By Tony Peters

The resignation of UKIP leader Neil “Liar and Cheat” Hamilton, which takes effect in May, was followed in pretty short order by that of deputy chair Rebecca Jane and, between them, these two departures have set off a fascinating chain of events in what was, once, the UK’s principal far-right party.

Hamilton explained his departure as being prompted by a desire to spend more time with his family. In fact, he is already pretty inseparable from his wife Christine (the self titled “Battleaxe”) and they have no children. Rebecca Jane, appointed less than two years ago by chairman Ben (“rogue builder”) Walker, had been suffering from health problems but used her departure to fire off a ferocious salvo at Walker who, she claimed, only put her in the job because he had designs on getting her into bed.

Walker (above right) found himself in some embarrassing difficulty recently when his appointment as a magistrate came under scrutiny. Questions were raised – not least of all by Searchlight on Twitter and our website – as to how someone with criminal convictions can be appointed to sit in judgment over others. The answer, of course, is if the Ministry of Justice is not aware of the criminal record in the first place. Walker, who sports no less than five criminal convictions for building regulation offences (hence the nickname) had not seen fit to declare them and defended this omission by arguing that guilty sentences do not count as convictions if you’re not actually sent to prison. That did not impress the MoJ which promptly sacked him.

But this may yet come back to bite Walker even harder. The making of false statements, deliberately or recklessly, in such an application is an offence of perjury with a maximum sentence of ten years’ imprisonment. A custodial sentence is usually imposed even for a first offence. It seems that only the huge post-Covid judicial backlog may be holding up a decision as to whether to proceed in this particular case.

Who’s next?

First candidates to put themselves forward as Hamilton replacements were Lois Perry and Anne Marie Waters. Perry is an anti-net zero campaigner of limited ability but of whom, Rebecca Jane alleged, Walker harboured similar desires and for a while she was his favoured candidate. Waters, who only rejoined UKIP last year, definitely was not: she made it clear to supporters that, if elected, the first thing she would do would be to dump Walker, as would be her constitutional right. For his part, Walker confided to others that he would block her ever getting the job.

In the event, Waters dropped out of the race at an early stage and Perry, who came across as witless at the membership hustings, fell out of favour with Walker, to be replaced by “Bungalow” Bill Etheridge (above left), a former UKIP MEP who had earlier been thrown out of the Conservative Party for posing with a golliwog. His other claim to fame is that he is Walker’s mate. So UKIP may be set to become the “Bill and Ben Show”.

UKIP as a political party is now totally controlled by a curious trust, of which the sole trustee is Walker. So a well-disposed leader would not be entirely unwelcome. But, whatever happens, it’s win-win for Walker. The only candidate who might have presented a challenge to his domination of the party was Waters, who has now withdrawn.

Perhaps not surprisingly, in light of all this, the party’s UK Activists Forum WhatsApp group, supposedly the “top secret” preserve of trusted leading activists, began giving forth its secrets, exposing internal division and the pressure Walker is coming under.

He was particularly angered by a post from Pat Mountain, a former interim leader and deputy leader, regurgitating all the salacious allegations made by Rebecca Jane. Mountain’s ambiguous comment “True Colours” fooled no one and was universally read as referring to Walker, not Jane. Rebecca Jane’s posts attacking Walker have now been deleted (although not before they were archived!).

Walker then took to shutting down group discussion – especially of the leadership election. Hapless NEC member Julie Carter had to be advised by Mountain that “Ben has instructed that there be no chat regarding the leadership election on this group”. That particular exchange leaked and led to Walker expelling suspected leakers from the group and threatening to shut it down or restrict it to branch or regional officers. In fact, the leaks just kept on coming.

The latest topic of animated internal party gossip, however, is the fate of all those bequests from elderly party members which, cynics have argued, are the main reason the expiring party has been kept on life support for so long. In the 25 years or so up until 2021, UKIP benefitted from some £20 million in such bequests. Even in 2021, it received tens of thousands of pounds. However, since September 2021, not a single bequest or donation above £500 has been declared to the Electoral Commission. This odd state of affairs has not been lost on some members, who are beginning to ask questions.

It was precisely because of concerns about the party’s management that, according to Rebecca Jane, other right-wing parties – principally Reform UK – have spurned offers of a coming together. Jane was charged specifically with handling unity talks and, since her anti-Walker resignation tirade, she has revealed that Reform refused to have the conversation until UKIP’s management changed – a demand turned down flat by UKIP’s board. Both that tweet and the one about Walker’s alleged libidinousness have since been deleted.

Results of the Leader election will be announced in mid-May. Oh yes, and Walker is the returning officer.

Hotbed of crime…

Meanwhile, down in that (relative) UKIP stronghold of south Wales events continue to entangle the party in reports of criminal activity. First, as we have reported before, there were the goings on at Stamps bar in Llanelli, a favoured UKIP meeting place, but linked to a major class A drugs importation. Then, the conviction of leading south Wales kipper Dan Morgan for serious fraud offences, and then the unsavoury activities of Paul Dowson, former UKIP Pembroke councillor, whose record includes both drugs offences and ABH. Now, the Neon nightclub and events venue in Newport, whose owners are reportedly UKIP supporters and where the party has gathered many times over the past 8 years (most recently for its national 30th anniversary conference in October) has closed after police found a “large scale cannabis factory” on the premises.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Searchlight

As Patriotic Alternative limps on, its two breakaways are looking to gain electoral success in the May local elections. Paul Gale charts the latest ups and downs of the three rumps

One year on from its catastrophic split, the UK’s leading far right group Patriotic Alternative (PA) is raking in the cash but struggling to motivate activists. A three-way split within the organisation, founded by former Griffinite favourite Mark Collett in 2019, has become even more bitter in recent weeks.

One thing you can say about Collett and his deputy Laura Tyrie, alias Laura Towler, is that they certainly don’t miss an opportunity for fundraising.

As soon as Towler’s husband Sam Melia – PA’s Yorkshire organiser and a former member of the now banned nazi terrorist group National Action (NA) – was convicted and imprisoned at the start of March, Towler and Collett began an online propaganda blitz that is believed to have netted more than £40,000.

After NA’s proscription under the Terrorism Act in 2016 and the failure of several covert attempts to keep the group alive, Melia created the “Hundred Handers”. Using Telegram (a favourite social media platform for the most extreme factions of the international far right) he distributed racist stickers and advised his thousands of followers on how to set up secure communications.

