Last weekend the Homeland Party’s obese duce Kenny Smith was posing in Vienna (above) as leader of “sensible nationalism”. His overseas liaison officer Martin Kuziel spoke at one of Europe’s best publicised racist rallies, sharing a platform in the Austrian capital with the “identitarian” leader Martin Sellner.
But within days another wheel fell off the Homeland wagon, and last night the party rolled into a ditch, delighting its many rivals in the endlessly squabbling British fascist playground.
The crisis began on Monday while Smith was still recovering from his all-expenses-paid Viennese hangover. Several of his core activists decided to quit, they claim spontaneously, though Smith loyalists are probably right to smell conspiracy.
It took only a couple of days for the latest set of rebels to issue a letter to the party’s National Council demanding wholesale changes, requiring not only Smith’s resignation as leader but his complete departure from the party’s ranks.
Neither side was happy that the first time most members got to see the letter was when it was published on Searchlight’s website last night.
Starting pistol
Knowing their letter would be dismissed, the dissident faction quickly teamed up with the most recent set of “hardline” racists and antisemites to fall out with Homeland, and last night they fired the starting pistol for what they hope will be mass resignations.
Typically, all this occurred online. The rebels are proud of the fact that their generation measures success in terms of viewing figures on streams, follower numbers, and “likes” on social media. Their revolt consisted of posting their letter on Google Docs, followed by a two-hour rehash of its contents on an X audio stream.
This X space was hosted by Steve Laws, the Folkestone anti-immigration campaigner who has become an ever more virulent extremist during the past year. After only 0.4% of voters in the Dover & Deal constituency backed Laws at last July’s general election, he has oddly enough become even more convinced that democracy is fatally flawed.
Instead, he spends most of each day on social media, where he takes comfort among those who agree with his ever more deranged rants.
Nazi vlogger
Laws’ main ally inside Homeland was the nazi vlogger Sam Wilkes who uses the pseudonym Zoomer Historian. As we explained last month, they were leaders of a “hardline” faction that split from Homeland, ostensibly over the party’s abortive effort to appoint a gay member as an organiser in Belfast.
Gay men in particular are second only to Jews on the Laws-Wilkes hate list. Please don’t ask us why. The answers would fill a psychiatric textbook.
For many weeks Laws and Wilkes have been howling in the X wilderness against Smith and Homeland, growing increasingly frustrated, but this week their lottery numbers finally came up.
When this row over the Belfast organiser blew up, there was an additional faction who were upset with Smith, but not so upset that they were willing to quit.
These included Kai Stephens, once a teenage star of Patriotic Alternative (where he used the pseudonym Barkley Walsh) and until Monday a Homeland organiser in Norfolk, and Jerome O’Reilly, once a regional organiser and party treasurer.
Both featured in last night’s stream. Walsh actually authored the Open Letter though it was subsequently amended after suggestions from O’Reilly and others.
There was one especially delicious moment when Laws’ guests were berating Smith and the party for spending too much time and money of foreign trips. In particular they cited visits earlier this year to Paris and Berlin.
Laws remained totally silent throughout this little exchange – wise, perhaps, given that he had been with Smith on both trips.
O’Reilly was sidelined by Smith in April this year but hung around on the Homeland fringe rather than quitting. He seethed with rage against two of the few pro-Zionist voices in the party, former UKIP “intellectual” Pete North, and the ex-Reform activist and Leicester-based Islamophobe, Mark Heath.
Even after North quit the party (and Heath became slightly detached within weeks of joining), O’Reilly still argues that Homeland is too ambiguous in its policies on the Middle East.
Hatred for Jews and gays
Now O’Reilly and Stephens have made common cause with Laws and Wilkes. Last night’s online broadcast made it obvious that the depth of their shared hatred for Jews and gay men has become central to the ideology of this faction, which also now includes Connor Marlow, a parish councillor in Fulford, Staffordshire.
Marlow was among the first eight defectors from PA who joined Smith to create Homeland, but he’s now been expelled for a tweet denouncing ‘disgusting smears’ put out by the leadership against Stephens and O’Reilly in response to their letter.
Last night’s resignation letters and tweets hinted that Callum Barker, the Homeland activist who has been in the forefront of militant racist protests in Epping, is also part of the rebel faction.
Former party treasurer O’Reilly went so far as to claim that Smith had labelled Barker as a police agent, in the long tradition of fascist party leaders desperate to smear their own followers once they step out of line.
It didn’t take long for the level of “debate” to sink to playground insults. O’Reilly claimed that his former leader Smith has “an alcohol problem” and that he gets “absolutely smashed and wrecked”, especially during his frequent overseas trips on party business.
In response Smith’s faction labelled O’Reilly as an incompetent treasurer who had lost £2,000 in Bitcoin donations due to technical fumbling. O’Reilly admitted the error but said the sum was closer to £1,000.
Troubled young man
The leadership loyalists also hit out at Kai Stephens as “a troubled young man who acts on impulse with little regard for others”, and claimed that the party had helped him out “during serious personal and legal difficulties”.
This refers to yet another complicated tale of strange sexual hang-ups and offensive online messages which led to a court case during 2023-24. The charges were eventually dropped.
So far it looks as though the ex-Homelanders have no interest in joining any of the rival groups on the far right. Paul Golding’s Britain First are too Zionist. Nick Tenconi and UKIP are too irrelevant and “civnat”. The British Democrats are too geriatric. British Movement is too Hitlerite.
Patriotic Alternative is an even worse example of the leadership clique and lack of accountability that the rebels criticise in Homeland.
And though Alek Yerbury’s National Rebirth Party is from the rebels’ standpoint probably the best of the bunch, it’s still just too tiny and Yerbury’s Hitler impersonation just too risible. Also, there’s the small matter of Yerbury’s partner, the notorious Katie “Sanity” Fanning.
Online pressure group
So, what will the rebels do? They are likely to organise themselves as an online pressure group, not as a party, and will try to influence the increasingly racist circles around ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe. Steve Laws now regularly posts online in support of Lowe.
Kenny Smith’s enemies are celebrating prematurely, and the Homeland Party is likely to stagger on for a while as probably the strongest of many contenders for political space in the zone that is more racist than Rupert Lowe but less openly nazi than Mark Collett’s Patriotic Alternative or the Hitler-worshippers in British Movement.
Homeland can still rely on a core of senior officers who remain loyal to Smith including Ant Burrows, Alec Cave, and Daniel Gale who succeeded O’Reilly as Treasurer.
Yet the chances of Smith building a serious electoral force along the lines of the 2000s NF or the 1970s NF are now slim (an adjective not often applied to Kenny).
