Rogue’s gallery, left to right: David Clews, Laura Towler, Joel Davis,  Mark Collett, Tony Hovater, Warren Balogh

Fearful of internal splits and anti-fascist infiltration, Patriotic Alternative abandoned plans to stage their conference in an expensive hotel (as they have done at least once a year since the group was founded). Instead, they gathered in the humbler surroundings of a village hall in Waltham on the Wolds, Leicestershire.

Organisation on the ground was handled by PA activist Adam Lambert, who has stayed loyal to Mark Collett’s faction despite many of his fellow Midlands activists quitting to join the rival Homeland Party.

Lambert is based just the other side of the county border, in the Nottinghamshire village of Cropwell Bishop, where he is a director of the family business, Lambert Kitchens & Joinery.

Those forking out £75 for a day ticket including evening meal might have picked up an early clue that this year would be more downmarket. Last year’s event in the Lake District cost £95.

Another clue to PA’s internal problems is that three of the speakers came from overseas – and all of them were from the furthest fringes of the neo-nazi scene.

Two of them were from a tiny and openly nazi American grouplet called the National Justice Party. Warren Balogh and Tony Hovater were co-founders (or “co-chairmen”) of the NJP when it was created three years ago by the podcaster Mike Peinovich (known until 2017 by the pseudonym Mike Enoch).

US Nazi Tony Hovater (right) with so-called ‘Pembrokeshire Patriot’, Darren Edmundson

Although he is blatantly antisemitic and mocks the Holocaust through the title of his main podcast The Daily Shoah, Peinovich is distrusted by many other nazi factions because his former wife is Jewish.

Both his fellow PA speaker Hovater (who is from Ohio) and another of the NJP’s founding co-chairmen, Joseph Jordan, were previously active in a Strasserite nazi group called the Traditionalist Workers Party.

Warren Balogh’s father Alan (yet another NJP co-chairman) spent years as the Philadelphia organiser for Dr William Pierce’s terroristic National Alliance before moving to the NA compound in Hillsboro, West Virginia.

As a student in the 2000s, Warren Balogh seems to have infiltrated the West Virginia Democratic Party, where he took part in protests against President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

More recently he and other NJP co-founders attended the notorious racist rally at Charlottesville, advertised as ‘Unite the Right’, which collapsed into violence leading to many criminal charges.

For the last few years, Balogh and his wife Emily Youcis have produced Hitler-worshipping podcasts and video streams.

Warren Balogh with Laura Towler and Sam Melia

Part of the connection between PA and these two NJP leaders is through the Nordic Resistance Movement, whose podcast Nordic Frontier has featured the Baloghs (father and son), Hovater, and Collett. NRM is banned in Finland as a terrorist organisation, and is regarded by the authorities elsewhere in Scandinavia as dangerous and violent.

Yet it is distrusted by some other leading European nazis because of suspicious ties to the Russian intelligence services and mercenary groups fighting on the Russian side in Ukraine. This partly explains the strange absence of Heritage and Destiny and some of their pro-Ukrainian European friends from the PA event.

Occasional H&D contributor Michèle Renouf was however spotted at the Leicestershire conference. She is another British nazi who has appeared on Nordic Frontier.

The same ex-BNP camera team who regular film at PA events – including former Enfield BNP activist and GLA staff member Tony Avery – were also on duty with PA.

Together with the two Americans, Australian nazi YouTuber Joel Davis was another platform speaker at Collett’s hatefest. He co-hosts the Joel & Blair Show with Blair Cottrell, chairman of the United Patriots Front, whose donors and Facebook contributors included the terrorist murderer Brenton Tarrant.

Australian nazi Joel Davis with PA fuhrer Mark Collett

Earlier this year, Davis and Cottrell used their show to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday. The following month their guest was fellow Australian Thomas Sewell, leader of the National Socialist Network, who has praised Tarrant and stated on Davis and Cottrell’s show that Jews “are trying to genocide us”.

It seems obvious that PA’s response to internal divisions has been to come out as open nazis, with the implication that their rivals – Homeland and the National Support Detachment – are soft sell-outs by comparison.

Conference ‘Master of Ceremonies’ the ‘Reverend’ James Costello – the ‘reverend’ comes from the white nationalist Church of Creativity which calls for race war.

In early responses to last weekend’s Hamas invasion of Israel, the Collett faction has openly mocked Israelis and gloried in the slaughter of Jews, and some of their output must surely be examined closely by the authorities under the Terrorism Act and other legislation.

Another of the speakers at the PA conference has completed an eccentric political path from civic nationalism and Scottish unionism, through increasingly unhinged conspiracy theorising, and has now ended up in the company of open nazis.