As the head of the Crown Prosecution Service Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division said after Melia’s conviction: “[He] knew full well the impact these racially inflammatory stickers were having, and by attempting to remain anonymous, sought to protect himself and others from investigation.”

Even after Melia’s arrest in April 2021 Towler carried on lying about her husband’s role in the Hundred Handers.

Cowards

In assessing our own strategic approach to combatting PA, it is important for anti-fascists to think about Towler’s motivation for lying, and some of the contradictory reactions to Melia’s conviction within PA and the broader far right.

PA’s bravado has made much of the worldwide publicity attracted by Melia’s case, and the short-time boost to the group’s fundraising. But we should not fall for the notion that the prosecution was counter-productive, or that campaigning against PA gives it the valuable “oxygen of publicity”.

The reason Towler denied Melia’s role in the Hundred Handers for so long, and the reason that PA has been so badly disrupted by recent convictions of several senior activists is that its members are mostly cowards.

They like to form micro-communities online, where they can spend hours every week watching each other’s video streams. They like to set up tiny businesses to sell each other scented candles and relabelled teabags. They like to hold conferences in upmarket hotels.

But most of them are afraid to show their faces and use their real names. Even many of PA’s senior organisers are terrified of being identified. This makes it difficult for PA to field election candidates or to carry out normal campaigns.

And the situation has become even worse after the criminal cases that have beset PA during the past 12 months, which have led to a number of leading activists – James Allchurch, Kris Kearney and James Costello – doing prison time, the latter two for terrorist offences.

Several other PA followers have also been jailed, but these three were well known throughout the movement. And Melia’s conviction was the final proof that belonging to PA, if you got drawn into its culture of extreme racism, could be very bad indeed for your career prospects and threaten your liberty.

That is one reason why Collett’s followers are dropping away. It is one thing to watch a video and click “like”. It is very different if you are expected to show your face on a demonstration. And as for putting your name on publicly accessible forms as a candidate or election agent – forget it!

There was a minority faction within PA that always saw it as an embryonic political party that could take over where the British National Party (BNP) had failed. This faction was led by Kenny Smith, who like Collett had been part of Nick Griffin’s BNP.

Billy no mates While Kenny Smith and Alek Yerbury have managed to find limited common ground, Mark Collett (above) remains isolated, with PA continuing to lose members

Bitter rivals

When Smith and Collett got together, Searchlight knew it was only a matter of time before they came to blows. They had, after all, been bitter rivals when the BNP split in December 2007. Smith’s faction in those days described Collett as one of “the three scumbags” who made it impossible for “good honest” people to remain in the BNP.

It came as no surprise last year when Smith led another breakaway hostile to Collett, this time splitting from PA to form the Homeland Party. He took with him several of the most committed young PA activists who were unafraid to show their faces and who were exasperated by some of their “comrades”.

The new factor is that on 31 January this year Homeland succeeded in registering as a political party. Although its officially registered HQ is in Scotland, Smith has since moved to the West Midlands and several of his main activists are in Black Country boroughs such as Dudley, and around Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire and Cheshire.

After an early surge of defections, Homeland and PA settled down into a trench war of attrition. Smith was disappointed not to be joined by his former factional ally Steve Blake, PA’s Eastern England organiser, who instead chose to become even closer to Collett and Towler.

For at least another year, Smith has plans to chip away at PA, building credibility and hoping to recruit defectors from civic nationalist movements such as Reform UK and UKIP, as well as from explicitly racist groups. He was especially pleased to recruit Roger Robertson, a former BNP regional organiser and parish councillor, who jumped ship to Homeland from the British Democrats.

Robertson will be one of Homeland’s very few borough council candidates at the local elections on 2 May.

Although he criticises Collett for existing mainly online, Smith has himself been increasingly active on Twitter, but he argues that there is an important difference. Collett preaches almost exclusively to his own fringe cultists. Smith tries to build bridges both with older nationalists who have dropped out of partisan activity, and with the increasing number of members expelled by Reform UK as too extreme, or those who have fallen out with UKIP and its splinters.

Homeland’s successful registration was bad enough. But on 28 February, just days before Melia was jailed, Collett suffered another blow when yet another faction of ex-PA activists succeeded in registering as a political party where PA had failed.

Low-quality yobs

Alek Yerbury seems like a joke even among many fellow fascists, with his paramilitary style National Support Detachment and his very strange girlfriend Katie Fanning, a former UKIP official. But he has managed to create his own appropriately stunted and feeble political front: the National Rebirth Party.

He immediately goaded Collett: “When various prominent nationalists said to me, ‘it is impossible to register political parties’, all they really told me is that THEY couldn’t do it.”

Yerbury maintains that activists need to summon up the courage to take off their masks, use their real names and attend public events. So far most of his recruits seem to be among the lowest quality yobs on the far right, although one exception is Antony Flowers, owner of landscape gardening businesses that operate as Tadcaster Stonework & Patios, and Towton Home & Garden Services. Several fellow nazis including Melia and Yerbury have worked for Flowers.

Yerbury and Fanning believe it is quite a coup to have recruited Flowers, who was a BNP member before joining PA. He has become the new party’s nominating officer.

Yerbury and Smith agree that elections and other forms of “real politics” are the way forward. They condemn Collett and PA for reliance on video streams and an adolescent obsession with the gaming fraternity. Where Collett’s two rivals fall out is partly a matter of personality, partly strategy.

Some of Yerbury’s biggest fans are those who most hated and distrusted Smith, in some cases for reasons dating back to the anti-Griffin splits in 2007. It is already obvious that Yerbury’s is the only one of the three post-PA factions which is on good terms with Griffin, and they might become even closer in the coming months, if Griffin can see any opportunity to make a fast buck from Yerbury’s new party.

‘Ladder strategy’

Beyond these personality factors, Yerbury and Smith take opposite views on the so-called “ladder strategy”, as developed years ago by one of Britain’s few nazi intellectuals, Steve Brady.

Now writing for Heritage & Destiny under the pseudonym Ian Freeman, and retired from his job with Mercedes Benz in Milton Keynes, Brady updated his “ladder strategy”’ for the 2020s, and Smith mostly agreed with him. Rather than making a grand and eye-catching assault on Westminster through general elections and parliamentary by-elections, Brady and Smith argue that the far right should build credibility at local level.

