Author Archives: Searchlight Team

PA leader Collett in desperate ‘state asset’ attack on Homeland Party boss

*Mark Collett, PA leader who has launched bitter attack on right wing rival*

By Mark Scholl

Patriotic Alternative, the neo-fascist political entity that has housed and harboured many a convicted criminal, is in trouble and leader Mark Collett has launched a desperate smear attack on one of his leading rivals accusing him of being a state asset.

PA’s founding core group included many closely associated with the prescribed terrorist group National Action. One of these, as Searchlight readers will recall, is Sam Melia, now out on license having himself been convicted and jailed as the mastermind behind a vicious campaign of racist propaganda that operated nationally and internationally. Indeed, the propaganda produced and supplied by him is still being used by racists around the UK.

Collett losing out to Yerbury and Homeland

Despite having raised tens of thousands on the back of Melia’s conviction, and further thousands after the Farage Riots last Summer, all is not well at PA Towers. First, Collett was soundly defeated in a widely advertised online debate on the future of the neo-fascist movement, by former associate Alek Yerbury, now leader of the National Rebirth Party.

Second, Collett is losing activists to Yerbury’s group in West Yorkshire, London and the North West. Other defections have taken place, primarily to the Homeland Party but also to the hardline Hitlerites of British Movement. Against this background, an increasingly desperate PA Fuhrer Mark Collett yesterday launched a vitriolic attack on Kenny Smith, Homeland’s leader.

“Morbidly obese slob with a giant swastika and eagle on his chest who boasts that he used to be an organiser for Combat 18 now claims he can travel freely to any country without being stopped”
Mark Collett on Kenny Smith

The nature of this attack, which doesn’t mention Smith by name but is unmistakeably referring to him, has raised many eyebrows, including within Collett’s own ranks. Without using the actual words, Collett is directly accusing Smith of being a state asset who, unlike others on the far right, is allowed to operate with impunity. The unhinged salvo was posted on his Telegram channel:

“Morbidly obese slob with a giant swastika and eagle on his chest who boasts that he used to be an organiser for Combat 18 now claims he can travel freely to any country without being stopped is free to have his picture taken on the roof of the German Parliament.

“Yeah, while everyone else is being stopped, searched, detained – and when many nationalists have been forced to strip and have their tattoos photographed – he is just allowed to go about his business.

“Sensible nationalism guys, defo not anything else.”

Collett suggests Homeland’s Kenny Smith as state asset

The post was a response to Smith’s boast, during a recent visit to Germany hosted by AfD Members of the Bundestag, that by adopting a new, respectable well-behaved modus operandi, especially online, Homeland was no longer subject to the strictures of stop and search which have routinely plagued extremists travelling in Europe. In a thinly-veiled dig at Collett he urged other right-wingers to clean-up their online accounts and avoid accounts which courted illegality.

*Homeland Party delegation led by Kenny Smith (third from right) toured the Bundestag as guests of the far right AfD*

On one issue, by the way, Collett has a point: Smith does indeed sport a huge eagle and swastika nazi tattoo on his torso, which is why, even at Homeland Party camps and treks, you’ll never catch him with his top off in public.

It’s almost impossible to know where to start where the Collett rant is concerned but many of his own supporters, and others active within neo-fascist circles, have been swift to point out that he himself is widely regarded as a state agent, a grass, a grifter and an all-around dodgy fella as far as the authorities are concerned.

Internal strife

Many postulate that he went native as early as his outing on the “Young, Nazi and Proud” documentary aired on TV in 2002. He then stayed in the BNP, it’s argued, in order to cause as much internal strife as possible. And, of course, Collett was indeed the source of huge trouble within the BNP; he got arrested for threatening to have leader Nick Griffin killed and left in disgrace. It might have been then, it’s said, that Collett took the state shilling.

The actual date, his detractors claim, is neither here nor there; people associated with Collett have a worrying habit of being arrested for all manner of crimes whilst he himself, the leader, organiser and agitator, sits pretty, atop a sizeable pile of cash.

