Hard on the heels of its catastrophic annual conference last weekend, UKIP has suffered another high-level resignation. And, as Searchlight predicted back in July, it’s Paul Campbell (above), the party’s Wales Regional Officer who is the latest to decide enough is enough.
Campbell’s resignation – both as Regional Officer and as a UKIP member – has not been made public yet, but he communicated it to the UKIP leadership on their confidential ‘Smoked Herring’ WhatsApp group on Monday. Campbell says he is, “disappointed at recent events in particular the leadership election fiasco. I was supporting Bill Etheridge and expected him to win easily”.
In this, Campbell was not alone. Virtually the entire membership expected UKIP veteran Etheridge, a former MEP, to be elected leader in May, and were astonished when newly-recruited Lois Perry swept the board with almost 80% of the vote. Actual voting numbers have never been published by UKIP Chairman Ben ‘Rogue Builder’ Walker, the party’s Returning Officer.
Perry lasted only a few weeks, before dramatically resigning during the general election campaign, to be replaced by another recent recruit, Deputy Leader, Nick Tenconi. Tenconi is now Leader having been elected to neither position but simply put in post by the now omnipotent Walker. The timing of Campbell’s decision, however, suggests that events around the conference, albeit added to other concerns such as last May’s leadership election, triggered his departure.
Tenconi’s new direction for UKIP as a party of the Christian far right has also made Campbell unhappy; while he acknowledges that Tenconi is a dynamic leader, he says he “cannot get totally on board with the heavy Religious dialogue”.
Campbell, who doubles up as an unlikely Elvis Presley impersonator, suggests that the Wales party organisation should be taken over by Stan Robinson (above right), the Llanelli gobshite and former trade union buster. With the convicted fraudster Dan Morgan (above left), he runs the Voice of Wales online operation which is long on abusive talk, but rather short on ability or action.
Recent months have seen the resignations of Deputy Leader Rebecca Jane, Party Director Pat Mountain and her successor, Lester ‘Jeff’ Taylor, Bill Etheridge, Health and Social Care Spokesperson Dr Chris Ho, Defence and Veterans Spokesperson former Squadron Leader Peter Richardsson, Home Affairs Spokesperson Steve Unwin, and Education Spokesperson Julie Carter. The National Executive Committee has also been denuded by departures and is now thought to be so small that it cannot even muster the required quorum to meet.
The Traditional Britain Group holds its annual get together next weekend, and its panel of speakers includes one or two interesting characters, given how TBG likes to present itself as an upmarket far-right offering which has had government ministers address it in the past.
Most notable this year is Rhodri Philipps (above), aka 4th Viscount St Davids, who will speak on “a project (in partnership with TBG VP Robin Tilbrook) to hold officials legally accountable for the harm that they have done to Britain and the British people”. Tilbrook, of course, doubles up as the leader of the English Democrats, which is in an electoral alliance with UKIP, and was the funder of neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative candidates in July’s general election.
Phillips, who was also a speaker at a TBG social in December, is highly qualified to talk about harm, and has in the past been held very accountable indeed for harm that he did: specifically, harm to anti-Brexit campaigner, Gina Miller. In July 2017 he was convicted of sending malicious communications after posting on Facebook that he would pay “£5,000 for the first person to ‘accidentally’ run over this bloody troublesome first-generation immigrant”.
He was also convicted for offering £2000 to anyone who would “carve into pieces” a man who had been reported in the press as having turned down a five-bedroom council house for his family of eight.
Philips was jailed for 12 weeks. Gina Miller had to employ professional security for herself and her family as a result.
Also due to address TBG this year Unity News Network activist David Clews (above), who fled abroad recently when he thought he might be arrested for inciting violence during the August post-Southport riots. Even by TBG standards, Clews is a ridiculous crank and it’s rather surprising that TBG will promote him. But then he is very much part of the far-right pro-Moscow propaganda axis of which TBG is a key UK component.
TBG is a well-funded far-right group at whose events right wing conservatives rub shoulders with members of further-right extremist and fascist groups. Jacob Rees-Mogg was guest speaker in 2013 (pictured below, with TBG founder Gregory Lauder-Frost) despite being warned by Searchlight about what TBG was. He later said this had been a mistake.
Other speakers this year will include Dr Niall McCrae, a climate change denying fanatic, and Professor Ed Dutton, aka The Jolly Heretic, who has written books on racial differences, ‘woke eugenics’ and feminism. In the latter he equated feminists to modern witches. Attendees will be disappointed, though, to learn that Harald Kujat, an 82-year-old who served in Luftwaffe and was from 2002-2005 chairman of NATO Military Committee, has had to pull out through ill-health. He is another pro-Putin propagandist.
Where to start reporting the farcical UKIP/English Democrats joint conference which took place in Nottingham on Friday night and through yesterday?