Smith interprets this as meaning parish councils, which is convenient for him and his fledgling party, because seats at this level are “low-hanging fruit”, quite often elected unopposed and giving his activists the chance to obtain “councillor” status, sometimes by stealth without at first putting the party’s name forward.

In Smith’s view, it then becomes more difficult for anti-fascists to campaign against a Homeland councillor who has already to some extent become known in their local community, perhaps for work that is not obviously partisan or overtly racist. Smith also believes that this can counter defeatism.

Yerbury’s strategic vision is very different. He argues that the lower rungs of the ladder are irrelevant to what he sees as his manifest destiny, the racist transformation of Britain. So, right from the start, he sets out his mission in the grandest possible terms. Nothing less than the seizure of nationwide power will do.

Mates of sorts Kenny Smith’s (top left) Homeland Party has scored against PA, poaching former BNP organiser Roger Robertson (top right), while Alek Yerbury (bottom right) is the only one of the three PA rumps to be on good terms with BNP leader Nick Griffin (bottom left), who is keeping an eye on Yerbury’s new National Rebirth Party

Not so amiable

Any other activity, according to Yerbury, is subordinate to this overall objective. And naturally, unlike Brady and Smith, Yerbury is fully committed to the führer principle. No prizes for guessing who Yerbury has in mind as Britain’s führer for the 2020s, nor which historical model he has in mind. If you need reminding, take a look at Yerbury’s moustache and trench coat.

As so often, the big problem is the dismal quality of Yerbury’s recruits. The leader himself sometimes comes across as an amiable nutter, until you listen or read closely and realise that he is a nazi. His followers are even more obviously off putting.

Perhaps the worst is the one who in theory has the best political CV. Fanning, Yerbury’s girlfriend, used to work for UKIP and was considered respectable enough to address Gregory Lauder-Frost’s Traditional Britain Group, the most upmarket forum of the UK fascist scene.

But even hardened anti-fascists are frequently shocked by the vicious tone of Fanning’s attacks on her factional rivals. She reserves a special hatred for Towler, whom she derides in such spiteful language that even moderators of far-right Telegram channels sometimes intervene.

In late March, Fanning pushed some of her enemies too far and they began circulating news reports from 2018, when prosecutors agreed to drop charges of racially and religiously aggravated harassment, despite Fanning having threatened to kill two witnesses as well as police officers, in addition to making repeated racial slurs.

Prosecutors said Fanning attempted to bite police officers, then shouted: “Do you have kids? I’m going to kill all of them. … I’m going to get the guys of Manchester to firebomb all the police stations in Manchester … I’m going to send the worst paedo for your kids.”

Fanning escaped further proceedings only because a consultant psychiatrist advised that it was not appropriate for her to attend court.

At the end of March the rival factions began taping each other’s threatening phone calls, and issuing “letters before action”, though no one really believes any of these characters would dare to expose themselves to further ridicule by taking each other to court. More’s the pity.

What anti-fascists can probably expect is that a small number of Britain’s more serious extremists will stand for election and hope to position themselves for what they believe is the coming collapse of both the Tories and Reform UK.

A larger faction will continue to spend their time exchanging obscenities on Telegram. As has often been the case, the challenge for anti-fascists is to identify which individuals and groups represent a serious threat, both in terms of electioneering and potential violence.

This article first appeared in the Spring issue of Searchlight published ahead of the 2 May 2024 elections

By Martyn Lester

At the end of 2023, when unruly factions of Conservative MPs were demanding that the UK left the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to make it easier to dump asylum-seekers in Rwanda, most normal people will have been mystified to hear the agitators described in the media as “The Five Families”.

The press may have happily picked up and run with this shorthand phrase for “the Tory rabid right”, but the term was almost certainly coined by the swivel-eyed loons themselves as a self-aggrandising boast. It is borrowed from 1930s New York, when the five families referred to were the leading Mafia clans of the day.

Although it may seem preposterous for such genteel figures as Jacob Rees-Mogg to suggest that they somehow class as “made men”, the idea of Conservative factions having Mob equivalence is not new. Most notably, back in 1974 the faction plotting to oust Edward Heath as party leader and replace him with Margaret Thatcher was dubbed “The Milk Street Mafia”.

Keeping track of Conservative Party factions is about as easy as herding coke addled cats on a recently resurfaced ice-rink. Still, there is an election coming, and these fractious factions will be fighting tooth and nail to ensure that their hobby-horse policies feature in some shape or form. So, let us have a go at identifying as many as we can of the current cabals.

There is no official list of the Five Families factions, and I have seen at least seven proposed as members, but the first five listed below are those most often cited.

1 European Research Group (ERG)

Although it has at times seemed able to call on 80 or even 100 Commons votes, the European Research Group (ERG) membership is looking rather smaller than it once did: one recent estimate was more like 30.

This is partly due to the fact that some of its greedy members decided to apply for their ERG annual subscriptions to be refunded via MPs’ expenses claims, and were “outed” by the parliamentary authorities, and it would seem that a lot of those 80-plus ERGonauts were not too keen on seeing their names on a public list. You can, though, still expect to see them all filing into the same voting lobby at crucial moments, so the group remains potent.

The ERG is composed of people who describe themselves as “Eurosceptics”, which seems something of a misnomer. Their minds have always been thoroughly made up about the European Union (they hate it) so it is hard to see where there is any scepticism involved.

ERG power was at its peak between the 2016 referendum and Brexit actually coming into force, a time when they could make negotiations with the EU as difficult as possible. In stymying Prime Minister Theresa May over Europe at every opportunity, they effectively killed off her premiership.

In their pomp, they were lined up behind Rees-Mogg. These days it is the rather more hard-of-thinking Mark Francois. Now there is a man who probably likes all this “Mafia” talk. Keen to be seen as a roughie-toughie type, Francois loves to remind everyone that he is an Army Man – although he is really only a platoon leader in the Territorials.

2 Northern Research Group (NRG)

The Northern Research Group (NRG), numbering 50 to 60 MPs, will wield a fair amount of clout over the coming months, although ultimately it is likely to prove the equivalent of a relegation club.

The reason for this power-now-but-little-later status should be evident from its name. The NRG is a collection of mostly northern English MPs, many of them in the so-called Red Wall seats that fell to the Tories at the 2019 general election because voters there wanted to “Get Brexit Done”.