This is David Clews, host of the Unity News Network. In 2011 Clews (who since 2007 had been an elected councillor in Renfrewshire, Scotland) defected from the Conservatives to Labour, allegedly because he opposed the Cameron coalition’s austerity policies and cuts to local services.

A few years later Clews turned up in the official anti-independence campaign Scotland in Union, but quit to form a splinter group called UK Unity that promised to be more “aggressive” and “populist”. Police Scotland raided his home in Renfrew in February 2018 investigating data protection offences involving leaks from within Scotland in Union.

No charges followed, but Clews record as a serial splitter and troublemaker continued when he took a leading role in anti-vaccination protests. Covid conspiracy theorising is probably what brought Clews into contact with PA and fellow extremists.

Ironically Collett’s many enemies on the British far right are never slow to pick up on their own conspiracy theories. They are now pointing the finger at Clews and suggesting he might have a hidden agenda, highlighting his odd political record and what they claim to be his wife’s job with a well-known firm of defence contractors.

Left to right: David Clews, Laura Towler, Joel Davis, Mark Collett, Tony Hovater, Warren Balogh

Patriotic Alternative leaders lied to a charity to book a community hall for PA’s annual conference.

The conference was held at Waltham on the Wolds Village Hall, near Melton Mowbury in Leicestershire, last Saturday. As well as PA leaders, speakers included American nazi Warren Balogh. Tony Hovater, like Balogh, a senior member of the National Justice Party and Australian neo-Nazi Joel Davis.

Also gracing the platform was David Clews of the UK conspiracy-peddling online TV channel, Unity News Network, whose contributors also include the deranged anti-vaxxer Kate Shemirani, best known for calling for the execution of NHS staff.

But to hire the hall, PA – presumably in the form of leader Mark Collett who was being congratulated on the PA Telegram channel for organising the event – lied to the charity which runs the hall about who was actually hiring it.

Alerted by Searchlight, the Hall Committee yesterday issued the following statement:

“It has been brought to our attention today that the group known as ‘Patriotic Alternative’ hired Waltham on the Wolds Village Hall on the 7.10.2023 to host a meeting. This booking was made under an alias that did not alert us to the nature or content of the event. 

“We do not support or affiliate with Patriotic Alternative or any other political group.  Waltham on the Wolds Village Hall is a volunteer run charity, and we welcome people from all communities and promote diversity and inclusivity”. 

There had been some comment online that the venue might have been an adjacent scout venue, as PA posted photos taken outside the conference hall which showed the exterior of the scout hall. The scouting group also issued a statement:

“We were surprised to learn that Patriotic Alternative (PA) held a conference in a hall next to one of our Scout Facilities. The building in which PA met is not owned or operated by the Scout Movement but sits next to one of our existing meeting spaces. The PA event was held in the Wolds Village Hall and at no time during their conference did PA access our Scout meeting space. Scouting is a non-political, inclusive organisation that welcomes young people and adults from all faiths and communities across the UK.’

As if things weren’t bad enough down in Llanelli, in South Wales, with the far right stoking up racist feeling in the town, UKIP now plans to hold a public meeting there, jointly with the far-right Voice of Wales, featuring anti-Islam campaigner, Anne Marie Waters.

Waters, UKIP’s Justice spokesperson, was only recently re-admitted to the party – just three days after UKIP lifted its ban on former members of nazi organisations joining up. She had previously been leader of For Britain and involved in Pegida with Tommy Robinson.

The Llanelli meeting, the night before UKIP’s annual conference 60 miles down the motorway in Newport, will be held at Stamps, a city centre bar which is a bit of a favourite with UKIP – they used it for a “Unite the far right” meeting last August, when Waters spoke along with party leader Neil Hamilton. It is a place where they clearly feel welcome and at home.

That’s perhaps not surprising: the Director of Stamps, Ethan Smith, had difficulty re-opening the place after the pandemic shutdowns. First, he tried to bring in his friend Jordan Parry as bar manager, until it was discovered that this was prevented by Parry’s probation conditions – he had just come out of jail for his part in a major conspiracy to import 2kg of cocaine in 2020.

Then Smith tried to transfer the license to another friend, Aaron Coelho, but police objected on the basis that Coelho’s sister had also been involved in the cocaine importation and was, in fact, the girlfriend of the principal villain in the case.

Ethan Smith himself has 12 convictions for various offences, though he was not involved in the drugs case and claims to be “a reformed character”.

