After a ten month police investigation into nine members of the far-right group British Movement, who held a celebration for Hitler’s birthday in April last year at a pub in Oldham, it has been announced that no further action will be taken.
Video footage of the alleged display from April 2025 showed men holding flags decorated with Nazi paraphernalia and British Movement symbols, and a cake embellished with a swastika. Additionally, the group posted to its Telegram page a message which appeared to read: “On a gorgeous sunny afternoon in Greater Manchester, a platoon of Northwest British Movement met up to celebrate the 136th Birthday of Uncle A.”
Greater Manchester Police reportedly admitted that there was insufficient evidence to send a file of evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service to consider this particular case.
The neo-Nazi group British Movement has a long history of violence and extremism since its founding in 1968 as an extension of the National Socialist Movement, itself founded during the 1960s and supposedly dissolved in the early 1980s, which exhibited antisemitism and advocated for violence towards ethnic minorities. Its successor, British Movement, has been the subject of multiple police raids, arrests and imprisonments over the years – including a most recent police raid in April 2025 where they found imitation and replica Nazi weapons, including a Zyklon gas canister, like those used to murder Jews in the gas chambers during the Holocaust.
In another recent incident in 2021, a sticker belonging to the group was found on a lamppost near Manchester’s Charedi Jewish community.
To not take robust action against the commemoration of the world’s most evil ideologies sends an extremely unnerving message.