Anti-EU sentiment, however, is going to count for very little in this year’s election and these MPs are feeling very vulnerable. The most pessimistic (from their point of view) analysis of opinion polling says that the Conservatives may end up with as few as 90 MPs, and seats that were lost by Labour under Jeremy Corbyn are likely to turn out to have been borrowed by the Tories rather than secured.

The NRG will be looking for manifesto pledges calculated to appeal to Midlands and northwards right-ish working and lower middle-class voters. Immigration and levelling up are likely to feature much more prominently than stockbroker belt concerns such as inheritance tax.

Former party chairman Sir Jake Berry founded the group, and it is chaired by Carlisle MP John Stevenson.

3 The New Conservatives (NC)

As fresh to the scene as the name suggests, and possibly boasting no more than 25 members, the New Conservatives (NC) is nonetheless a group with rapidly growing influence, not least because it features a number of relatively youthful rising stars compared with the effete old lags of most party factions.

Especially visible is the 2019-elected Miriam Cates, who is barely over 40, blonde and moderately photogenic. These are superficial attributes, but among the predominantly late-middle-aged, male and white party membership out in the shires, this is the kind of thing that gets the sap rising in their near-dead branches.

Cates made something of a splash at last year’s National Conservatism conference in London by calling for a rise in the UK’s birth rate – despite Britain being too overcrowded to take in any immigrants. Co-founder Danny Kruger was also one of the 2019 intake and, along with Cates, he is an evangelical Christian who likes people to know it. Eton, Edinburgh and Oxford will do him no harm on his way up the greasy pole. Jonathan Gullis is another fast-emerging darling of the “anti-woke”. At the age of just 34, he is already a party deputy chair.

NC will probably not have a huge impact on the manifesto (with a policy list of immigration, immigration and immigration they are pushing at an open door), but more of one after what looks like an inevitable election wipe-out. Expect to see them pushing for rabid Cruella Braverman as next party leader, and clamouring for front bench roles if she gets in.

4 Common Sense Group (CSG)

Also considered a pro-Suella De Vil faction, the Common Sense Group (CSG) is chaired by close Braverman ally Sir John Hayes. Although it does not hustle itself into the media as much as some groups, it is said to have a membership of up to 60, so is probably numerically larger than both the ERG and NC.

Its relatively low public profile perhaps stems from the fact that many of its people are simultaneously members of other factions, and are often perceived as speaking for those, rather than the CSG – for example Cates, Kruger and Gullis (see above) are usually considered members.

Like all of the right-wing Tory factions, it takes a hard line on immigration, but the “culture war” is probably its speciality – expect some staunch rants on Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and the National Trust (unbearably “woke”).

The group is also much exercised by what it likes to call “the nanny state” and will be giving PM Rishi Sunak short shrift regarding his (admittedly daft) plans for a rolling recalculation of the minimum age limit for smoking.

The faction’s punch has been reduced a little by the unceremonious departure of disgraced former party deputy chair “30p Lee” Anderson.

5 Conservative Growth Group (CGG)

Considering the Tories are now in a massive amount of extra electoral ordure because of the short but insane prime ministership of Liz Truss, you might imagine that the list of party movers and shakers would be devoid of her pals. Not so.

One of the newest of the factions to sit in the Five Families, Conservative Growth Group (CGG), was more or less explicitly set up to carry on the work of the Truss premiership. Yes, it sounds unfathomable that a PM who was outlasted by an unrefrigerated lettuce might retain a line of cheerleaders, but Truss can boast about 50 of them.

What you need to understand here is that none of it was her fault. Yes, she perhaps gave Kwasi Kwarteng too much slack, but her policies were exactly right. She was let down by the panicky markets, panicky media, panicky voters, unsupportive civil servants, faintheart colleagues, sniper Sunak – the list goes on.

Not only are there 50 libertarian Truss fans clamouring for lower taxes and reduced regulations, but some are far from faceless backbenchers. Former Home Secretary Priti Patel is on board, as is Sir Simon Clarke, who served on the front benches of Boris Johnson as well as Truss. The group is chaired by Ranil Jayawardena, who also spent more than two years as a middle ranking Johnson minister.

Popular Conservatism (PopCon)

Before we leave Truss, it should be noted that she is front and centre of another outfit that many in the media describe as a “Conservative Party faction”, though I am not so sure.

PopCon was launched by Truss, but also by former Institute of Economic Affairs director Mark Littlewood, who is not a Tory politician, past or present. There were certainly MPs present at the launch including Patel, and Rees-Mogg and Anderson even spoke from the platform. But other characters floating around included Nigel Farage, who was using the cover that he was a “journalist with GB News”, but was clearly there to sniff around for his own potential benefit.

The fact that this group’s name is Popular Conservatism (cf New Conservatives) strongly suggests that its purpose is to be an umbrella, rather than a strictly party-aligned body.

No Turning Back (NTB)

Regarded by some as a Five Families member, but in my book no longer an influence in quite that league, No Turning Back (NTB) is way older than any of the other groups we have looked at so far. Its name was taken from Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 conference speech (“The lady’s not for turning…”) and its purpose was to be a bulwark against backsliding with regard to the Thatcherite agenda.

NTB’s drift down the league table of Tory groups probably has three causes. It was set up in the 1980s, and a lot of its members have departed since then. It was set up on pretty much the far right of the party, but today’s Tories are so much farther to the right than in those days that there is no longer a line to be guarded.

And even 20 years ago, the group had internal logical contradictions. Thatcher wanted Britain to run Europe. She badgered the other EU members into setting up the Single Market. She was a sceptic (in the proper, not ERG sense) but not a Brexiteer. Guarding Thatcher’s legacy and taking Britain out of the EU are, I would argue, incompatible aims.

But somehow NTB keeps going, and occasionally barks out some public “Keep the Faith” kind of announcement. I believe that it is still chaired by John “the Vulcan” Redwood. If so, he has been doing that job for nearly 20 years.

Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO)

The biggest axe ground by Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) is one of internal party mechanisms. The group was only founded at the end of 2022, to bemoan the “coronation” of Sunak as new party leader and Prime Minister.

In fact, that was the second change of leader/PM of the last four to have gone through without a party membership vote (May pulled off the same stunt). And there was some obvious jiggery pokery involved in cutting out Penny Mordaunt to get Truss into the frame. But only Sunak bothers them.