Furthermore, PA’s activist corps have been dangerously close to real terrorists, without Collett himself being at all troubled by the forces of the state. So now, Collett how finds himself under attack on all fronts so, true to the tried and tested fascist formula that we have seen multiple times, he’s turned his ire, and fire, on a political rival.

Massively backfired

Who knows, maybe the new Identity Party, ostensibly set up by PA activists as an electoral front, will abandon ship and dump Collett. After all, he’s not the one who registered the party, but his North West stalwart Craig Buckley.

Worse still, Collett’s attack on Smith has massively backfired at a time when PA is clearly struggling to catalyse its few hundred remaining members into action. An event held in Castleford, two weeks ago, near Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s constituency offices was attended by no more than a dozen people. Videos and pictures produced by PA and posted online show a miserable and paltry group.

*A Castleford demo, near Yvette Cooper’s office, only drew a handful of PA activists*

Elsewhere, small leafletting efforts and a few pints down the local pub are bigged-up as massively significant activist events when, in reality, they are very small beer.

The irony is, of course, that Collett first linked up with Homeland’s current leader, Kenny Smith, and his sidekick Steve Blake, in the BNP. They were all mates together, for a while, and it was Smith who covered up for Collett when he was accused of seriously inappropriate behaviour (to put it mildly) at a BNP conference.

They were all mates together, for a while, and it was Smith who covered up for Collett when he was accused of seriously inappropriate behaviour (to put it mildly) at a BNP conference.

Not long after, when the BNP membership list was leaked online, they themselves ended up being accused of very foul play by Nick Griffin. Now, in 2025, Homeland has hoovered up many PA activists and donors with Collett forced to earn a living grifting in online super-chats and via live streaming shows.

Homeland announced, last week, that its membership had risen to over 1,000. That is probably a little inflated, but there is no doubt that it is growing and feeling reasonably confident going forward. Its forthcoming international conference at the end of April is set to be a seminal event for the far right in 2025 and is certainly gathering momentum. It features a speaker from Germany’s AfD, for instance.

Speaking of international friends in low places, it should not be forgotten that one of Collett’s main allies in the USA, Warren Balogh, is an open and convinced nazi. He was the guest on Collett’s Patriotic Weekly Review online chat show only two weeks ago.

*Warren Balogh (left) with Mark Collett at 2023 Patriotic Alternative conference*

And only yesterday, as Collett tore into Smith, Balogh was online waxing lyrical about how his father’s political mentor, ‘Commander’ Matt Koehl, inheritor of Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party from August 1967, met up with nazi pilot and Hitler apologist Hans Ulrich Rudel in the 1970s. How Warren wished he’d been there with his dad, Alan, a notorious hatemonger in US extremist circles.

The stench of the Holocaust and nazi war crimes is never far from Collett and his inner circle.

*Warren Balogh boasting of his father’s nazi connections*

The rivalry with Kenny Smith has now taken a bizarre and vicious turn. That much we know. And Collett is already under heavy fire on his own social media platforms for being a “Jew-fed” or a “kosher clown”. Collett now looks all the more stupid when we recall that he himself brought Kenny Smith back into Patriotic Alternative before the split between the two! Clearly, the tinpot fuhrer is an appalling judge of character.

The good news is that when fascists are fighting with each other they’re not fully focussed on encouraging people online to spread racist propaganda, organise for “remigration” and, possibly, train to physically attack people they consider to be the enemy. Which is pretty much anybody. Much more important, it turns out, is the grift not the graft. Money and an easy living first, political principles a distant second.

Money is said to be the root of all evil. And where Mark Collett is concerned, this is certainly true.

George Galloway fields friend of Holocaust deniers in Runcorn by-election

We still don’t know how many (if any) far right candidates will compete with Reform UK at the Runcorn & Helsby by-election, expected to be held within the next few months.

Even if Nigel Farage’s rival Rupert Lowe, who presently sits as an independent, decides to form a new and more virulently anti-immigration party, it wouldn’t be registered in time for the by-election.

