Andrew Henry William Brons (born 3 June 1947) is a British politician and former MEP. Long active in far-right politics in Britain, he was elected as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Yorkshire and the Humber for the British National Party (BNP) at the 2009 European Parliament election. He was the Chairman of the National Front in the early 1980s. He resigned the BNP whip in October 2012 and became patron of the British Democratic Party. He did not seek re-election in 2014. Family background and early life Brons, who has English and German ancestry, was born in Hackney, East London, two years after the end of the Second World War. He spent most of his childhood in Sidcup, on the outskirts of London, before his family moved to Harrogate when he was eleven years old. He attended Harrogate Grammar School until the age of sixteen, when he left to join the civil service, where he remained for 16 months before sitting part-time A-Levels in law and economics at Harrogate College. He studied politics at the University of York, and graduated in 1970. After graduation, Brons started working as a lecturer at Harrogate College in 1970, and worked there until 2005; lecturing in A-Level law and government, and politics. He has two daughters. Political career Early activity Brons began his political career in 1964 when, aged seventeen, he joined the National Socialist Movement (NSM), a Neo-Nazi organisation founded on Adolf Hitler's birthday by Colin Jordan. In 1980, Searchlight published two letters Brons had written in 1965 to Françoise Dior, Jordan's wife, in which he mentioned meeting an NSM member who "mentioned such activities as bombing synagogues", stating in response to this that: "On this subject I have a dual view, in that I realise that he is well intentioned, I feel that our public image may suffer considerable damage as a result of these activities. I am however open to correction on this point." The second letter requested materials such as a swastika, a copy of the Horst-Wessel-Lied, and posters and stickers in furtherance of Brons' goal of forming a local NSM group. Questioned in 2009 about his membership of the National Socialist Movement, Brons said, "People do silly things when they are seventeen. Peter Mandelson was once a member of the Young Communist League but we don't continue to call him a Communist." Brons was forced to