Neil Hamilton and Ann Marie Waters address August UKIP meeting at Stamps

Recent events in Llanelli have been deeply troubling and UKIP are plainly planning to aggravate and capitalise on the volatile situation there. The local Stradey Park hotel was earmarked as for accommodation for asylum seekers since last May, and ever since there has been an escalating campaign against it, fuelled by outside activists from far-right groups

A fire was set in the hotel two weeks ago, and firefighters and police who attended were attacked with fireworks. Six people were arrested, from as far afield as Cleveland and Peterborough. The local Labour Party office has also been attacked and an attempt was made to burn it down.

Voice of Wales, co-sponsoring the meeting, is run principally by Dan Morgan and Stan Robinson. Morgan is a bit of a political newbie who only came to far right politics during the Brexit campaign. Robinson, however, is an old hand, who boasts of involvement in far-right groups going back to the Freedom Association’s union-busting Operation Pony Express in 1977.

Stan Robinson and Dan Morgan

There’s clearly an affinity between VoW and Stamps: the Stamps Facebook page has only two “likes” and one of them is from VoW.

Tomorrow 8^th October: Searchlight urges local anti-racists to support the Llanelli Unites Community Fun Day at Selwyn Samuel Centre & Lliedi Suite starting at 12.00 noon.

In recent weeks splits within Patriotic Alternative, the most extreme and active far right organisation in the UK, have widened. Fascists who until a few months ago were supposedly comrades in campaigns of race-baiting, are now bitter personal enemies.

One significant development is that PA’s leadership have become even more explicit in identifying themselves with the most extreme forms of European neo-nazism.

On September 9^th the group’s founder Mark Collett and his deputy Laura Tyrie (alias Laura Towler) spoke at the annual meeting organised by Britain’s largest far-right publication, Heritage and Destiny.

Traditionally dedicated to the memory of deceased BNP führer John Tyndall, this year’s event focused on four individuals from the pantheon of British fascists (whether boneheads or self-styled intellectuals such as H&D’s editors).

The four men being ‘honoured’ were:

• Derek Beackon, elected in 1993 in East London as the BNP’s first ever councillor. Beackon was also the BNP’s chief steward, and worked closely with thugs who went on to create Combat 18, the notorious racist terror group. Beackon himself is a dedicated nazi, who came to the BNP via the openly Hitlerite British Movement, and regularly distributed Holocaust denial publications. He now lives in Kent and is said to be in poor health.

• Andrew Brons, whose racist odyssey began in the National Socialist Movement alongside Colin Jordan and synagogue arsonist Françoise Dior, and who himself wrote to Dior making curious comments about “well-intentioned” arson campaigns. Brons went on to become chairman of the National Front, before signing up to Griffin’s BNP in time to join him in Brussels as a Member of the European Parliament. Within a year, Brons had split from Griffin again, and eventually formed odd alliances with both supposed ‘moderates’ and open nazis to create the British Democrats, of which he is now President.

• Sir Oswald Mosley, who founded the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists and was interned during the Second World War. Unsurprisingly, it was feared that in the event of a nazi invasion, Mosley would become the British Quisling or Pétain. His second marriage took place at the home of the Third Reich’s propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as a witness. Postwar Mosley tried to exploit racism on the streets of London, and his followers incited anti-black riots on the streets of Notting Hill, just as they had attacked Jews on East End streets in earlier years. Retiring to Paris after being comprehensively defeated by anti-fascists, Mosley died unrepentant in 1980.

• Ian Stuart Donaldson, founder of the violent racist organisation Blood & Honour and lead singer of Skrewdriver. Since his death in a car crash thirty years ago, Donaldson has become a hero to racist thugs worldwide, and his organisation is banned in several countries for its links to terrorism. Memorial events in his name are notorious magnets for violence, drug dealing, and murderous internal feuds between rival factions that broke out after Donaldson’s death.

Searchlight observers monitored events in Preston on the day, and were surprised to discover that the notorious Spanish nazi Isabel Peralta – banned from Germany because of her connections to dangerous extremists – had been allowed into the UK to speak at the H&D event honouring Beackon, Brons, Mosley and Donaldson.