One candidate who has already announced his intention to stand is Peter Ford, deputy leader of George Galloway’s “Workers Party of Britain”.

Distinctly unproletarian

Ford has a distinctly unproletarian background. He went from Queen’s College, Oxford, into the Diplomatic Service and spent most of his career in the Middle East, eventually as Ambassador to Bahrain (1999-2003) and Syria (2003-2006).

In 2017 Ford became a director of the British Syrian Society, a propaganda front for the Assad dictatorship that was finally ousted last December. This organisation was created and run by Assad’s father-in-law, a Harley Street cardiologist. Perhaps he is another of the “workers” that Galloway claims to champion?

But for Searchlight readers, the most disturbing thing about Ford is that he’s yet another example of the Galloway party’s readiness to associate with extremist conspiracy theories and antisemitism.

It’s fair to ask whether the “Workers Party of Britain” should be seen as belonging in any way to the left. Isn’t it time to admit that Galloway’s party is pro-Assad, pro-Putin, and arguably Strasserite?

Holocaust denier

Ford has come to anti-fascists’ attention more than once as guest speaker at one of the UK’s most extreme antisemitic conspiracy theory groups. This is an outfit called “Keep Talking”, organised by Ian Fantom and Dr Nick Kollerstrom, a leading Holocaust denier and Putin apologist.

On 14^th April 2022 Ford spoke at a Keep Talking meeting, held at their regular venue, the Tea House Theatre in Vauxhall, a stone’s throw from MI6 headquarters. The title of his speech (“Covidism, Climatism and Russophobia”) managed to combine several themes beloved of the group’s tinfoil hat wearing conspiracists.

The ex-ambassador went on to “guide a discussion about how covidism, climatism and Russophobia appear to be linked, and about how these crises have generated or accentuated new forms of politics where the old Left-Right divide has become meaningless.”

Common cause with the far right

Ford and Galloway are doing a good job of demonstrating that the latter phrase is in their case true enough. They repeatedly made common cause with the far right in defending the murderous regimes in Damascus and Moscow: Ford could not have been ignorant of the true nature of the Keep Talking group, which was exposed in several press and online articles as early as 2020.

He and Galloway have not uttered one word of apology since Assad’s fall last December and the incontrovertible evidence that emerged of corruption, torture and murder that characterised the Ba’athist regime under the Assad family for over half a century.

It’s no secret either that Assad’s government sheltered nazi war criminals including one of the architects of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann’s righthand man Alois Brunner.

Not that Peter Ford’s friends at Keep Talking would care about that, because they think that the Holocaust was a big lie invented by Jews. Other guest speakers and performers at Keep Talking have included Alison Chabloz, who has convictions for posting “grossly offensive” antisemitic material online.

Ford’s other conspiracist friends include Piers Corbyn, another Keep Talking regular, with whom Ford shares pandemic-related conspiracy theories.

Pro-Putin propaganda

Since 2022 Keep Talking has regularly promoted pro-Putin propaganda. Not content with Holocaust denial, the group’s co-founder Kollerstrom specialises in insulting Putin’s victims. He has asserted that the attempted poisoning of Russian defector Sergei Skripal by Russian military intelligence agents was a “hoax” perpetrated by British intelligence.

Within weeks of the death last year of another Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny, in one of Putin’s camps in the Arctic Circle, Kollerstrom rushed to defame him at another Keep Talking meeting.

The voters of Runcorn & Helsby are unlikely to be conned by Galloway and Ford’s attempt to present Moscow propaganda and conspiracy theory as any sort of authentic voice for British workers. But social media will continue to amplify both their fake version of the “left”, and their often-indistinguishable fellow conspiracy theorists on the far right.

Patriotic Alternative register political party – under another name

*Craig Buckley (centre) leading Patriotic Alternative activist and ‘leader’ of newly-registered Identity Party*

Patriotic Alternative, one of Britain’s most overt nazi organisations, has secretly registered as a political party with the Electoral Commission under another name.

