Paul Golding

Golding was a British National Party (BNP) Sevenoaks District councillor for St Mary's Ward in Swanley from 2009[7] to 2011.[8] He was also a communications officer for the party.[8] He stood as BNP candidate for Sevenoaks in the 2010 general election, and received 2.8% of the vote.[9] In 2008, it was reported that Golding had been expelled from the BNP for physically attacking Lawrence Rustem, a BNP Barking Borough Council councillor who is half-Turkish.[10]

He stood in the 2014 local elections[11] and as a Britain First lead candidate in the 2014 European Parliamentary election for Wales; the party received 0.9% of the vote.[12] Golding had been a member of the neo-Nazi National Front and once attended a Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday wearing women's underwear on his head.[13] As leader of Britain First Golding made it into the leading anti-Muslim, counter-jihad street movement.[14]

In May 2015, Golding threatened to bury a pig at the site of proposed mosque in Dudley, mistakenly believing this would contaminate the site and render it unsuitable.[15] At the Britain First Annual Conference in November 2015, Golding and his then deputy, Jayda Fransen, led the meeting which agreed a number of policies including banning the media from using the word 'racism' and abolishing the BBC.[16]

He stood as a candidate in the London mayoral election in 2016.[17] He came eighth with 31,372 votes (1.2% of those cast) while Labour's Sadiq Khan was elected as mayor.[18] In June 2020, Golding spoke at a far-right protest in central London.[19]

In December 2019, Golding announced that he was a paid-up member of the Bexleyheath and Crayford Conservative Association. He explained that he intended to "help solidify Boris Johnson's control on the leadership, so we can achieve Brexit and hopefully cut immigration and confront radical Islam".[20] Shortly after the announcement, a Tory spokeswoman said that "Paul Golding's application for membership of the Conservative Party has not been approved."[21] In January 2020, Golding released a letter that he had received from the Conservative Party, informing him that his membership had been rejected.[22]

In December 2016, Golding was sentenced to eight weeks in prison for breaching a court order banning him from entering a mosque or encouraging others to do so in England and Wales. Nine days after the imposition of the court injunction, Golding drove others to a mosque in Cardiff; they entered and mosque members found their behaviour provocative and unnerving. They feared the situation could have escalated if prayers had still been going on.[30]

Leadership of Britain First was passed on to the former deputy leader Jayda Fransen in November 2016.[31] Fransen claimed that Golding was taking 6 months leave as leader of the organisation "to address some important, personal family issues".[32]

The satirical news web site, The Rochdale Herald, capitalised on the incident by inviting readers to sponsor his incarceration[33] to raise money for refugees.

On 7 November 2017, Golding was sentenced to a 120-day suspended prison sentence and ordered to carry out 200 hours of unpaid community work by Sevenoaks Magistrates' Court after admitting a charge of assault by beating. He was also told to pay £750 compensation to his victim, plus £115 victim surcharge and £85 prosecution costs. Summing up, magistrate Alan Austen described it as "a really nasty and vicious assault in a public place".[34]

In December 2017, on a reported visit to Belfast to support Jayda Fransen, Golding was arrested by the Police Service of Northern Ireland for a speech he gave in the city in August,[35] and was later charged.[36]

On 7 March 2018, Fransen and Golding were found guilty of religiously aggravated harassment at Folkestone Magistrates' Court, as a result of an investigation concerning the distribution of leaflets in 2017 in the Thanet and Canterbury areas. The pair were convicted over an incident at a takeaway in Ramsgate, Kent, during which Fransen screamed “paedophile” and “foreigner”, while Fransen was also convicted for approaching a mistaken address she believed to belong to a Muslim defendant on a rape trial. They were both sentenced to prison, with 9 months for Fransen and 18 weeks for Golding.[37]

In November 2018, Golding was charged with a number of offences related to anti-immigration leaflets distributed in Ballymena, County Antrim, and was charged with three counts of publishing written material intended to stir up hatred and one count of using threatening, abusive, insulting words or behaviour.[38] In June 2019, he was sentenced to three months' imprisonment, suspended for two years.[39]

In February 2020, Golding was charged under the Terrorism Act for refusing to provide police at Heathrow Airport with the PIN codes for his phone and computer. Golding was stopped at Heathrow airport in October 2019, while returning from a trip to the Russian parliament, by officers from the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism command. He was subsequently sentenced to a conditional discharge for nine months and ordered to pay a £21 victim surcharge and £750 in costs.[40]