Last weekend in the unlikely setting of a Derbyshire parish hall, the Homeland Party made its big pitch to be the future of the British far right.
This is a party that by its own records had only 251 members before this conference, but it’s already overtaking its rivals Patriotic Alternative (from which Homeland split last year), the longer established but stale British Democrats, and the fast declining Britain First.
Their proudest boast this week was to attract overseas guest speakers from two of Europe’s more credible far right parties. Some of this seems to be down to their energetic liaison officer Martin Kuziel, an ethnic German with family roots in what is now the Czech Republic. But Searchlight has also monitored intense networking by Homeland leader Kenny Smith (far right of picture) and some of the young organisers he took with him from PA. Smith has succeeded in winning over some anti-Farage, ex-UKIP dissidents.
Manuel Schreiber, an activist from Junge Alternative (the youth wing of AfD) advised the party on how to use social media to boost their growth. Schreiber is from Saxony, one of the AfD’s growth areas, and is associated with the party’s most extreme fascist wing or “Flügel”. He openly celebrates the way that AfD has moved away from its previous “civic nationalism” towards a relentless focus on race and immigration. Smith hopes that Homeland will be the gateway for a similar ideological hardening among the increasingly racist, pro-Brexit crowd.
Schreiber’s allies in AfD include the leader of the Flügel faction, Björn Höcke, and the MEP Maximilian Krah, who like Schreiber is from Saxony. Krah is now suspended from AfD while investigations continue into his dubious connections with China, but Schreiber’s attendance at the Homeland conference suggests that concerns over Krah’s remarks about the Third Reich are purely cosmetic.
It wouldn’t make much sense to suspend Krah for making positive remarks about nazis, but then to tolerate a leading official of AfD’s youth wing speaking at a conference alongside some of the UK’s leading nazis.
The other European guest was Robert Grajny, foreign relations director for Konfederacja (Confederation), an alliance of far right Polish parties. Grajny is from the National Movement (Ruch Narodowy), the most extreme party in the Confederation.
When it was founded in 2012, this National Movement was allied to the infamous Roberto Fiore (well known to Searchlight readers) and his network of European fascist parties. But in recent years it split from Fiore due to his pro-Russian stance. The National Movement is among the most anti-Putin far right parties in Europe. This is probably one reason why Grajny has chosen to ally with Homeland rather than with Fiore’s old friend Griffin, or with the equally pro-Moscow Mark Collett and Patriotic Alternative.
It’s surprising that officials of two successful parties were prepared to associate with a party that so far has won nothing and that makes a big deal out of having parish or community councillors. In Homeland’s only serious election campaign, in May this year, ex-BNP organiser Roger Robertson polled only 13% in the Hampshire village of Hartley Wintney.
After this embarrassing failure, Smith decided not to stand any Homeland candidates at the General Election in May. But two members of the conference panel were notably unsuccessful parliamentary candidates, and Smith’s European guests must have been surprised to be in the company of such small fry. Steve Laws, an increasingly outspoken racist who made his name with anti-immigration videos, stood as an English Democrat in the Dover & Deal constituency but finished eighth with only 0.4%. Also on the panel was an obscure Covid conspiracy theorist called Garreth Falls, who stood as an independent in Northern Ireland’s Strangford constituency, again finishing eighth with 0.7%.
An oddly assorted panel of guests was completed by Pete North, one of the online right’s most active self-styled intellectuals. As Searchlight has previously reported, North has been active for his entire adult life in pro-Brexit movements, as has his father Dr Richard North.
Both father and son are known to be enemies of Nigel Farage. A significant outcome from the Homeland conference is that Kenny Smith seems to have recruited both Steve Laws from the extreme racist, street activist right, and Pete North from the more Toryish, pro-Brexit, pro-Israel right. People like North avoided overt racism and conspiracy theory until recently, but while Farage and Tice are seeking a form of respectability, North and some others from the old UKIP now seem happier with blatant race-baiting.
North still criticises his new allies for some of their conspiracy theorising and nazi roots. He seems unsure whether or not to denounce the behaviour of several leading Homeland activists, including party treasurer Jerome O’Reilly, who taunted anti-racist protesters outside the conference by chanting the German racist anthem “Ausländer Raus”.
Another odd faction present at the conference was a small gang of SDP activists. The SDP has little connection to the party founded by David Owen, Shirley Williams and other former Labour ministers in 1981. Technically, today’s SDP was founded in 1990 when a minority of activists in what had been Owen’s party refused to accept its dissolution. But in recent years the SDP has represented pro-Brexit culture warriors with Old Labour economic attitudes. Its most prominent supporter and candidate is the newspaper columnist Rod Liddle.
The strangest guest at the conference, who though not a speaker has since identified himself on X as supporting Homeland’s racial agenda, was Alex Bramham, who was the SDP’s General Election candidate in the Staffordshire constituency of Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge.
Bramham has taken an eccentric political journey since his days as chair of Oxford University’s LGBT Society in 2012. He became an exceptionally provocative activist in the faction of gay politics that is militantly opposed to trans rights, indeed he seems to have entered far-right politics via the gateway of militant transphobia.
In 2021 and 2022 Bramham was a Tory candidate at several Manchester City Council elections. Local Conservatives supported him even after police ejected him from a Manchester Pride protest in August 2021 after he turned up promoting a confrontational anti-trans agenda.
Just before the May 2022 city council elections, the Tories disowned Bramham after he went too far by posting a tweet that seemed to compare the ‘Progress flag’ (an LGBT symbol) to the nazi swastika.
It was after this suspension that Bramham left the Tories and joined the SDP. And now he has continued his rightward path by turning up at the Homeland conference. Two years after using the swastika as a crude insult to rivals in LGBT politics, Bramham now associates with genuine nazis.
He might be in for a surprise once fellow Homelanders react to having a gay activist (even one who now describes himself as celibate) in their ranks. But the main question is whether Kenny Smith can sustain his new coalition of oddballs, conspiracy theorists, Tory boys, nazis, “civic” nationalists, racists, libertarians, Old Labourish culture warriors, pro-Russians, pro-Ukrainians, and Little Englander Brexiteers.
This week Smith is celebrating a clear victory over his main rivals, Mark Collett of PA and Alek Yerbury of the National Rebirth Party. But the more Homeland grows, the more questions there will be about its real agenda.