It’s now a brutal bare-knuckle fight for leadership of British fascism. During the past 48 hours open hostilities have broken out between leading figures from the Homeland Party and Patriotic Alternative, with Homeland’s leader Kenny Smith describing his ex-comrades in PA as “a corrupt and disingenuous fringe cult”.
In one corner is Smith (above, left), 52, born in the Hebrides and a committed racist since joining John Tyndall’s BNP as a 19-year-old. Like most of the Scottish members, Smith deserted Tyndall to support Nick Griffin’s BNP takeover in 1999. He then helped lead an attempted coup against Griffin in 2007 and was expelled. At that time a bitter enemy of Griffin’s close aide Mark Collett, Smith patched up his differences and joined Collett’s Patriotic Alternative. But then at the start of last year Smith led a cadre of prominent PA organisers who split from Collett to form the Homeland Party.
In the other corner is Mark Collett (above, right), 44, born in Leicestershire and (like his rival) a racist activist since his teenage years. While a student at Leeds University, Collett joined the city’s National Front branch that was then controlled by one of Britain’s most violent but erratic nazis, Eddy Morrison. He quickly abandoned Morrison and became one of Nick Griffin’s young acolytes, before an acrimonious split with the BNP führer in 2010. Collett became one of the most hated men inside the far right and spent several years away from active politics, then worked his way back into nazi good books. He built contacts via mysterious fundraiser Larry Nunn and some of the leaders of the now banned terrorist group National Action, before creating Patriotic Alternative in 2019.
A few months back, some of the greybeards of the far right tried to patch up a non-aggression pact between Smith and Collett, but the idea faded quickly. This week it became obvious that their feud will continue in a permanent and bitter split.
Just as Blair Cottrell, one of Australia’s most violent nazi leaders, was unpacking his bags before speaking at this weekend’s PA conference, Smith decided to denounce Collett’s party openly, ignoring advice to tone down the infighting. And Collett’s errand boys have been dishing out similar abuse in return.
The overt difference between these groups is that Homeland has registered as a political party and at least in theory aims to fight elections. In practice things haven’t worked out well. At the May local elections Homeland made a great song and dance about its single candidate Roger Robertson, a former BNP organiser who attempts a country squire image. Smith and his friends made no secret of their ambition for Robertson to win a district council seat in Hampshire, and concentrated the party’s entire resources on this single ward. But Robertson could only scrape 13%.
After this weak vote by his party’s flagship, Smith avoided the General Election. To general surprise it was Collett who pushed a handful of PA activists forward to stand in July. As PA is still not registered with the Electoral Commission (and exists as a private business run by Collett and his deputies Laura Towler and Steve Blake, not as a political party), Collett struck a deal with the far right’s favourite solicitor Robin Tilbrook. This resulted in PA nazis standing officially as parliamentary candidates for Tilbrook’s “civic nationalist” English Democrats.
Steve Laws, a prolific racist video blogger, also stood as an ED and for a short time seemed to be cosying up to PA. But last month Laws abandoned Collett and openly signed up with Homeland as a guest speaker at their conference. He now encourages his many online followers to follow him into becoming a card carrying member of Kenny Smith’s party.
Collett’s fury at Laws’ decision is one reason for the increasing bitterness of the PA-Homeland split.
PA’s partisans argue that Homeland is selling out to civic nationalists. Smith and his allies argue that PA isn’t serious about political activism and is more of a club for online hobbyists and Hollywood Nazis.
On Wednesday night hostilities worsened when Collett interviewed one of Blair Cottrell’s fellow Australian nazis Jacob Hersant, founder of the National Socialist Network. Hersant is the first person to have been charged under new anti-nazi laws in the state of Victoria, after he gave a Hitler salute on the steps of a court in Melbourne. This followed his conviction for violent disorder after he was part of a group of fifteen masked men who attacked two passengers in a car.