EC records show that in November, the Identity Party, with an address in Poole, Dorset, was registered with the Commission. However, the Leader of the party, and its Nominating |Officer, is recorded as Craig Buckley, a leading PA member in the Northwest and close to PA leader Mark Collett.

Collett has for a long time resisted registering PA as a party, as it would mean filing financial records and disclosing matters such as the organisations’ income and just how much he and deputy leader Laura Towler have been taking out of it. However, this failure has met with growing criticism from party members and derision from its far-right rivals.

Money not forthcoming

In the last election Collett got round the problem by cutting a deal with Robin Tilbrook’s English Democrats, in whose name four PA candidates contested seats. Tilbrook was supposed to finance all four campaigns, but it appears that not all of the money was forthcoming.

One of those candidates was Craig Buckley who contested the Leigh and Atherton constituency.

Setting up a proxy party under another name solves a number of those problems. Now they will be able to fight elections under their own steam (if not their own name) without any embarrassing consequences such as having to make public the state of PA’s finances.

Right-wing anger as ‘Tommy Robinson’ short changes family of riot ‘martyr’

Or, how a ‘Tommy Robinson’ whip-round divvy-up has fired up a right wing Lynch mob

Can you remember when, before his latest stint in the slammer, ‘Tommy Robinson’ could be seen posing in an ‘I am Peter Lynch’ T-shirt? We all took it at the time as being an example of statements of identification with real or supposed victims, such as ‘Je suis Charlie’, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ or even ‘I am Spartacus’.

But suspicions are now being muttered online that was more of a declaration that ‘Peter Lynch’ had simply become the latest of the Luton Leprechaun’s many aliases*, and so support for Lynch was the same as support for Robinson. Money raised for Lynch’s family was the same as money raised for Robinson’s family and so on.

Whatever semantics and sophistry one can apply to ‘I am Peter Lynch’, it certainly seems to be the case that money donated by protest marchers with the intention that it should ease the pain of Lynch’s family has instead ended up in the pockets of the ‘Robinson’ brood.

Disturbed and conspiracy-obsessed

To remind readers, the real Peter Lynch committed suicide in prison, having been banged up for his part in last summer’s post-Southport riots. While guilty as charged, Lynch was pretty clearly a disturbed, conspiracy theory-obsessed individual, and even many anti-fascists would concede that psychiatric detention would possibly have done him a lot more good than being in the general prison population. At any rate, there was a great deal of sympathy for him among the far right.

Robinson climbed on this bandwagon and decided to commandeer it. “He’s a martyr for our country and a martyr for our cause,” he said on social media the day after Lynch’s death. “If you’re his family and you’re watching this, we will pay for his funeral. We will pay for everything.”

Cashing in

Ever the opportunist, he sought to cash in on this cause du jour by repeatedly urging those horrified by Lynch’s fate to turn out for a London rally that Robinson had already organised and that was really all about himself. “Every single one of you upset about this man’s death, you have to get yourself to London,” he said.

As fate would have it, Robinson was himself unable to attend the October rally, having been arrested and remanded the day before, in connection with the charge for which is now serving 18 months in prison.

The rally continued in his absence (and was streamed online), and during it one of his loyal sidekicks, Richard ‘I’m Free’ Inman, told the audience: “There’s another hero, and he’s not here today, and he won’t be at any more demonstrations.… what we’re going to do is pass buckets round the audience, and we’re going to do a collection for Peter Lynch’s family.” He added:

“And we’re going to do a collection for Tommy Robinson’s children.”

This made it sound like two whip-rounds were to take place, but in fact a single set of identical blue collection buckets circulated. None appeared to have any writing on them, so donors will have been unclear what exactly they were handing over money for and may have relied on what was said to them by the bucket-chuggers.

The Sun alleges that not a penny of this money has made its way to the Lynch family in the five months since it was collected, only to the ‘Robinson’ family. And the jailbird’s associates do not even dispute this. They say that the Lynch share of the begging bowl (a measly one-quarter, apparently) was turned down by the dead man’s family. The Sun claims that a representative of the Lynch family told the paper that they could not comment on whether they were offered any money, because of “an investigation”.