They are, I would suggest, simply Borisites. Their gripe with Sunak is that he backstabbed their hero, and they are going to make him pay. But there is no obvious immediate future for a “bring back Boris” campaign.

Still, they do have some biggish names on their books: founder Lord Cruddas is president, Tory turned UKIP turned back Tory (and Freedom Association stalwart) David Campbell Bannerman is chairman, and one of its key public speakers has been Patel (yes, her again).

China Research Group (CRG)

Although set up by Conservative MPs, this is more of a single issue lobby than a party faction proper. In part modelled on the ERG, it urges a hawkish stance on China at just about every level imaginable. It will undoubtedly try to nudge something “Sinosceptic” into the manifesto, but this year’s election campaign is not going to focus on China!

Net Zero Scrutiny (NZS)

Internal branding for Tories persuaded by the aims of the charity Global Warming Policy Foundation and its uncharitable spin-off, the Global Warming Policy Forum. Part of the notorious 55 Tufton Street network (think TaxPayers’ Alliance, Leave Means Leave, Institute of Economic affairs and so on), this is another single-issue lobby. Let us just call them “climate denialists” and move on, shall we?

Conservative Environment Network (CEN)

Run by Ben Goldsmith (older brother of Zak), this is arguably more than a single-issue lobby, since the environment is so multifaceted. Goldsmith is genuine in his environmental passions, but it is questionable how much this forum can achieve. It boasts about 130 MPs and peers among its ranks, but how many are simply paying lip service? If 130 legislators cared that much, would our rivers be turd crusted and Boat Race crews throwing up from E coli?

Blue Collar Conservatives (BCC)

Also at least 130-strong, but again one has to wonder whether this potential powerhouse actually succeeds in anything. It was founded in 2012 by Esther McVey and relaunched in 2019 as a caucus of Tory MPs who regard themselves as working class. But ask yourself: How often do I hear spokespeople from, say, the New Conservatives on the radio and TV? Quite often, I’ll bet. And how often from the Blue Collar Conservatives? Admit it, you had never heard of them until 30 seconds ago.

One Nation Conservatives (ONC)

What are the One Nation Conservatives (ONC) doing right down here? you ask. They are a genuine caucus and, with 110 MPs, bigger than any of the Five Families. And these are very fair points. Their problem is that they are moderates (by Conservative standards), do not shout all that loud, and are all but ignored by prime ministers.

Although the idea of “one nation conservatism” stretches back to Disraeli and held sway until Thatcher became party leader, the ONC was only formed in 2019, as a caucus to try to ensure that a candidate who did not favour a no-deal Brexit won the coming party leadership election.

In the event, Johnson won, and appeared to appease the caucus by appointing both of its chairs, Nicky Morgan and Amber Rudd, to his front bench. With hindsight, it may be argued that he bamboozled them. When Johnson decided to withdraw the whip from 21 MPs, ONC demanded that he reversed the decision. Nearly two months later, Johnson reinstated just 10. The gap was long enough and the reinstatement small enough that it was clear Johnson had in essence told the ONC to eff off. Despite imposing membership numbers, it will probably get the same message from Sunak.

The group is chaired by May’s deputy prime minister (in all but name) Damian Green.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Searchlight magazine

In 2023 rival factions lined up to become the new BNP and the new UKIP, each of those parties being obviously on the way to the knackers’ yard, and only remaining registered in the hope of inheritances from some aged nazi or senile Powellite.

At the 2024 local elections the competition is different. Who can claim the wooden spoon for the most embarrassing electoral failure?

It’s very difficult to choose between the hapless leaders of the three factions who used to march in step as part of Britain’s premier nazi outfit Patriotic Alternative.

PA’s Mark Collett desperately twisted arms last month among his wannabe stormtroopers, when he feared that his rival Kenny Smith, having registered his faction as the Homeland Party, would put up a credible slate of candidates.

It was a sad enough spectacle when Collett’s forces could only muster three candidates. But faces were even redder at the führer’s Yorkshire bunker when two of the three cocked up their nomination papers, leaving just one PA candidate (officially an independent due to Collett’s suspicious inability or unwillingness to register his cash cow with the Electoral Commission).

This single candidate, in Widnes, managed just 11.3%. Desperately spinning this underwhelming result, Collett and his deputy Laura Towler, in her spare time between prison visits to her criminal racist husband Sam Melia, have constantly repeated that PA was runner-up, while trying to avoid mention of his low vote. And absolutely no-one in PA now mentions the two candidates who got lost on their way to the starting gate.

Anything Collett’s PA can do badly, his hated rival Kenny Smith and the Homeland Party can, it seems, do even worse. For weeks Smith and his cadre of organisers, who quit PA to form what they promised would be a more “professional” political machine, boasted on social media about their great candidate Roger Robertson, an old ally of Smith’s in their BNP days.

Robertson cultivates the image of a country gent who has somehow amiably wandered through some of Britain’s most toxic racist parties, the BNP, For Britain, British Democrats, and now Homeland. He convinced Smith that he had a great chance of winning his council ward in the Hampshire village of Hartley Wintney.

Roger Robertson (front, centre) with Homeland A team…

So the obliging Homeland leader focused his entire party’s resources on this single ward and talked up the likelihood of victory. Apparently without thinking about the strange fact that Robertson had reached his advanced age without ever managing to get elected to anything above a parish council.

Was there perhaps some reason for this underachievement? Smith and his smart suited leader guard wouldn’t allow such a negative thought to cross their minds. Until the ballot boxes were opened, and Robertson was found to have won only 13.5% of his fellow villagers’ support.

It’s a measure of the electoral embarrassment suffered by both PA and Homeland that in their post-election analysis both Collett and Smith chose to concentrate not on their own failures, but on the fact that each of them had contributed to the election campaigns of another party, the English Democrats.

Collett “revealed” one of the worst kept secrets in British fascism, that he had been designing leaflets for English Democrat leader Robin Tilbrook and that his members in several southern English regions had leafletted in Tilbrook’s campaign for Essex Police and Crime Commissioner.

Robin Tilbrook – secretly helped by PA nazis

Perhaps this was Tilbrook’s idea of a balanced ticket? After all, he is a veteran solicitor, while PA has more experience of crime than any other political outfit in England. What other English party or group can claim such a high percentage of its senior activists presently in jail, for offences including terrorism?

