In a bland hotel room in Birmingham, brightened only by the flags of his National Rebirth Party, leader Alek Yerbury last week addressed a gathering of no more than twenty midlands followers at an NRP multi-branch meeting.
The setting is telling: not a vibrant public square, but a sterile, functional space tolerant of political extremists. Here, Yerbury channels the ghost of Hitler, not Mosley, weaving a tapestry of historical fantasy, fascist ideology, and profound foolishness that defines his movement.
Mystical invocation
Yerbury’s world view is built upon a corrupted and selective reading of history, one that serves his white supremacist narrative. He speaks of Britain’s past as a series of “collective struggles,” whose “blood” is “generational.”
This mystical invocation of heritage deliberately ignores the complex, often inglorious, reality. He laments that historical Remembrance events have become an “ideological pit,” yet fails to acknowledge that the blood shed by a multi-ethnic empire and its foreign mercenaries was always the same colour.
He vaguely suggests some past wars were wrong, most likely a reference to WW1, but perhaps alluding to the British Empire, or maybe even WW2. But he never confronts the brutal truth of empire: millions murdered, displaced, and robbed; their resources plundered in a system of state-sanctioned theft.
Historical revisionism
His historical revisionism reaches absurd heights with the claim that 200 years ago, people universally sought to emulate the British political system. This is a fantasy that crumbles upon the slightest scrutiny – it entirely depends on who you were and the colour of your skin.
This was an era of rotten boroughs, preceding the Great Reform Act of 1832, and one that saw Mancunians massacred at Peterloo for demanding representation. Yerbury, who invokes history as a patriot, would doubtless brand the Chartists, trade unionists, and radicals who fought for genuine change as “enemies of true Britons.”
His nostalgia is not for a real past, but for a white supremacist fable where Britain’s imperial conquests overshadow the fact that the nations it invaded often already had sophisticated and effective systems of government.
Divorced from reality
This distortion of history is the lifeblood of his political entity, fuelling a rhetoric that is deliberately short on detail and big on emotion. He makes bold, lazy claims, such as asserting that the political right and left have amalgamated into “one entity.”
This is a statement so divorced from reality it collapses under the weight of its own absurdity – what do Lee Anderson and Zarah Sultana truly share?
This narrative of universal doom is essential for the fascist leader. It allows him to paint a world where there is no good, no kindness, no beauty, only disaster which, for his followers, is likely synonymous with seeing a few dark faces or hearing a foreign language.
From this manufactured crisis emerges Yerbury’s “solution”: a stark choice between a finished old system and a new one run by “true patriots” like himself.
Petty tribalism
His annoyance with the more successful Reform UK reveals the petty tribalism within the fascist ecosystem. Despite Reform being riddled with fellow travellers, its relative popularity makes it a rival, a “600-pound gorilla” that overshadows Yerbury’s own insignificant operation.
The core of Yerbury’s appeal, and its profound danger, lies in his dehumanizing philosophy. He defines “British” values as integrity, a hard work ethic, and resilience against “victimhood.” These are, of course, universal qualities, not unique national virtues.
But Yerbury deliberately conflates the “genuine British person” with the “British Nationalist,” whose only value is serving the collective. This is a vision stripped of individuality, reducing people to the level of ants in a game of exclusion, force, and top-down control.
Blood struggle
Ultimately, Yerbury’s metric for success is chillingly simple: “what remains of our people.” This is a future defined by war, violence, and conflict, where the group with one more soldier standing is the “winner.”
In this Lovecraftian horror, even God is relegated to a bit part, with salvation is to be delivered by the less than 200 members of the NRP.
He finishes, as he began, by invoking a “blood struggle,” wilfully ignoring that the empire he implicitly admires was built on the innocent blood of international theft, a theft that, far from being a gift, forced the British working class themselves to demand a piece of the pie through hard-won democratic struggle.
Yerbury’s fascism is not just foolish and ahistorical; it is a deliberate and dangerous perversion of the very history it claims to champion.
