As we reported yesterday, the Traditional Britain Group (TBG) will tonight welcome Pete North (above), an ex-UKIP activist and recent recruit to the fascist Homeland Party, as guest speaker at its Christmas party in central London.

North’s rightward drift has already caused fierce reactions among Homeland’s former comrades in Patriotic Alternative. PA’s deputy leader Laura Towler, whose husband Sam Melia is about to be released from jail after his conviction for inciting racial hatred, didn’t mince her words. This might be the season of goodwill, but in the Towler-Melia household that doesn’t extend to ex-comrades who dare to criticise your incessant grifting.

“The absolute state of Pete North”, howled Towler. At Searchlight we know that his real sin in her eyes is to have joined Homeland, but Towler has to keep up the pretence that the problem with North is his failure to extend his racism into antisemitism.

 

What triggered PA’s deputy führer this time was North’s insistence on blaming Hamas terrorism for provoking the war in Gaza. Outside the cesspit inhabited by Homeland and PA, decent people are able to disagree about aspects of the Gaza tragedy, but for Britain’s fascists it boils down to whether Muslims or Jews are the priority hate targets.

PA are the ultimate hypocrites in this obscene hatemongering game. When it suits their leader Mark Collett, he becomes an Islamophobe, tagging along at a recent London demonstration in support of the fraudster Tommy Robinson, even though PA and others regularly denounce Robinson as a “Zionist shill”.

But when there’s a chance to berate their rivals, PA acquire “anti-Zionist” principles. In her attack on North, Towler insisted “You cannot be a nationalist and want a safe homeland for the British people while also supporting Israel. Anybody who does is either completely clueless and needs to stop talking or they’re dodgy as hell and are trying to direct efforts down a dead end, thus working against nationalism.”

Anyone who still hasn’t worked out Towler’s “nationalism” and “anti-Zionism” should bear in mind that she’s best known within her circles as an especially devoted fan of Sir Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader who was married at the home of nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler as guest of honour. Her jailed husband Sam Melia was previously active with the banned nazi terrorist group National Action, and after NA’s proscription he created a secret network called “The Hundred Handers” distributing propaganda to stir up racial hatred.

Towler and Melia’s boss at PA is Mark Collett, who is a contender for the hotly disputed title of world’s number one nazi grifter. Older readers might remember Collett as one of a series of young male acolytes promoted by the BNP’s Nick Griffin. In 2002 he agreed to take part in a fly-on-the-wall documentary for Channel 4, believing it would help promote him as the BNP’s up and coming “intellectual” and as Griffin’s heir.

Channel 4’s reporter spent six months with Collett, and the resulting film (titled Young, Nazi and Proud) was so embarrassing for Griffin’s young favourite that he considered resigning from the party. He thought again, when he realised most fellow members were so stupid that he would be able to make an easy living in charge of leaflet design and other publishing.

Eventually Collett’s arrogance provoked the enmity of a handful of other literate party activists, who created a rebel faction that first tried to persuade Griffin to ditch him, then broke away in an attempted coup at the end of 2007.

Among the leading anti-Collett rebels were BNP administrator Kenny Smith and his then partner Nicholla Ritchie. When discussing how best to undermine Collett, Smith and his faction’s co-leader Sadie Graham (an elected BNP councillor and head of ‘group development’ for the party) were in no doubt as to where they should turn for information.

In a telephone conversation that was recorded and ended up in Griffin’s hands (thanks to his then allies, former South African secret agents Lance Stewart and Arthur Kemp), Graham told Smith: “Basically, we need back copies of Searchlight, because whatever has been in Searchlight about Mark we could use but lots of our people haven’t even read Searchlight, so how the f**k can we get loads of back copies of Searchlight.”

Readers can guess how amused we were when Smith turned up again, this time as an ally of Collett in PA. But the two never quite trusted each other after the 2007 split, which led to a long and expensive court battle between Griffin and Smith’s faction.

So it wasn’t exactly a shock when Smith and Collett fell out again, eventually leading to formation of the Homeland Party, which took away most of Collett’s most efficient regional and branch organisers. For Smith, this was sweet revenge, a more effective repeat of the damage he inflicted on Griffin’s BNP in the late 2000s.

One mystery in 2024 is why TBG has chosen to get cosy with Homeland, while keeping PA at arm’s length. Mark Collett and TBG leader Gregory Lauder-Frost are two of the most pro-Kremlin individuals on the British far right, but Lauder-Frost has pretensions to gentility, and sees Collett (despite his status as a Leeds University graduate) as too close to the boot-boy image of British nazism.

We shall be keeping a close watch on TBG’s tie-up with Homeland (as well as its continuing links to Kenny Smith’s rivals in the British Democratic Party). As UKIP stumbles from crisis to crisis collapses and Nigel Farage continues to be a “Marmite” leader repelling many leading activists within the confused space between the Tory right and outright fascism, we expect to see competition intensifying for members and donors.