Jane Birdwood, Baroness Birdwood

Jane Birdwood, Baroness Birdwood (18 May 1913 – 29 June 2000), born Joan Pollock Graham, was a British-Canadian far-right political activist who took part in a number of movements, and was described as the "largest individual distributor of racist and antisemitic material" in Britain. She was the second wife of Christopher Birdwood, 2nd Baron Birdwood.

Early life She was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, the daughter of a singer from Hull and a mother from Newcastle, although according to her Searchlight obituary she was the daughter of a Scottish aristocrat. in 1951. In the 1950s, she was a prominent supporter of the émigré group, the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, dominated by supporters of the extreme right-wing Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). A central aspect of the OUN's ideology was the belief that nations had to stay racially "pure" to be successful, and hence the OUN made it clear that in the Ukrainian state it wished to establish there would be no minorities. In 1961, she visited South Africa, where she praised apartheid as an "inevitable and a social necessity".

Around the same time, she allied herself with campaigns to support public decency, and was briefly associated with Mary Whitehouse, becoming chairwoman of the London branch of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association. In this role, she attempted to launch a number of prosecutions against productions and writers that offended her sense of taste, including the producers of the theatrical revue Oh! Calcutta! and actor John Bird, the author of the play Council of Love, whom she accused of blasphemy. Choice was described as a "stridently" anti-immigration magazine, which blamed all of Britain's problems on immigrants. It was observed there was a close stylistic resemblance between the pamphlets of the National Front and the articles in Choice, leading to suspicions that both were being written by the same people. In 1988, she founded the English Solidarity Against Multi-Racialism group that worked with the British National Party in its efforts to protect the "Christian way of life". The group, which was closely linked with another of Birdwood's creations, the Gentile Self-Defense League, in efforts to stop non-white and non-Christian immigration to the United Kingdom. In Britain, membership of extreme-right groups tends to overlap, and individuals are often closely identified by their choice of a journal than by their group. In the 1980s–1990s Birdwood's journal Choice was one of the more popular journals, together with Candour edited by Rosine de Bouneville. Birdwood's home was a popular meeting place for the extreme right.

In her 1991 pamphlet The Longest Hatred: An Examination of Anti-Gentilism, Birdwood wrote:"Against the clear wishes of the indigenous British people and in a manner which can only be described as treasonable, an estimated 10 million racially unassimilable aliens have been brought into our already overcrowded island. The incomers include: West Indians, Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Iranians, Vietnamese, Tamils, Philippinos, Arabs, Egyptians, Indonesians, Malaysians, South and Central Americans, Chinese, Greek and Turkish Cypriots, etc., not to mention vast numbers of 'nearly-Whites' from southern Europe. Now we face the prospect of further millions from Hong Kong—and Turkey, if Turkey's application to join the 'European' Common Market is successful. The hostility which these various ethnic groups bear for us, the 'host' community, is often only exceeded by the imported ancestral hatreds which they nurture for each other.Why is this being done to our country? Because the almighty International Bankers—Rothschilds, Warburgs, Rockefellers and their associates have decided that all the peoples of the world are going to have a World Government imposed on them whether they like it or not, and breaking down the identities of the various sovereign nations is best achieved by mixing up their populations. As the pro-World Government spokesman Rabbi Abraham Feinberg put it One World—One Race: the deliberate encouragement of inter-racial marriage.Britain has been selected by the Bankers to be their first victim nation in the context of the Common Market and other developing World Government structures. To ensure that the planned destruction of our nation is total and permanent the Bankers have determined that our unique Anglo-Saxon-Celtic people must be obliterated as a distinct ethnic group by means of forced race mixing with hordes of Blacks, Browns and Yellows who are being deliberately brought into our country for this purpose." Later in 1991, she had been convicted of distributing antisemitic literature with the intention of stirring up racial hatred by handing out The Longest Hatred. According to the prosecution, Birdwood admitted to police that she had written the foreword, edited it and was responsible for its publication and distribution. She was sentenced to three months in prison, suspended. According to Birdwood, the victims of the Holocaust died from typhoid.

Birdwood continued to lead British Solidarity as a pressure group, publish Choice, and run a publishing venture, Inter City Researchers, until late 1999, when she was forced to stand down for health reasons. After her retirement, most of these concerns passed into the hands of her associates, the former National Front co-leader Martin Webster and Peter Marriner, also a former British Movement activist. She died from cancer on 28 June 2000. In her obituary in The Guardian, her various pamphlets outlining her anti-Semitic conspiracy theories were described as "chronicles of wasted time".

Elections contested Date of election Constituency Party Votes % 24 February 1983 Bermondsey 'Independent Patriot' 69 0.2 10 April 1986 Fulham England Demands Repatriation 226 0.6 9 April 1992 Dewsbury British National Party 660 1.1

Books and articles