On the organised far right, where it is commonly held that ‘Robinson’ is nothing but an unashamed grifter, condemnation has been swift in coming. Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett described the story as “sickening” whilst other right-wing accounts have alleged that “Tommy’s team are all fraudsters” or asked “Does this fund his Spanish lifestyle?”

Thailand-based veteran racist-inciter James Goddard stated that:

“Tommy and his team are SCUM Imagine telling people you’re raising money for Peter Lynch’s family, only to then give the money to Tommeh’s Kids.

“I warned everyone about these scumbags.

“If you follow Tommy, you’re part of the problem!”

In another post he said: “Team Tommy Robinson are Despicable… if you’re not calling this out then you’re either a coward or morally bankrupt.”

Jayda Fransen, former leader of Britain First gloated that there was obviously “Trouble amongst the Tommytards”.

But, predictably enough, complete radio silence from usually un-shut-up-able UKIP leader Nick Tenconi, who drools over Robinson’s fund raising gifts and can’t wait to sit down and plot with him as soon as he is released from prison.

Unapologetic

Robinson’s mouthpiece Urban Scoop has been entirely unapologetic about the whole business. “The money went to Tommy’s kids. No explanation required as everyone was told donations were going to them at the time. We can’t make Peter Lynch’s family take money they don’t want from us.”

What Robinson’s online account does dispute is the sums of money involved. “Allegations… claiming we collected £42,000 that day are categorically false,” says Tommy Robinson News. (The Sun has subsequently toned this claim down to the much vaguer “thousands”).

One intriguing aspect of this is just how paltry the sum raised was, if one is to believe the Robinson version of events. The Sun estimates the size of the crowd at that rally as around 50,000. We believe it was more like 50% of that figure. Even taking 25,000 as a fair guess, that would number-crunch to an average donation of about 17p per protestor.

Pathetically small

Use the Sun’s estimate of 50,000 and the average donation per Robinsonite recalculates to 8p. For a dual-purpose whip-round among a supposedly highly committed crowd, this seems pathetically small. And it’s hard to believe that £4,000 was supposed to cover the “we will pay for his funeral. We will pay for everything,” promise, even before Robinson’s daughters divvied up three-quarters of it

This leaves the TommyRotters painted into a bit of a corner. They want us to believe that the crowd was massive. But they also want us to believe that it stumped up just £4,000 to be shared between two martyrs’ families (and be in no doubt that O’Bogus considers himself as much of a martyr as Lynch). Between the two aspects of the arithmetic, they are effectively trying to sell us the idea that even that fraction of Robinson’s supporters who are not skinheads are decidedly skinflints.

* ‘Tommy Robinson’ is a nom de grift. He was born ‘Stephen Yaxley’, his iffy Irish passport says he is ‘Stephen Lennon’, he has been convicted for illegally travelling as ‘Paul Harris’ and he has also, at minimum, used the aliases ‘Andrew MacMaster’ and ‘Wayne King’ (many have suggested that Wayne Kerr would have been more accurate).

UKIP leader Tenconi to Rupert Lowe MP: Come into my hate-filled parlour

*Nick Tenconi appeals to Rupert Lowe from the pub*

Sitting in a pub with a beer in front of him, UKIP Leader Nick ‘The Kick’ Tenconi makes an offer to Reform UK’s dissident and suspended MP, Rupert Lowe. ‘When you’re ready to get serious and jump on the team for the big win, my line and my door is open, for talks. Call me.’

Well, you would have thought that an appeal from the lounge bar, all to reminiscent of the bloke-in-the pub-persona cultivated by Lowe’s now-bitter enemy Nigel Farage, is not the pitch best geared to getting Rupert to sign up and become UKIP’s third MP (the previous two also having come from defections though before Tenconi’s particular brand of far-right lunacy infected the party).

But the latest developments in UKIP would seem guaranteed to put paid to any faint hopes that Tenconi might be harbouring that Lowe could be tempted to swap Reform for the outer fringes occupied by UKIP.