Not to be outdone, despite his party having slightly fewer activists with experience of standing trial, Smith also boasted of the Homeland Party’s role in supporting the English Democrats’ Police Commissioner candidate in West Mercia, Henry Curteis.

Any member of a normal political party might ask their leader why, if they had so much time to spare to support the candidates of other parties, they didn’t invest this time in building their own party’s campaigns.

But for PA and Homeland, it’s now about seeking whatever crumbs of comfort might fall from a wealthy Essex solicitor’s table.

And these revelations by Collett and Smith surely erase the last shreds of respectability from Tilbrook’s operation, which has always been marketed as a “moderate” and multiracial organisation, but which has an inexplicable habit of jumping into bed with notorious nazis.

Back in the 2000s, Tilbrook eagerly collaborated with the England First Party, then led by Mark Cotterill, who was thrown out of the USA after campaigning for years with the most famous Klansman of the last half century, David Duke, and who for more than twenty years has edited the nazi magazine Heritage and Destiny.

The ED leader then moved on to work with Eddy Butler, former chief electoral strategist of the BNP and a man who once prowled the streets of London with Combat 18’s boot boys.

And now, after a few years of dalliance with eccentric conspiracy theorists on the fascist fringes, and a failed attempt to advise a London-based faction trying to take back control of the BNP, Tilbrook is allied to each of the main factions from Britain’s largest Hitler and Mosley fan club.

While Collett and Smith competed in obsequious cosying up to the English Democrats, the leader of the third splinter from the former PA is in a world of his own. Alek Yerbury has (unlike Collett) at least managed to register his group as a political party, though for reasons best known to himself the political arm is registered as National Rebirth Party, while his broader organisation is called National Support Detachment.

Yerbury’s party was registered only a few weeks before the elections, but he must know this excuse won’t wash forever. Unabashed, he is already regaling his Telegram readers with grand statements about how local council elections are small beer. His aim is nationwide power, in one fell swoop.

Alek Yerbury – nationwide power, in one fell swoop…

A march on London? A Wakefield beer hall putsch? Judging from the state of Yerbury’s followers at his sparsely attended rallies, the problem would be getting past the beer stage. Though we hear that some of his closest allies prefer other substances.

The only rival group prepared to speak to Yerbury and his eccentric partner Katie Fanning, are the Independent Nationalist Network. This group is mainly based in the West Midlands. In June they will stage a “seminar” on election strategy with none other than Nick Griffin, the man who until a month or so ago was telling his Twitter followers that elections were a waste of time.

Griffin has always seen consistency as an overrated political virtue, especially if it gets in the way of passing the collection bucket.

It really is difficult to choose among Collett, Smith and Yerbury as to which faction leader has most to be ashamed of following 2024’s election cycle.

What of another former rival of Collett’s from the BNP days? Paul Golding preceded Collett as Nick Griffin’s blue-eyed boy. He disappeared for a while into the Essex rave scene, but then reappeared (or according to some suspicious observers was reactivated) as leader of the Islamophobic gang Britain First.

Golding’s pitch was as the thinking yob’s Tommy Robinson, and most of his followers were undeterred even after their leader’s then-partner Jayda Fransen accused him of domestic violence. It seems that the average Britain First foot soldier was if anything proud of being led by someone who beats up women in his spare time.

For a year or two Golding also seemed to have inherited the Midas touch from the far right’s most successful fundraiser Jim Dowson, who helped him create Britain First before moving on to a more lucrative grift with Nick Griffin.

And in the early post-Covid elections it looked as though Britain First had invested at least some of their profits wisely. Golding’s new partner Ashlea Simon won some of the best far right votes of the 2020s, taking 21.6% in Walkden North in 2022, and only slipping back slightly to 18.2% in 2023 even when opposed by a Reform UK candidate.

Then it all started to go wrong. Golding threw money at pointless campaigns in parliamentary by-elections. And when a by-election occurred in Rochdale this year, one of the few constituencies where Britain First’s Islam-bashing might have won more than a negligible audience, Golding’s team failed to nominate.

Worse than that, they sent out fundraising appeals for their Rochdale campaign even after nominations had closed and they knew there was no such campaign!

Stumbling from one embarrassing failure to another, Golding and Simon for some reason abandoned the only borough where they had ever won a decent vote. There were no Britain First candidates in Salford this year. Instead, they scraped together council campaigns in Cokeham (Sussex) and Coventry, managing 12.5% and 9%.

But the headline Britain First campaign was in London, and what an epic disaster it proved to be! Nick Scanlon, a former BNP member who was briefly in charge of the failed effort to create a British version of Generation Identity, stood for both Mayor of London and the GLA. The London Mayoral campaign seemed an ideal vehicle for an Islamophobic party whose followers liked nothing better than to scream about the capital city’s Mayor being a Muslim.

But the voters’ verdict was unmistakeable. Scanlon achieved one of the worst votes in the entire history of Britain’s far right, just 0.8% in the Mayoral contest against Sadiq Khan, and 1.3% in the GLA list section, which is designed to be favourable to smaller parties but couldn’t rescue Britain First from the gutter. Golding and Co were especially riled when taunted that their man was even beaten by comedy candidate Count Binface.

Nick Scanlon and (top) heckling Sadiq Khan at the London Mayoral count

The strange thing is that some fellow fascists are eager to follow Britain First into the fringe of the fringe. Even though he’s a member of a rival party, Welsh football hooligan and PA regional organiser Joe Marsh couldn’t resist tweeting about Britain First’s “cool banner drop”, 24 hours after their entire strategy had met with total disaster.

The problem for Marsh is that like most football yobs, he cares more about posing than about reality. He openly admits that he doesn’t really care about elections and prefers marches and demos, and he is one of the chief architects of PA’s own strategy of banner drops, intimidatory demos outside asylum accommodation, and homophobic thuggery.

Marsh and his fellow PA organisers are addicted to failure, which helps justify their preferred strategy of giving up on their fellow Britons and retreating into “nationalist communities”. This approach of creating White enclaves has been tried several times in the USA. PA’s activists spend most of their time online, so it’s not surprising that they have been influenced by American examples. Judging from the number of PA activists doing jail time, it seems that some of them are also influenced by the terroristic strategy often followed by those who go down this route. Withdrawing from society all too often means being at war with society.

