The white supremacist host of a podcast that made “vile” racist attacks in an attempt to stir up hatred, divide communities and spread fear has been jailed for two and a half years.
James Allchurch, 51, from Pembrokeshire, south-west Wales, and his guests used extreme racial slurs and propagated racist ideology while discussing topics such as grooming gangs, immigration, slavery and crime.
Those invited on to the podcast included Alex Davies, a co-founder of the far-right group National Action, who was jailed last year for being a member of a banned organisation.
Allchurch, a self-proclaimed white supremacist and Adolf Hitler supporter, was found guilty by a jury sitting in Swansea of 10 counts of distributing audio material to stir up racial hatred over a two-year period.
In mitigation, Allchurch’s barrister, Emily Baxter, said that after he was injured at work in 2007, he became unemployed and isolated, spending a lot of time online talking to people with far-right views, many of them in the US.
But the judge, Huw Rees, told Allchurch he was a “perfectly intelligent man” whose lack of work “gave you the time you needed to harbour and promote your warped thinking and express it in highly emotive, racial and antisemitic language”.
The judge continued: “You were bent on inciting racial hatred. Your offending amounts to a stain on our humanity for our fellow human beings. The contents of these podcasts were vile. You are a man who holds deep-seated views of a highly pejorative racist and antisemitic nature.”
The judge highlighted a probation report that said while there was “no direct victim”, what Allchurch had done “has an impact on community cohesion” and created fear.
Each charge he faced related to a separate episode uploaded by Allchurch between May 2019 and March 2021 to a public website called Radio Aryan, later renamed Radio Albion.
A number of other known extremists from the UK and US featured on the podcast talking to Allchurch, who went by the alias Sven Longshanks – a reference to King Edward I, who was also known as Edward Longshanks and was responsible for expelling Jewish people from England in 1290.
Jonathan Rees KC, prosecuting, described the podcasts as “highly racist, antisemitic and white supremacist in nature”. Rees said: “The very purpose of Radio Aryan was to spread his propaganda about racial conflict.”
The prosecutor said that about 4,000 people listened to the podcasts when they were first posted, and they remained in an archive that could be accessed later. He said Allchurch used the podcast as a “propaganda mouthpiece” and said it was aimed at “impressionable” listeners.