A naïve viewer commented on Steve Laws having recently given a “great speech” at the Homeland Party conference. Collett testily replied: “No, do not join them. He (Laws) can do whatever he wants, but if you’re here on this stream and you’re listening to Jacob, Jacob’s basically saying ‘don’t cuck’. Jacob’s saying ‘don’t give in to the pressure to sell out’. These clowns have got a handful of community councillors, which are non-elected positions. They pretend they are serious elected positions. One of their community councillors, in order to keep his position, has already voted for diversity and inclusion on the council. So they had a vote and this supposed nationalist councillor voted in favour of diversity and inclusion. At the end of the day, if you call yourself a nationalist party, and you have the mildest toehold on power in Britain that you could possibly have, but you’re already voting for diversity and inclusion, then what’s the point in even existing. There’s none.”
Collett continued: “I don’t think that anyone who sits with a bunch of liberals and endorses anti-white policies can be held up as a nationalist. And if Steve Laws wants to support that kind of nonsense, that’s up to him. You know, that’s on his head, that’s on his conscience. I’ve never sold people out in my life. I’m not going to start selling out. Although I might have certain differences with people about optics, one of the key issues is this. If you call yourself a nationalist, and you endorse the policies of replacement; if you endorse the policies of diversity and inclusion, which is just a series of codewords for anti-white, then you’re not one of us. It’s as simple as that.”
Collett then invited his Australian guests to join in the mudslinging, but Hersant was visibly embarrassed to have been dragged into this factional rhetoric and replied: “Well’ I don’t know a lot about the Homeland Party, and I don’t know a lot about Steve Laws. I’ve seen some of it on Twitter…”
After Hersant had finished a lengthy evasion, refusing to condemn Homeland on the grounds that as an Australian he couldn’t verify what was being said on either side, Collett became even more irritated and insisted that everything he said about Homeland had been “verified” as it had been reported in the press. He ploughed on:
“They did that because they’re selling out. I can tell you this as well. They won’t be supporting you. They won’t be supporting the kind of work you do. They won’t be supporting political prisoners in the UK. They haven’t supported anyone in the UK that’s been arrested for protesting or for saying things on social media. I can tell you now, they are not the real deal, and the people who set them up are people that everyone should steer well clear of. Especially the ones who have admitted in court to committing basically what are considered acts of terrorism, but the police won’t act against them – when young lads are getting dragged out of classrooms and genuine nationalists are getting arrested for the same thing and being given five years in jail. Anyone that manages to get away with that kind of stuff, when they’ve admitted doing those things in court, it just glows in the dark. I’m telling you that for free.”
The next day Laws replied in what everyone understood as a reference to Collett: “Sly digs from so-called allies do not go unnoticed.”
Smith chipped in with a clear implication that Collett and PA were grifters: “There are gatekeepers actively engaged in subversive behaviour. It appears to mainly be because they fear their grift will crumble if serious nationalism becomes a major force.”
This prompted instant fury from one of Collett’s few remaining Scottish supporters Stephen Thomson, a prolific video streamer who calls himself Chief Moody.
Thomson/Moody told Smith, “The only grifter in this chat is you. Everything you accuse people or groups of doing can be pointed right back at you.” To which the Homeland leader replied: “I don’t give the subversive types any oxygen. You and your disingenuous group do nothing but damage. Cheerio!”
In fact, Smith couldn’t resist chipping in again with further attacks on PA, not only giving them oxygen but giving free entertainment to anti-fascist onlookers. “With so-called allies,” he opined, “it’s usually about the grift and maintaining their niche market.”
As Searchlight readers might guess, the third party in PA’s messy divorce, Alek Yerbury from the National Rebirth Party, was by now craving his share of the limelight. He decided this time to join Smith in putting the boot into Collett and perhaps especially to PA deputy leader Laura Towler, who is specially hated by Yerbury’s partner Katie Fanning.
“Their whole financial model”, Yerbury wrote, “is based on the monetisation of dissidency and being a notorious ‘underdog’. They effectively can’t afford to succeed. It’s why these kinds of people sabotage everything they touch but can offer no rational explanation for why they are doing it.”
A day later Smith was still fuming about PA: “We want nothing to do with that corrupt and disingenuous fringe cult.”
And to think that just 18 months ago Smith, Collett and Yerbury appeared to be best of friends, working closely together in PA’s leadership team. But as Searchlight has seen many times over more than half a century, there’s only one thing a fascist likes more than spewing hate against any convenient minority. And that’s spewing hate against a factional enemy who fishes in the same pond of donors.