Lowe, of course, has been suspended from Reform following allegations of bullying and inappropriate behaviour, but it all happened suspiciously quickly after he publicly attacked Nigel Farage for exercising complete control over Reform which, said Lowe, is not serious, but merely a ‘protest party led by a messiah’.

*Departing UKIP NEC member, John Poynton*

Well, listen to this: this is from the resignation statement of the latest defector from the UKIP NEC, party stalwart John Poynton, which was posted only two days ago:

“I have this week resigned from UKIP and its NEC. The final straw came last week when the NEC were given just two days by Ben Walker, our Chairman, to approve by email a new and radically different manifesto. I have no idea who actually wrote it.

“Without sufficient time to assess or discuss it in open session I voted against it, but replied that I would submit a short list of recommended changes within seven days. I got no reply, and now see it has been published without change just five days later…

“…Ben Walker has displayed a habit of bulldozing his decisions through the NEC in this way for a long time, treating us as little more than a rubber stamp. It is highly disrespectful to us as an elected group representing our members, and this latest incident to me personally. I have confronted him many times about this but he takes absolutely no notice”.

If Lowe was unhappy with Farage’s modus operandi, he is not unlikely to subject himself to the even more dictatorial methods of Ben ‘Rogue Builder’ Walker. Tenconi’s appeal is little more than an invitation to leap from the Reform frying pan into the Ukip fire. And he’s unlikely to hook up with a party led by Walker and Tenconi, both convicted criminals.

But there’s more. Poynton alleges (with some justification) that the new UKIP manifesto defies the party constitution.

“As it happens this new manifesto is unconstitutional. It introduces positive cultural discrimination in favour of the Christian religion and makes no mention of libertarian values. Now I could live with that if it were in accordance with our constitution, but it is not. Our constitution under Clause 2.4 explicitly declares we are a libertarian party that opposes all forms of discrimination and upholds the principle of equality under the law. This makes it easy to combat loony lefty charges of racism. The constitution can only be changed by a majority vote of the members. I could have stayed to argue this point out of loyalty to the party and its members, but experience tells me I would be wasting my time”.

This is his statement in full:

*John Poynton’s resignation statement from UKIP*

Poynton joined UKIP in 2014 and was an election candidate in Southall, West London in 2015 and 2017 and in Old Bexley and Sidcup in 2021. Last year he contested the Holborn and St Pancras constituency against Sir Kier Starmer, polling a mighty 75 votes, or 0.2% of the vote.

The new manifesto, UKIP’s ‘Living Manifesto 2025’, which bears all the hallmarks of having been drafted – at least in part – by Tenconi himself, embraces the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, rails against ‘globalists’ and ‘communist inspired corporatism’ and proclaims that UKIP is ‘the party of mass deportations; placing Christianity back into the heart of government; removing communists and socialists from public sector jobs; ending woke and the politicisation of law enforcement and public sector funded institutions.’

One extraordinary clause states that: ‘Groups such as The Muslim Brotherhood, ANTIFA, Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, Socialist Worker Party, Just Stop Oil, and Extinction Rebellion will be met with extreme prejudice’ a phrase usually take to mean the use of lethal force.

It sets the party up for a final break with the dwindling band of UKIP traditionalists (like Poynton) who have hung on in there, and establishes a firm, racist political basis for an alliance with ‘Tommy Robinson’ (aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) when he is released from prison. The NEC from which Poynton has resigned has been steadily stuffed with Yaxley- Lennon supporters in recent months in anticipation of such a link up. Ponyton’s departure will almost certainly lead to another being inserted.

The question that Poynton fails to answer, and which has been posed by a number of respondents to his online resignation post, is why it has taken him so long to realise that Walker has been bulldozing decisions through the NEC. The most notable, of course, was the decision relating to the Trust that now controls UKIP and over which only one man – Walker himself – exercises control.

Poynton, it has to be said, does himself no favours with the absurdly pompous proposal that should Reform form a government under Nigel Farage, he would be willing to serve as Chancellor, but from a seat in the House of Lords.