Well, at the beginning we suppose. Events kicked off, so to speak, with UKIP’s unelected leader Nick ‘Threesome’ Tenconi (above) steaming across the hotel car park towards an anti-racist demonstration gathered there, barking into his megaphone “Who invited you to my conference?”. That’s right: “…my conference.” Now, that would be a bit presumptuous at the best of times but when you are completely unelected Leader of a political party who hasn’t even yet had to attend an NEC meeting to account for yourself, it really is a bit rich.
Of course, he made sure he was filmed doing this and a video duly posted on YouTube was titled “Nick Tenconi storms through far-left blockade”. What it appeared to show, however, was more like Tenconi ‘storming’ towards the demo hoping to provoke a confrontation and being rather disappointed when the the smiling, chanting anti-racists politely stood aside to let him pass.
Inside, proceedings were, shall we say, modest. As you can see from our picture, the conference room -which at times accomodated both UKIP and ED contingents – had seating set out for only around 80 and according to our sources, less than half of these were occupied even at peak times. The majorlty appeared to be from the EDs. And things must have felt a bit odd to participants in the 11.30 session on ‘UKIP branding’ considering that all the ‘branding’ in the room belonged to the EDs,
But even so, proceedings livened up a bit at one stage when a gentleman ventured that party chairman Ben ‘Rogue Builder’ Walker, sacked as a magistrate earlier this year for deceiving the Ministry of Justice about his criminal convictions, should either be expelled forthwith or handed over to the police.
Walker could barely contain his fury. A few lapdogs leapt to his defence saying he was doing his best in difficult circumstances, but it kind of summed up where UKIP is at, at the present time: a pathetic, shrinking shell of its former self, terminally-ill and barely breathing, kept on life support by the convicted criminals Walker and Tenconi as a receptacle for the remaining bequests left to it by loyal members in UKIP’s glory days.
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.
A nostalgic post on Facebook yesterday, from Mark Cottrell (above, right), editor-in-chief of the self-styled nazi ‘intellectual’ rag, Heritage and Destiny:
“I was in Uckfield in East Sussex yesterday” he writes, “so it would have been rude not to pop by and have a look at the old Tony Hancock Print Shop, which was used by generations of nationalists for over 50 years, to print their magazines, newspapers, posters, stickers, leaflets and booklets. As you can see it’s now a Tyre and Exhaust fitting unit. Tony had many faults, but he was a staunch nationalist till the end (as his late father was too).”
Oh, please, let’s not stop there. Let’s do Mr Hancock’s ‘faults’ rather more justice than that.
Anthony Sandford Hancock (pictured, top left) was a lifelong neo-Nazi, antisemite, racist and holocaust revisionist. He and his father, Alan Hancock, ran a printing press in Uckfield, Sussex, which acted as printer to the fascist and neo-Nazi movement worldwide. It flooded the globe with some of the most vile nazi propaganda imaginable. Most notably, the notorious ‘Did 6 Million Really Die’ by ‘Richard Harwood?’ (aka Richard Verrall of the National Front) poured off Hancock’s presses in print runs of tens of thousands and in many languages to be distributed worldwide.
After an international Northern league meeting in Brighton in 1971 was broken up by the anti-fascist 62 Group it was Hancock who arranged for a local Jewish Chronicle journalist to be savagely beaten and left unconscious in the street in revenge.
Hancock’s international connections put him at the heart of some of the most evil nazi organisations operating at the time. He was the main UK contact for the neo-Nazi terrorists and fascists who plagued Europe with bomb attacks and other violent outrages in the early 1980s. It was at his Heidelburg Hotel in Brighton that Ray Hill, there as Hancock’s guest, was originally introduced to the French neo-Nazi terrorist who would in turn introduce him to the French nazis behind the plot to bomb the Notting Hill Carnival in 1981.
He was also the first point of contact for the fugitive Italian terrorists led by Roberto Fiore who arrived in the UK after the Bologna bombing of 1980. It was Hancock who first received them in Brighton and shipped them on to League of St George contacts in London who looked after them.
In 1989, he inherited the printing business and various properties worth over £1 million from his father, Alan Hancock, a pre-war Blackshirt who remained a lifelong Mosleyite and was one of the defendants in the notorious Lewes race relations trial in 1968. He apparently committed suicide in 1989 but, for years afterwards, son Anthony had to put up with persistent rumours on the far right that it was he who had hooked Hancock senior up to the mains supply at the print shop and despatched him to Valhalla.
An expensive libel action brought by his solicitor, and marriage to a woman who hated his politics but loved his riches, not to mention a gambling habit and some crazy investments in non-existent goldmines, meant that his fortune was soon wiped out. A successful legal action from former NF luminary Tom Acton, chasing considerable debts, did nothing to help and he died, skint, in 2012.
There was however, one bright moment early in this dark life. On 5th November 1980, outraged by what Hancock was up to in his printworks, a former member of the 62 Group, acting on his own initiative, drove down to Uckfield and burnt the place to the ground.
This is Searchlight’s full 2012 obituary for Hancock:
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