Alice Cutter
Alice Cutter denied being an NA member, despite attending the group's rallies
A former Miss Hitler beauty pageant entrant and her ex-partner have been jailed for a total of more than eight years for belonging to banned far-right group National Action (NA).

Alice Cutter was sentenced to three years and Mark Jones to five-and-a-half-years at Birmingham Crown Court for being members of the terrorist organisation.

The pair, from Sowerby Bridge in Yorkshire, were convicted in March alongside two other neo-Nazi "diehards", Garry Jack and Connor Scothern.

Mark Jones
Mark Jones was jailed for five-and-a-half years
Jack faces four-and-a-half years in prison, while Scothern was sentenced to 18 months' detention.

Jurors were shown messages in which Cutter, 23, joked about gassing synagogues, using a Jewish person's head as a football, and exclaiming "Rot in hell, bitch", after hearing of the 2016 murder of MP Jo Cox by far-right sympathiser Thomas Mair.

The waitress entered the Miss Hitler beauty contest as Miss Buchenwald - a reference to the Second World War death camp.

She denied ever being an NA member, despite attending the group's rallies, where banners reading "Hitler was right" were raised.

Jones, 25, a former member of the British National Party and a rail engineer, was a "leader and strategist" who played a "prominent and active role", the court heard.

The extreme right-wing group was banned in December 2016 by then-home secretary Amber Rudd, who described it as "racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic".

Alice Cutter
Cutter entered the Miss Hitler beauty contest as Miss Buchenwald
Judge Paul Farrer QC told the four: "Following proscription [of National Action], you weren't prepared to dissociate yourselves from the vile ideology of this group and therefore defied the ban and continued as members".

Judge Farrer told Jones he had played "a significant role in the continuation of the organisation", after its ban.

Cutter, he said, was a "trusted confidante" of one of the group's leaders, as well as being in a "committed relationship" with Jones.
Garry Jack
Garry Jack was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison
All four defendants were "active" group members, even after the ban, prosecutors alleged.

Jack, 24, of Shard End, Birmingham, was at almost every meeting of NA's Midlands sub-group.

He also had a previous conviction, from before the group was banned for plastering Birmingham's Aston University campus with NA's racially charged stickers, some reading "Britain is ours, the rest must go."
Connor Scothern
Connor Scothern was sentenced to 18 months' detention
Speaking ahead of sentencing, the director of public prosecutions Max Hill QC described NA members as "diehards" who "hark back to the days of not just anti-Semitism, but the Holocaust, the Third Reich in Germany".

Scothern, 19, of Nottingham, was "considered future leadership material" and had distributed almost 1,500 stickers calling for a "final solution" - in reference to the Nazis' genocide against Jews.