John Kingsley Read

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John Kingsley Read (1937 – 1985) was chairman of the British National Front from 1974 to 1976. A former member of the Conservative Party and chairman of the Blackburn Young Conservatives he left to join NF in the early 70s.

Read was elected Chairman of the National Front on October 21, 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.

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 a 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 guiulty and fined by local magistrates for it.

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 he died.

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. ^[1] 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.

[edit] Elections contested

Date of election             Constituency               Party    Votes    %
28 Feb 1974 (general)        Blackburn                    NF     1778    4.2
10 Oct 1974 (general)        Blackburn                    NF     1758    4.4
 4 Mar 1976 (by-election)    Coventry, N W                NP      888    5.7