By Paul Gale
Britain’s far right is approaching conference season. So we can expect toxic politics of hate to be spewed in all directions, including vicious hatred among former comrades in the now chronically divided Patriotic Alternative.
A realignment is under way, with previously “respectable” activists in UKIP and other milder versions of the far right now prepared to ally with blatant racists, including notorious neo-nazis. At the same time those neo-nazis are lining up in hostile camps.
The clearest evidence will be at this weekend’s Homeland Party conference in Derbyshire.
Among the speakers is a very familiar name: Pete North (below), known on Twitter as “Northern Variant”. Homeland’s rivals and former comrades in PA are claiming that his presence at the conference is a sign that Kenny Smith (far right, top picture),the former BNP official who chairs Homeland, is “selling out” to civic nationalism.
Mr North fancies himself as an intellectual. He recently produced a verbose “manifesto” which (in the pub bore tradition of a poor man’s Nigel Farage) he tries to foist onto any party or faction who will listen. In fact onto anyone too polite to make their excuses and leave.
The problem is, Mr North is a bit dim. Though among the far right, even the lowest watt bulb in the box is hailed (or perhaps that should be heiled) as a beacon of light.
In 2019 North was ordered to pay the philosophy professor A.C. Grayling £20,000 plus costs, after an obscene libel on what was then called Twitter. North failed to mount any defence in the ensuing High Court action, where Judge Richard Spearman commented in passing judgment: “Mr North’s conduct was extraordinary from first to last. He certainly seems entirely unrepentant and has offered no apology.”
Two years later, with a bit of a fanfare. North announced he was back in UKIP: “I’ve been a visceral critic of UKIP over the last ten years” he wrote, “but have now seen the light”. That light went out pretty quickly.
In 2023 North was again humiliated after complaining to the press regulator IPSO. The background to his complaint illustrates the staggering hypocrisy of the “mild fascist” scene that hovers just to the right of the Tory Party. Its denizens flit between Reform UK, UKIP, various smaller Brexity parties, and “civic nationalist” talking shops. Their natural habitats are Substack and Elon Musk’s X, where they can pose as fogeyish “intellectuals”. And they are increasingly found hanging out with prominent nazis, while angrily labelling their anti-fascist critics as “woke”.
North was caught out after taking part in protests in May 2022 at a former RAF base in Linton-on-Ouse, near his home in North Yorkshire. The then Tory government (including then Home Secretary Priti Patel) proposed a “reception centre” at the former base to hold up to 1,500 asylum seekers. The proposal was abandoned six months later.
Many people objected (most of them for reasons that had nothing to do with racism), and the usual far right suspects crawled out from under their rocks to attempt infiltration of local residents’ campaign groups.
Among these fascist hangers-on were the notorious Islamophobe blogger Amanda Smith (alias “Yorkshire Rose”), and Yorkshire’s answer to Oswald and Diana Mosley – PA deputy leader Laura Towler and her husband Sam Melia, since jailed.
Anti-fascist journalists Harry Shukman and Josh Kaplan exposed North’s involvement, which was further publicised in The Times.
North complained to IPSO that he had been wrongly labelled as “far right”, that he had attended the demo only because he lived near the base, and that “he was in no way connected with PA”.
IPSO roundly rejected North’s complaint. They ruled that The Times was fully entitled to characterise him as far right, not least because North himself had at one stage written on his own blog: “If anyone wants to call me far right then so be it.”
It’s unlikely that after this weekend North will dare to dispute the label “far right”. Two years after claiming that he had no links whatsoever to PA, he will be speaking on a panel at the annual conference of Homeland, a party that grew out of PA and whose leading figures are all former PA officials.
Homeland leader Kenny Smith will be on the conference panel with North. Smith began his political career in the BNP when it was led by John Tyndall, one of Britain’s leading post-war nazis. He went on to become the BNP’s head of administration, but was part of a fierce split at the end of 2007 that led to dozens of his fellow activists and party officials either resigning or being expelled.
At that time Smith was one of the main enemies of Mark Collett, who was then a young ally of BNP chairman Nick Griffin. Collett worked as the party’s director of publicity, despite having himself cultivated a questionable type of PR as subject of a fly-on-the-wall TV programme, Young, Nazi and Proud. A very long and costly series of court actions followed, helping to bankrupt Griffin.
By 2021 Smith was (for a short time) back on comradely terms with Collett. He took several positions in PA before, last year, he again led a split from the no longer young (but still nazi and proud) führer.
Several of PA’s top organisers left with Smith, and they will be fellow speakers alongside Pete North at Saturday’s conference.
Among them is PA’s former East Midlands organiser Anthony Burrows, who in reply to a Twitter thread asking “describe your politics with four people”, posted photographs of Adolf Hitler and David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader. In 2021 Derbyshire Police revoked Burrows’ shotgun licence, and this revocation was upheld in 2023 by Derby Crown Court. Judge Jonathan Bennett, ruling against Burrows, commented that “he had given us significant concerns coupled with sharing links to terrorist literature and manifestos. Consequently, we take the view that the police were quite correct to act as they did when his shotguns were removed in August 2021 and his licence was revoked.”
The most disturbing aspect of Saturday’s conference is that Homeland is bringing together open nazis, prolific racists such as Steve Laws (whose rhetoric has become even more inflammatory since the post-Southport riots), and ex-UKIP activists such as North searching for a political base.
Searchlight will be investigating the extent to which North’s involvement reflects a broader shift in (ex)-UKIP circles from “civic nationalism” to open racism. His father Dr Richard North, who is now in his mid-70s, has for years been one of the most active and prolific writers and bloggers on the pro-Brexit scene. Dr North was a Referendum Party and UKIP candidate, and was employed for five years at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, working as research director for a group of Eurosceptic parties that included UKIP.
Both of the Norths, father and son, became personally and factionally hostile to Nigel Farage. They seem to share climate denialism as well as Euroscepticism, and they also share a tendency to libel their opponents. Perhaps they have deep pockets so don’t mind being repeatedly stung in the courts? In 2010 the Telegraph had to apologise and pay six-figure legal costs after an article by Richard North and the late Christopher Booker defamed the chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It’s not clear whether Dr North shares his son’s recent conversion to open racism and willingness to campaign alongside nazis, but within the last week he joined his son in criticising Farage for being too soft on immigration. Dr North wrote that Reform UK’s current position will “do nothing to address what many believe to be an existential threat, which can only be resolved by what is now called ‘remigration’.”
This weasel word “remigration” is increasingly deployed by the far right and in practice means the same as the old racist term “repatriation”.
Unlike his son, Dr North has not yet committed himself to an openly racist stance or openly racist allies. Instead, he dances around the issue:
“Skin colour may not matter but culture does, and skin colour is a heavy indicator of culture.”
Well, Dr North and Mr North: sitting on a conference panel with racists and fascists is also a “heavy indicator” of political trajectory.
UKIP and the English Democrats are holding a joint conference on Nottingham on 4-5 Oct. The venue they have hired is already coming under considerable local pressure to cancel the booking and tell the fascists to clear off. You can read about it here: https://www.searchlightmagazine.com/2024/09/ukip-and-english-democrats-move-closer-to-hook-up/
Collett’s Patriotic Alternative is also trying to put a conference together but, as we write, appears to be having difficulty booking speakers other than the odd online conspiracy nut job.
We will keep you posted.