Two leading far-right agitators have been arrested by police.
The Dover-based online activist Steve Laws has been arrested by police in Kent, whilst fascist ‘intellectual’ Pete North has been arrested in North Yorkshire, Both were, till earlier this year, prominent in the Homeland Party.
Social media silence
Searchlight understands that Laws was arrested yesterday morning, interviewed and released on bail. It is not known what he was interviewed about.
His silence on social media since early yesterday may be related to bail conditions.
Laws, who enjoys considerable influence on the far right, particularly online, was till recently a leading member of the Homeland Party but split in April when he decided that their line on remigration was too soft.
He believed Homeland should “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.”
Reluctant
Recently he has been moving closed to Patriotic Alternative and is due to speak at their upcoming conference, though he seems to be reluctant to actually join up.
Pete North was arrested the day after Laws and taken to Harrogate police station. From a statement posted online by his father it seems that his arrest is linked to a post on X. He was released without charge in the early hours of the morning.
Like Laws, North left Homeland earlier this year, but for very different reasons. North thought Homeland was was too hardline. Laws believed it was not hardline enough.
Considering himself something of a far-right intellectual and strategist, North began to lose patience with the hardliners in Homeland in the run up to the May local elections.
At the time he wrote that “The problem…is that the cranks are unappeasable. No hard line is ever hardline enough. Ideological purity, no matter how obnoxious and repellent, matters to them more than growing a movement that might achieve something.”
He quit a month later.
Steve Laws’ difficulties may also explain the decision of fellow Homeland Party rebel Kai Stephens to drop off X yesterday, shortly after Laws’ arrest, announcing that he was “Going to be taking a break from social media until I have progressed my personal life in a meaningful way.”
Needless to say, the arrests are already being seen on the far right as part of a state crackdown. Another prominent online activist, Carl Benjamin, posted after the North arrest that “it seems Starmer is coming for the online right as Steve Laws was arrested recently, too”.
Laws’ online mate Sam Wilkes (aka Zoomer Historian) tried to calm down heated speculation writing that: “It was for a specific thing where someone reported him, this Pete North thing is oddly coincidental a day later but it did seem like a one-off.
“We’ll see. Don’t freak out about us all being rounded up just yet!”
