Stop Co-Governance tour has ex-National Front organiser who believes ‘white people’ are being targeted

Former National Front organiser Chris McCabe and a masked associate screened people attending the latest meeting.

An organiser for the Stop Co-governance roadshow was a former “community organiser” for the far-right National Front movement and has spoken of his belief people of colour want to wipe out white people.

Hawke’s Bay local Chris McCabe has been identified as the person screening attendees to weed out protesters seeking to attend the latest Hawke’s Bay meetings of Julian Batchelor’s Stop Co-governance roadshow.

The roadshow has struggled to find venues, with meetings on Wednesday and Thursday taking place at a private home in Havelock North where McCabe and two others acted as sentries at the bottom of the driveway.

Batchelor’s meetings across the country have attracted accusations of racism, and he’s been accused of presenting factually incorrect claims about co-governance, bringing greater levels of protest and increased efforts to keep the gatherings secret.

One of those protesting this week, Neill Gordon, said he was aware of McCabe’s political leanings through mutual acquaintances and discussed with him at the driveway race-related comments made in videos posted online.

“Everyone that came in, he would check their name off in his notebook. He was vetting anyone who wanted to go up the driveway and attend the meeting.”

Gordon, who organises events, said he was initially drawn to the idea of organising an event at which co-governance could be debated - until he saw videos from Batchelor’s meetings.

When Gordon saw a video showing people being screened for entry on the basis of being “good Māori”, he said he believed no event would be possible because people would not want to be associated with racism.

“People are just giving him the benefit of the doubt that he’s someone who wants to talk about co-governance, but having your meetings organised by the former National Front community manager gives the games away.”

One other meeting attendee who recognised McCabe from his online presence had earlier email contact with him. It came after she pretended to be interested in attending the meeting so as to discover its location.

Julian Batchelor on his Stop Co-Governance tour.

The woman said she did so by emailing Batchelor. The email chain - which she has provided - showed Batchelor passed her inquiry to an email account in the name of Chris McCabe.

The person operating that account emailed her asking for a phone number and asked a number of questions before providing the address and telling her that her name was on the list to attend the meeting.

Gordon had since found three videos in which McCabe spoke about his views on race, two of which were directly linked to the National Front.

In one from 2018, in a piece for TVNZ’s youth news site Re: News, McCabe is described as a “community organiser” for the National Front.

In the video, McCabe said people had a “knee-jerk” reaction to the words “National Front” and associated it with people who were “skinheads, Nazis, thugs, racists, bigots”.

McCabe said there had been “constant anti-white propaganda since the end of the World War II” and “white European people globally are under the hammer”.

He rejected the idea of “white supremacy”.

“I don’t think it’s about supremacy. It’s about looking after your own people.”

In a video uploaded in September 2019, McCabe is pictured at Speaker’s Corner in London, where he talks about returning to the United Kingdom after 31 years to find an ideology intent on “mixing up the races”.

“I want to talk to my people and ask them what they’re doing and how it is the white European man appears to have lost his mojo in his own country.”

In his speech, McCabe talked about the “undermining of white identity” and suggested an advertising agenda at play that has left “your vanilla white guy … a very poor third or fourth in the eye of the English young lady”.

McCabe said it was the same in New Zealand. “I tell you, as you walk down Queen Street in New Zealand, you’re likely to see more white folks on the main street of Bangkok than you would see in Auckland.”

A few weeks later, a video uploaded purported to show McCabe speaking at the annual meeting of the UK National Front in front of a Union Jack bearing the image of a white bulldog and the words “White Youth Unite & Fight”.

“As white European people, we’re in trouble,” he told the meeting. “This is a global fight. White people worldwide that are under attack here. And they’re not happy with making us a minority. They want us gone.”

McCabe told the meeting he joined the National Front in New Zealand in 2016, where “things were going quite well” and there was “a good groundswell of public opinion” until the Christchurch massacre on March 15, 2019, when the movement “collapsed”.

McCabe said “no one can condone what occurred in Christchurch”, then added: “I’ve seen the video. This guy looked like a complete amateur, then went and shot up another mosque.”

“I don’t want to get into too much of the conspiracy theory about it, but it was incredible how much he managed to do in what appeared to be such an amateurish way.

“Looking at it in a long-term view, we can even put a positive spin on it now - to say all the tyre-kickers are gone and the only people who are left are serious. In that sense, it’s hard to say it’s good, but there has been a silver lining.”

He urged those at the meeting to challenge the word “racism”.

“Of course I’m a racist, but what does that even mean? Does that mean I hate someone because of the colour of their skin? Don’t be ridiculous.”

Neither Batchelor or McCabe returned calls from the Herald. In an earlier interview with Hawke’s Bay Today, Batchelor said there was no sign of the roadshow stopping.

“We have 100 events planned all around the country. We will come back to Hawke’s Bay for sure.”