Just when Searchlight’s judging panel was thinking about awarding the wooden spoon to Britain First, along came an undisputed winner. No one in fringe politics is more expert at making a fool of himself than Laurence Fox, whose entire acting career seems to have been a rehearsal for his present role as the ultimate delusional conspiracy theorist.

Lozza (or Looza?) Fox….

A month ago, Fox failed to nominate in the Mayoral election, thus missing out on the chance to compete with Britain First’s Nick Scanlon in the sub-1% fascist fringe category, Nevertheless, he grabbed his share of the limelight by persuading just 0.6% of Londoners to vote for him on the GLA ballot paper. His epic Twitter tantrum after the results were published, in which Fox announced he was moving out of London, presumably in search of a town where he might at least poll 1%, seals his victory as the far right’s biggest embarrassment of 2024.

Two parties on the far right achieved what superficially might seem more credible results, but when looked at in context even their supporters will surely be disappointed.

Three of the four British Democrat council candidates polled over 10%, the exception being party chairman Jim Lewthwaite who managed only 6.8% in Wyke ward, Bradford, where voters were unimpressed by his past as a BNP councillor.

Another ex-BNP councillor standing for the British Democrats was Julian Leppert, who polled 21.9% in Waltham Abbey North, Epping Forest. Boundary changes gave Leppert a real chance of getting back onto the council, since the new ward incorporated the area he used to represent as a For Britain councillor, and he had no opposition from Reform UK.

Epic fail Julian Leppert, left, at the count in Epping Forest

As Leppert was quick to complain later on social media, if the big talkers of the London far right scene had given him some practical help on the ground, he could have won. Recriminations are sure to follow, especially because the British Democrats, though few in number, are known for their factional splits.

One of the bitterest faction fighters in British fascism, ex-BNP activist Lawrence Rustem, took 17.8% in Maidstone, while yet another former BNP organiser Chris Bateman polled 14.3% in Basildon. Neither of them had Reform UK opposition.

Smiling Lawrence Rustem – before the count, that is

The verdict on the British Democrats must be that they avoided embarrassment, but after more than a decade of attempting to rebuild a BNP Mk II, they have clearly failed. The party’s septuagenarian leaders Lewthwaite and Brons are likely to retire from active politics soon. Are the likes of Leppert, Rustem and Bateman truly capable of leading a national party?

And what of the UK’s main far right force, the expert dog whistlers of Reform UK?

Nigel Farage, who effectively owns Reform UK already, is strongly rumoured to be coming out of retirement to take the leadership from his lacklustre substitute Richard Tice. The party had one electoral performance to boast about last Thursday, when they finished a strong third in the Blackpool South parliamentary by-election with 16.9%.

But elsewhere Reform UK’s results were pathetic, for a party that is endlessly boosted by the right-wing press and especially by the GB News channel.

They lost all three of the council wards they were defending, admittedly in seats that had been won in the first place by Conservatives who had defected to Reform.

They did manage to scrape onto the GLA with a single seat after polling 5.9% across the capital. But this was below the 6.5% that UKIP managed in the equivalent election in 2016, and the 8.4% that UKIP took in 2004. At each of these elections UKIP won two GLA seats.

This is not a performance that comes close to matching Reform’s opinion poll ratings. Does Farage have the stomach for the fight that will be needed to knock the party into fighting shape?

Outside London, Reform did manage to gain two seats in the Hampshire borough of Havant. But this seemed to owe more to Tory unpopularity, and Labour’s failure to field full slates of

candidates, than to any genuine advance by Reform. One of their winning councillors was elected with only 18% of the vote.

Only 21 Reform candidates in the whole of England managed to poll above 20%. More than 140 of their candidates finished below 10% of the vote, including notable failures in mayoral campaigns in London (3.1%), the West Midlands (5.8%), and Greater Manchester (7.5%).

The latter failure was especially notable, after Tice’s gloating about his success in persuading Dan Barker, originally selected as the Tory mayoral candidate, to defect to Reform.

Three strong Reform council results (between 27.7% and 30.1%) were in Barnsley, a borough that once had a strong BNP branch and which went on to elect councillors from the UKIP splinter group “Democrats & Veterans” in 2019. Unsurprisingly it was in one of these Barnsley wards, Darfield, that Reform polled 30.1% last week. The best Reform result was in Sunderland, which has one of the party’s few strong branches. In Redhill ward (which elected a UKIP councillor in 2019) Reform’s candidate polled 32.3%.

But the failure to win either of these target wards (or to win anywhere else apart from those two Havant seats) means that potential Tory defectors will be thinking very carefully.

As has so often been the case, Tice can take comfort in the total failure of the rump UKIP and the rival UKIP splinter party Heritage. The other parties that broke away from UKIP in past years seem to have disappeared completely.

UKIP had only three results above 10%, two of them in Tamworth, while the Heritage Party’s best vote was 9.7% in Broadfield ward, Crawley.

Half of UKIP’s candidates and the vast majority of Heritage candidates polled below 5%: in fact, twelve of the Heritage candidates were below 2%. As Searchlight and quite a few former UKIP members themselves have commented, the party’s chairman/owner now seems interested solely in controlling its bank accounts and future legacies. There is no expectation that UKIP will ever again be a serious electoral force.

Nor can Heritage have any such hopes. Its leader David Kurten increasingly focuses on conspiracy theories about Covid vaccines and other topics that interest the tiny online cult that constitutes his party.

How should anti-fascists sum up these elections?

As the far right themselves admit, this year was a new low for the British fascist movement. But we have seen similar low points before, and there should be no complacency.

In particular, the strong votes for Reform in certain areas are cause for concern. They might be nowhere near the level that would give Reform an electoral breakthrough, but they add up to a disturbingly large pool of long-term discontent and even despair.

Political disengagement, especially in working class communities, is also reflected in low turnouts and votes for independents and local pressure groups. Searchlight has seen before how this disengagement and despair can be exploited by the far right. While Britain’s defeated nazis lick their wounds and regroup, we must be ready for the next battle.

Poor Laurence Fox, whom some regard as the Basil Brush of right-wing British politics – fond of posing in front of TV cameras and laughing incessantly at his own 70s-style humour – has clearly been traumatised by his humiliation in the London elections, where he was massively overshadowed by, among others, the Animal Welfare Party. It seems that Londoners who yearn to hug a fox are much keener on the lower case type than the ones with capital letters.

