The great Homeland Party split (reported by Searchlight as it unfolded during the Easter weekend) has hardened within the past 24 hours.
2025 is starting to look very much like 1980. After the 1979 general election setback, the National Front split in several directions, then split again in 1983-4, and again in 1986-7.
Four way split
Two years ago, we saw a three-way split in Patriotic Alternative, which though nowhere near the size of the NF at its peak, and not even registered as a political party, was becoming the largest force in British fascism since the collapse of the BNP.
Now that three-way split has become a four-way split.
Almost as soon as PA’s bitter rival the Homeland Party started to overtake its parent, building some quite impressive international connections especially with Germany’s AfD, it was itself hit on Good Friday by the mother of all splits.
Two of its most widely followed online activists, Kent-based anti-immigration video blogger Steve Laws and Channel Islander Sam Wilkes (who vlogs as “Zoomer Historian”), have been forced out by Homeland’s obese Duce, Kenny Smith.
Their crime was to dare to challenge Smith’s authority after a fiasco in Northern Ireland, where Smith and his allies chose a new young Regional Organiser who was forced to resign within days after a hate campaign by fellow fascists, targeting his homosexuality and apparent sympathy for Irish republicanism.
Winning recruits from Reform
The “scandal” of Carter McAfee now seems to be only part of a bigger tension between Laws and his radical friends, who would like Homeland to be an explicitly racist/fascist party, versus some of Smith’s new allies such as the former UKIP activist Peter North, who are aiming to win over recruits from Reform and the Tory or Toryish right.
As Laws complained in his resignation statement, he believed the correct strategy is to “plant our flag in the sand and move people to our position, not shift closer to theirs. Sadly, the party is heading the other way.”
Though Laws hasn’t yet said he’s leaving the party, there seems no way back for him after he condemned Smith for “actively attacking and smearing nationalists” and pointed out that “any form of criticism is met with a block or a smear and it’s not acceptable”.
Insecurity and paranoia
While Smith and his faction have spent two years criticising PA’s führer Mark Collett for running the party as an authoritarian clique, Smith himself seems no better. What Smith and Collett have in common is an inability to handle criticism, which some critics see as a symptom of their insecurity and paranoia.
But what Collett and the Laws-Wilkes “rebel faction” have in common is being rooted among online conspiracy theorists and what Smith rightly calls “cranks” rather than what Smith calls “sensible nationalism”, focused on packaging racist ideas acceptably for the voting public.
Lurid details
Wilkes placed the blame squarely on Smith himself, who with “a couple of other key figures have exclusively decided to take the party on a new path, which seeks to placate the concerns of (or appeal to?) civic nationalists and homosexuals. The disaster in Belfast is simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
The two rival Homeland factions give contradictory accounts of the Belfast fiasco. Smith and the leadership loyalists argue that Laws at first agreed with the appointment, knowing that McAfee was homosexual, and that when more lurid details of McAfee’s private life appeared just before Easter, everyone quickly agreed that he had to stand down.
Homeland’s leaders flatly deny Laws’ claims that he had been trying to put a broader case against liberalisation of the party and had been ignored.
They imply that Laws has taken advantage of the Belfast ‘scandal’ to make a headline-grabbing excuse for his resignation, and that on this issue there was never any real split.
The main bigger issue is unsurprisingly immigration. Laws claims that he had wanted a much tougher immigration stance but was overridden by the leadership, who preferred a milder policy devised by the ex-UKIP Pete North.
The wilder versions of British racism are increasingly driven by a spiral of online rhetoric, often spewed by people who are unwilling to show their faces or give their real names, and who in some cases might not even exist
One surprise here is that it should be Kenny Smith, a former activist in the Tyndall-era, neo-nazi BNP, who is presented as the “moderate”, while Steve Laws, who started out as a populist anti-immigration activist with no roots in fascist parties, who is now the “extremist”.
What this shows is that the wilder versions of British racism are increasingly driven by a spiral of online rhetoric, often spewed by people who are unwilling to show their faces or give their real names, and who in some cases might not even exist.
Wilkes argues that the online fanbase (especially on Elon Musk’s new, more fascist-friendly X) “is the party’s current base and anyone with eyes knows that the party is mostly made up of these guys. These are our people. …They need to be given a reason to believe. Not dismissed as if they’re the scum of the earth. These fellows are how the party was built up. Our concerns on behalf of young nationalists, the base of the party, have been utterly ignored and ridiculed.”
Cranks and bad actors
Wilkes accuses Smith of dismissing this X-based support as “cranks and bad actors”. The trouble is, both Wilkes and Smith are accurate in their analysis of the present state of British fascism. Yes, the online fanbase is the core of the movement.
But yes, they are often cranks and unless Smith can wean them off crank obsessions it’s difficult to see how a traditional, ballot box focused far right can be rebuilt.
What Wilkes and Laws haven’t explained is whether they are genuinely interested in the ballot box route. Many of their anonymous fans make no secret of their rejection of traditional politics and are closer to the “accelerationist” position of American racists that has frequently incited terrorism.
Welcome with open arms
One of the online radicals argued that he and his friends had trusted Homeland only because they trusted Laws and Wilkes. He complained, “The problem is, Pete North and some homo fem boy survived longer than Steve and Zoomer Historian (Wilkes). That speaks volumes.”
Laws has a very big online following but absolutely no experience in running a real-world movement. It’s obvious that he could take a lot of online support away from Smith, but does he really have what it takes? If not, PA would welcome him with open arms, if not an open chequebook.
But if Laws thought it was impossible to work with Smith, he would find Collett a total nightmare. The PA führer is an even worse boss than the Homeland Duce. Another option would be to work with Alek Yerbury and his National Rebirth Party, but Yerbury also has a “my way or the highway” leadership style and, so far, his party is very tiny.
If Laws and Wilkes joined, this could spark a leadership crisis in the NRP as new recruits would swamp existing members.
The British Democrats, in the form of Lawrence Rustem, have tried to capitalise on the situation, and issued an appeal for ‘sensible nationalists’ to join them. They appear not to have noticed that it’s the hardcore fascists who are leaving, not the ‘sensible nats’.
Searchlight looks forward to the next exciting episode of British fascism’s endless nights of the long knives.
