By Paul Gale

Leaders of Britain’s fascist parties are already planning their next moves, anticipating the Conservative Party’s collapse at the general election.

Mark Collett has struck a short-term deal with English Democrat leader Robin Tilbrook and is running four members of Patriotic Alternative (now Britain’s largest nazi movement) as election candidates. Steve Laws, a Dover-based active racist who has ties to both PA and the rival Homeland Party, is also standing as an English Democrat.

But Collett’s conversion to parliamentary democracy is only skin-deep. The only reason he decided to stand PA candidates in this election (under ED colours because PA has not yet succeeded in registering as a political party) was because he feared that PA members would continue to defect to Homeland. This rival party, founded by Collett’s former ally Kenny Smith, is registered and presents itself as a real political party, in contrast to PA which it sees as more interested in online streaming and stunts.

Smith (pictured, above) had already decided that this General Election had come too soon for Homeland to fight credible campaigns, and he is now secretly hoping that the PA candidates suffer crushing defeats, or that the PA-ED alliance breaks up quickly.

Collett’s problem is not only to keep that alliance of convenience alive until polling day, but also to persuade some of his own leading activists that elections are worth their time and trouble.

Even Collett himself has been known to argue that the UK has now embraced a socially liberal and multiracial society to such an extent that there’s no point in community politics or the ballot box. Instead, Collett and others in PA sometimes argue, their fellow nazis should be developing networks of businesses so they can withdraw from mainstream society and create their own racist communities.

In the USA such ideas have often inspired terrorist violence, so it’s no surprise that several leading PA members have been imprisoned for a variety of offences, including incitement to racial violence and terrorist crimes.

Unfortunately, in 2024 many mainstream journalists are so obsessed by balance and seeking to be ‘fair’ to extremists that they have failed to scrutinise PA/ED candidates properly. For example, the Manchester Evening News, in an article that appeared on several local news websites, interviewed PA’s Craig Buckley (candidate for Leigh and Atherton) under the soft headline ‘”I’m no racist neo-Nazi,” says Greater Manchester election candidate.’

Rather than taking a serious look at PA or informing their article by discussion with anti-fascists, the MEN lazily allowed Buckley to present his racism virtually unchallenged.

Some of PA’s ideas are so crazy that they have achieved the amazing feat of making their rival Alek Yerbury look sane. Yerbury (pictured, below) is leader of his own small and imperfectly formed, military-style movement, which recently registered as the National Rebirth Party. He has recently mocked Collett and others for what he regards as cowardice and stupidity, since according to Yerbury, the strategy of withdrawing into racist communities is defeatist and will inevitably fail.

Where Collett, Smith, and Yerbury agree is in looking forward to the collapse of the Conservative Party, and hoping that parliamentary democracy itself will lose credibility.

The British far right is unsure whether or not to welcome the growth of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. On the one hand it shifts the ‘Overton window’ in favour of extremist ideas. But on the other hand, the likes of Collett fear another lengthy period in which Reform UK becomes the face of the far right, just as UKIP did, followed by the Brexit Party, for most of the 2010s.

During the past week one of Farage’s candidates was exposed as having argued that Britain shouldn’t have fought Hitler during the Second World War, while Farage himself is now dropping the mask and stating that the West was wrong to stand up to Putin.

Farage says so many contradictory things that it’s difficult to pin him down, but the one consistent thread seems to be that Reform UK’s leader and many of his candidates are more attracted to dictatorship than to democracy. They are more drawn to conspiracy theory and the shrill assertion of extremist slogans, than to serious political debate.

A major problem in this campaign is that it has been left to journalists such as the BBC’s Nick Robinson to confront Farage. Labour’s leading figures are happier making the election about economic competence, while avoiding the battleground of ideas.

We can hope that Farage’s repetition of Moscow propaganda lines in his latest interview will cause Labour to take the gloves off.

There are one or two people in Reform UK who are prepared to say a bad word about Nazism. But rather than criticising violent anti-immigrant rhetoric, these allies of Farage see echoes of the Third Reich in …the NHS!

One of Farage’s close advisers, the barrister and former UKIP secretary Matthew Richardson, now based in the USA where he is an important liaison with Trump circles, has described the NHS as “the Reichstag bunker of socialism”, and as being at the heart of a system of “wasteful socialist programmes”.