So badly did Laurence perform that some people have already suggested that he change his preferred handle of ‘Lozza’ to ‘Looza’. It’s only one letter change, and so much more descriptive. And appropriate, granted that he stood purely under his own name, and so cannot pretend that it was ‘The Reclaim Party’ that put off punters in the polling booth. He put himself out there as Laurence Fox and he lost as Laurence Fox.

The spurned candidate has lashed out with a spluttering tweet pointing out that Sadiq Khan is (this will shock everyone, we know) a Muslim. And so, he says, are another eight English mayors. And his point is? Well, exploring the canyons of this man’s mind is probably a job best left to Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, but we feel confident that Looza is reaching out to ‘the fash’ with a message calculated to enrage them. ‘The bastards,’ mister bigoted tweet-reader will be saying, ‘Coming over here, nicking our mayoral chains and leaving the robes smelling of curry…’

Perhaps misled by his own surname, Fox imagined that he was being cunning. He desperately wanted to get the response from sane people that he was being racist. And he succeeded, giving his over-excited fanboys the opportunity to shout back ‘Muslims ain’t a race, you lefty snowflakes. So how can it be racist, eh? Got you there!’

Where the plan starts to break down – from Professor of Cunning at Sly College Oxford level to something more like Temporary Lecturer in Window-licking at Concreton Tech – is that his claque has further chimed in with ‘So, telling the TRUTH is now “racist” in woke Britain is it?’ Unfortunately for lazy Loz, he didn’t do his homework, so when the Reclaimistas claim that his tweet is truthful, it doesn’t really deserve that label even if you strap the qualifier ‘relatively’ to it.

You see, as far as we know, four of the eight ceremonial mayors that he points the finger at aren’t Muslims at all. Oops!

The newly re-elected Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is indeed a Muslim. He’s never made any secret of it, and why should he? He got the job by (a) not being so stupid that he failed to fill in his nomination form correctly – unlike a certain Fox we could mention – and (b) receiving more votes than any other candidate. But we guess democracy is something The Looz is a touch disenchanted with right now.

The Lord Mayor of Birmingham, Chaman Lal, is actually a Sikh, not a Muslim. But as we can all guess that what Fox really means when he types ‘Muslim’ is ‘a bit brownish’, he probably doesn’t care that there’s a difference. It’s a purely ceremonial post which tends to alternate between Con, Lab and LibDem. He’ll leave office in about a fortnight, and the next man or woman in line will take up the post for the next 12 months.

Birmingham Lord Mayor Chaman Lal. You’d think the rather unmissable turban would be taken as a clue, by any intelligent person, that the man is a Sikh rather than a Muslim. But the difference seems to have Laurence… er… foxed.

Lord Mayor of Leeds is also ceremonial. We suppose that if you are of limited intelligence (or just paranoid) you might assume that the ‘Al’ in the name of the incumbent, Al Garthwaite, could sound suspiciously Arabic, but Fox can relax – this mayor is white. Though considering the contempt in which he seems to hold women, he’ll probably tense up again when he finds out that the ‘Al’ is short not for Alan or Algernon (we feel convinced that he will know one of those) but Alison.

Parwaiz Akhtar, Mayor of Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council (do keep up, Mr Brush) is definitely a Muslim, though he did send out a nice ‘Happy Easter’ video message to his townsfolk. In any case, don’t panic. This one-year appointment is organised a long way in advance, so we already know that there will be a white Mayor taking over in a couple of weeks’ time. Though she is (dammit!) female. Perhaps Basil can greet her to office with one of his charming ‘Who would want to shag that?’ quips. Arf arf arf!

Lord Mayor of Sheffield is another of those ceremonial posts. That his name is Colin Ross and that his Yorkshire roots go back centuries doesn’t guarantee that he’s not a Muslim, but we suspect that you’re chasing a red herring here, Looza. You’ll just have to hate on him for being a LibDem. Or a geologist. Whichever floats your boat.

The Lord Mayor of Oxford, Lubna Arshad, is self-described as the “first woman of colour” to hold the ceremonial post. And she’s a Muslim. That’s kind of a trifecta for you, isn’t it, Loz? But like most of the mayors that you’re having a tizz about, she’ll be replaced later this month, so chill out a bit and cross your fingers about the next one.

We feel pretty confident that the ceremonial Mayor of Luton, Mohammed Yaqub Hanif, is a Muslim. It would, we suggest, be an odd name for an Irish Catholic – though one never knows. He, too, leaves office later this month. You could perhaps breathe in and out of a paper bag while you wait for all of these terrible people to make way for someone more to your tastes, Laurence.

Zahid Chauhan, the one-year Mayor of Oldham, is a Muslim. He’s also honorary warden of Oldham Parish Church and eagerly accepted an invitation to perform the official opening of the Victory Christian International Ministries new church premises a couple of weeks into his tenure as Mayor. He seems to have a very open and inclusive mind. Unlike some people we could mention.

Zahid Chauhan, Mayor of Oldham. A Muslim but also a warden of Oldham Parish Church – the venue where he chose to be sworn in as Mayor, as seen here.

The ceremonial Mayor of Rochdale is the handsomely turned-out, be-robed and be-chained chap pictured below – Conservative councillor Mike Holly. We have absolutely no idea what his religious persuasion is, but if Laurence Fox is quite sure that he’s a Muslim, then we have no doubt that he will get back to us with some evidence.

And the ceremonial Mayor of Rochdale is this chap – Conservative councillor Mike Holly

Fox has just announced (though he claims to have made the decision “earlier this year”) that he is moving out of London, stating that Sadiq Khan has “turned this once great city into a violent ghetto”. All rather odd, that, because it’s only a few weeks since he attempted to sign up as a candidate for Mayor of Ghettoland (and was prevented only by his own ineptitude at filing nomination papers).

“I look forward to spending my days in what remains of this green and pleasant land from July,” he sighs, theatrically. “I’d rather spend the rest of my days with people I have something in common with.” Granted his capacity for stumbling into the brown stuff, we suppose we’ll have to think of it as his pied-à-turd.

That election result seems to have left the cracked actor in a hallucinatory fever, so we trust that this leafy out-of-London new home is situated in an area where he can get the rest and other medical support that he apparently needs. Yes, do retreat to the sticks, put your feet up and slap a wet flannel on your forehead, Looza. You’ll feel better in a week or two.

Inshallah…