By Mark Scholl

Patriotic Alternative, the neo-fascist political entity that has housed and harboured many a convicted criminal, is in trouble and leader Mark Collett has launched a desperate smear attack on one of his leading rivals accusing him of being a state asset.

PA’s founding core group included many closely associated with the prescribed terrorist group National Action. One of these, as Searchlight readers will recall, is Sam Melia, now out on license having himself been convicted and jailed as the mastermind behind a vicious campaign of racist propaganda that operated nationally and internationally. Indeed, the propaganda produced and supplied by him is still being used by racists around the UK.

Collett losing out to Yerbury and Homeland

Despite having raised tens of thousands on the back of Melia’s conviction, and further thousands after the Farage Riots last Summer, all is not well at PA Towers. First, Collett was soundly defeated in a widely advertised online debate on the future of the neo-fascist movement, by former associate Alek Yerbury, now leader of the National Rebirth Party.

Second, Collett is losing activists to Yerbury’s group in West Yorkshire, London and the North West. Other defections have taken place, primarily to the Homeland Party but also to the hardline Hitlerites of British Movement. Against this background, an increasingly desperate PA Fuhrer Mark Collett yesterday launched a vitriolic attack on Kenny Smith, Homeland’s leader.

“Morbidly obese slob with a giant swastika and eagle on his chest who boasts that he used to be an organiser for Combat 18 now claims he can travel freely to any country without being stopped”

Mark Collett on Kenny Smith

The nature of this attack, which doesn’t mention Smith by name but is unmistakeably referring to him, has raised many eyebrows, including within Collett’s own ranks. Without using the actual words, Collett is directly accusing Smith of being a state asset who, unlike others on the far right, is allowed to operate with impunity. The unhinged salvo was posted on his Telegram channel:

“Morbidly obese slob with a giant swastika and eagle on his chest who boasts that he used to be an organiser for Combat 18 now claims he can travel freely to any country without being stopped is free to have his picture taken on the roof of the German Parliament.

“Yeah, while everyone else is being stopped, searched, detained – and when many nationalists have been forced to strip and have their tattoos photographed – he is just allowed to go about his business.

“Sensible nationalism guys, defo not anything else.”

The post was a response to Smith’s boast, during a recent visit to Germany hosted by AfD Members of the Bundestag, that by adopting a new, respectable well-behaved modus operandi, especially online, Homeland was no longer subject to the strictures of stop and search which have routinely plagued extremists travelling in Europe. In a thinly-veiled dig at Collett he urged other right-wingers to clean-up their online accounts and avoid accounts which courted illegality.

On one issue, by the way, Collett has a point: Smith does indeed sport a huge eagle and swastika nazi tattoo on his torso, which is why, even at Homeland Party camps and treks, you’ll never catch him with his top off in public.

It’s almost impossible to know where to start where the Collett rant is concerned but many of his own supporters, and others active within neo-fascist circles, have been swift to point out that he himself is widely regarded as a state agent, a grass, a grifter and an all-around dodgy fella as far as the authorities are concerned.

Internal strife

Many postulate that he went native as early as his outing on the “Young, Nazi and Proud” documentary aired on TV in 2002. He then stayed in the BNP, it’s argued, in order to cause as much internal strife as possible. And, of course, Collett was indeed the source of huge trouble within the BNP; he got arrested for threatening to have leader Nick Griffin killed and left in disgrace. It might have been then, it’s said, that Collett took the state shilling.

The actual date, his detractors claim, is neither here nor there; people associated with Collett have a worrying habit of being arrested for all manner of crimes whilst he himself, the leader, organiser and agitator, sits pretty, atop a sizeable pile of cash.

Furthermore, PA’s activist corps have been dangerously close to real terrorists, without Collett himself being at all troubled by the forces of the state. So now, Collett how finds himself under attack on all fronts so, true to the tried and tested fascist formula that we have seen multiple times, he’s turned his ire, and fire, on a political rival.

Massively backfired

Who knows, maybe the new Identity Party, ostensibly set up by PA activists as an electoral front, will abandon ship and dump Collett. After all, he’s not the one who registered the party, but his North West stalwart Craig Buckley.

Worse still, Collett’s attack on Smith has massively backfired at a time when PA is clearly struggling to catalyse its few hundred remaining members into action. An event held in Castleford, two weeks ago, near Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s constituency offices was attended by no more than a dozen people. Videos and pictures produced by PA and posted online show a miserable and paltry group.

Elsewhere, small leafletting efforts and a few pints down the local pub are bigged-up as massively significant activist events when, in reality, they are very small beer.

The irony is, of course, that Collett first linked up with Homeland’s current leader, Kenny Smith, and his sidekick Steve Blake, in the BNP. They were all mates together, for a while, and it was Smith who covered up for Collett when he was accused of seriously inappropriate behaviour (to put it mildly) at a BNP conference.

They were all mates together, for a while, and it was Smith who covered up for Collett when he was accused of seriously inappropriate behaviour (to put it mildly) at a BNP conference.

Not long after, when the BNP membership list was leaked online, they themselves ended up being accused of very foul play by Nick Griffin. Now, in 2025, Homeland has hoovered up many PA activists and donors with Collett forced to earn a living grifting in online super-chats and via live streaming shows.

Homeland announced, last week, that its membership had risen to over 1,000. That is probably a little inflated, but there is no doubt that it is growing and feeling reasonably confident going forward. Its forthcoming international conference at the end of April is set to be a seminal event for the far right in 2025 and is certainly gathering momentum. It features a speaker from Germany’s AfD, for instance.

Speaking of international friends in low places, it should not be forgotten that one of Collett’s main allies in the USA, Warren Balogh, is an open and convinced nazi. He was the guest on Collett’s Patriotic Weekly Review online chat show only two weeks ago.

And only yesterday, as Collett tore into Smith, Balogh was online waxing lyrical about how his father’s political mentor, ‘Commander’ Matt Koehl, inheritor of Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party from August 1967, met up with nazi pilot and Hitler apologist Hans Ulrich Rudel in the 1970s. How Warren wished he’d been there with his dad, Alan, a notorious hatemonger in US extremist circles.

The stench of the Holocaust and nazi war crimes is never far from Collett and his inner circle.

The rivalry with Kenny Smith has now taken a bizarre and vicious turn. That much we know. And Collett is already under heavy fire on his own social media platforms for being a “Jew-fed” or a “kosher clown”. Collett now looks all the more stupid when we recall that he himself brought Kenny Smith back into Patriotic Alternative before the split between the two! Clearly, the tinpot fuhrer is an appalling judge of character.

The good news is that when fascists are fighting with each other they’re not fully focussed on encouraging people online to spread racist propaganda, organise for “remigration” and, possibly, train to physically attack people they consider to be the enemy. Which is pretty much anybody. Much more important, it turns out, is the grift not the graft. Money and an easy living first, political principles a distant second.

Money is said to be the root of all evil. And where Mark Collett is concerned, this is certainly true.