to fire. Who the hell are the police to suggest they might know my friend I’ve known for more than fifteen years better than me?”

On the same day he also boasted: “I have a Long Barrel Revolver”. On 9 January this year he declared: “I’d still prefer my .44 LBR and be able to use cartridges with my nitro”.

Fyfe, who works as a chemical process supervisor in the chemical industry, also has an interest in explosives and their illegal use. On 27 May 2008 he wrote: “I’ve a big box of fireworks in my attic, just waiting for the day when some muslim extremists fly a plane into westminster”.

While it is not surprising that Fyfe’s obsessions and desires do not make him unsuitable to be a BNP candidate, the same cannot be said about his membership of the Territorial Army, in which he serves with the 3rd Royal Anglian Regiment. His postings contain hints that he might be abstracting items from his TA unit.

For example on 21 July 2007 he wrote: “The new 30 round H&K mags for the SA80 work really nice in mine. I have ‘aquired’ [sic] one or two. However, if you aren’t in the TA/Army/ Navy/Air Force, you can find one or two floating round on ebay.”

Fyfe claims to like extreme and outdoor sports. One of them appears to be driving at dangerous speeds. A long post in January 2006 described how he was caught driving his Subaru Impreza at over 140 miles per hour. Concerned that a conviction and almost certain driving ban would cost him his firearms and shotgun certificates, he said he was hiring Nick Freeman, the specialist motoring lawyer known as Mr Loophole, to get him off.

It is unclear whether Fyfe is a fantasist or whether he really owns restricted weapons and breaks the terms of his firearms certificate. Either way, he is clearly unsuitable for service in the Territorial Army or to be in possession of any lethal weapon.

He may see himself as a Rambo figure, but the reality is different. Writing on 21 November last year about British forces serving in Iraq he explained: “I described the chaps who went as ‘silly Bastards’ because they did not go out of any sense of justice, belief, national pride, or even camaraderie”.

Grimsby’s terrorist line-up

Grimsby has been the home of a number of nazis with a interest in terrorism and weapons.

Back in the 1960s, Donald Mudie, a crank member of Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement (NSM), used to hold court at his Grimsby home for people who shared his political views. In the 1970s Mudie, a former newspaper journalist, was one of two security guards at a camp held by the elite nazi League of St George on Mersea Island in Essex. Mudie patrolled the site with a loaded shotgun.

Fast forward to 2002 and Cameron Duncan, a supporter of the British National Party and the Ku Klux Klan. Duncan was caught and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, after a man in the USA with whom he was exchanging emails turned out to be an FBI agent. Duncan had been asking him to obtain firearms and explosives. The agent had infiltrated the KKK for the purpose of catching such dangerous men as Duncan.

Moving inland up the River Humber, we find Martyn Gilleard from Goole, the local branch organiser of the nazi British People’s Party.

Goole, who also had links with the BNP in Scotland, was found in possession of an array of knives, guns, machetes, swords, axes, ammunition and four nail bombs, together with internet instructions for making poison and bombs and significant amounts of racist literature from far-right parties.

The police were surprised to find all this terrorist material when they raided his flat in October 2007 on a tip-off about child pornography. The 39,000 indecent images of children that they also found, some very nasty, did not endear him to the court and he received a total sentence of 16 years in prison.

In December last year Nathan Worrell (pictured) was jailed for more than seven years after being found guilty of possessing material for terrorist purposes and racially aggravated harassment. Police had found manuals and a video explaining how to make bombs and detonators using household materials at his flat in Grimsby as well as two tubs of weedkiller, three bottles of lighter fluid and fireworks, some of which had been tampered with.

They also found a lot of racist and far-right propaganda, including BNP material and membership cards for other extreme groups.

It would appear that nazis with an interest in terror, violence and firearms are a familiar sight in this part of Britain. The good thing is that the police appear to be keeping track of them, so its surprising that Steve Fyfe has so far slipped through the net.

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