Peralta was at Preston railway station with H&D’s assistant editor Peter Rushton, greeting an ugly assortment of vile nazis including:

• Steve Cartwright, a notoriously violent nazi from Glasgow who has for decades been a leading organiser in Blood & Honour and various offshoots. Cartwright was involved in some of the bloodiest feuds inside Combat 18 and the BNP.
• Alan Payne, former organiser of Manchester & Salford BNP, who was recorded more than 30 years ago by Searchlight investigators when he was discussing plans to kidnap Sri Lankan asylum speaker Viraj Mendis from his sanctuary in a Manchester church.
• James Costello, a prominent PA activist in Merseyside who for years has described himself as “Reverend James” in relation to his work for the Creativity Movement, formerly the Church of the Creator. The leader of Costello’s “church” is Matthew Hale, currently serving a 40-year prison sentence for attempting to organise the murder of a US federal judge.
• Colin Todd, editor of Candour (founded by the original NF chairman and anti-semitic fanatic A.K. Chesterton). Todd has spent almost his entire life on the most extreme fringes of the British far right. He recently served a prison sentence for assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
• Michael Woodbridge, a veteran of many extremist groups, who was involved in training sessions near his home in Wales for members of the banned nazi terrorist group National Action, and more recently with members of Patriotic Alternative.

Despite being questioned for four hours by border security, who were very well aware of her identity and of the reason for her visit, Peralta was allowed to proceed with her mission. Searchlight is aware of extensive networking being organised by Peralta and Rushton among leading nazis and Holocaust deniers, across Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia – even including fugitive extremists living in the Far East.

When Searchlight used X (formerly Twitter) to ask why Peralta had been allowed into the country it was seen by almost 2 million people and reposted by almost 4,000, many demanding answers from Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Our intervention did not go down well with the nazis, and soon afterwards Searchlight was subject to a hysterical, vitriolic attack on the Heritage and Destiny website.

One strange and disturbing fact is that the H&D meeting seems to have united pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian elements of the European and American far right.

Isabel Peralta and Peter Rushton on the platform

Peralta and Rushton have strongly distanced themselves from pro-Russians among their nazi circles, and it was notable that at least two young Germans attended from the ultra-hardline sect Dritte Weg, which is close to the Peralta-Rushton axis of anti-Kremlin opinion.

Speaking alongside them was Stephen Frost, leader of the remnants of Colin Jordan’s British Movement, and Benny Bullman, lead singer of the “white power” band Whitelaw, who has faced travel bans due to international police and border security concerns about Blood & Honour. Frost, Bullman, Peralta and Rushton were the three most openly nazi speakers at the Preston conference, and to varying degrees are all anti-Moscow.

Kenneth Schmidt addresses the meeting

However other guest speakers at the event have publicly identified themselves with Putin. These include Mark Collett of PA, who has made several pro-Russian broadcasts with the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and H&D’s American columnist Kenneth Schmidt, a former leader of the US branch of Roberto Fiore’s International Third Position. Schmidt is less blatantly pro-Kremlin than Collett, but he has endorsed several conspiracy theories beloved by the Trump movement and their pro-Putin fifth column.

This peculiar aspect of the meeting was its only demonstration of factional unity. A few days earlier Alek Yerbury – the ludicrous ex-squaddie who leads the National Support Detachment – and his very strange partner Katie Fanning (a former UKIP activist) asked to attend, and were told that they could do so.

Collett, Towler and her husband Sam Melia responded with furious complaints to H&D editor Mark Cotterill, warning that the presence of Yerbury and Fanning would certainly lead to trouble, and probably to violence. Then, on Saturday morning, only hours before the event was due to start, Cotterill told Yerbury and Fanning that their invitation was withdrawn, and they would not be welcome in Preston.

For all his military posturing, Yerbury wisely decided he didn’t wish to confront H&D’s security team, largely drawn from members of the British Movement Leader Guard and including convicted killer Tony McDonnell. But he and his faction ignited a further online storm of abuse against PA’s leadership (now extended to attacks on Cotterill and Rushton).

Searchlight understands that members of some other groups hostile to PA, including the Homeland Party, New British Union, British Voice, and Highland Division, were welcomed by H&D to the Preston event, on the understanding that their disagreements with Collett would not become disruptive.

Yerbury and Fanning by contrast were banned. They are now expected to pursue an even closer alliance with ex-BNP activists in the so-called Independent Nationalist Network, and with the ever-hovering Nick Griffin and Jim Dowson, who are keen to find allies anywhere they can, whatever their level of credibility.

Images: top, Denis Nikitin, aka Kapustin, with his Russian Volunteer Corps in May this year; bottom left, camps organiser Larry Nunn (with loud hailer); bottom right, Arkadiusz Rzepinski, leader of the UK section of far right Polish group NOP [National Rebirth of Poland]

This article first appeared in Searchlight Summer 2023 issue.

THE LEADER OF a fascist pro-Ukraine militia that invaded part of southern Russia in May was exposed by Searchlight in 2014 for providing military training to fascists in Britain.

Denis Nikitin, also known as Denis Kapustin and ‘White Rex’, is the leader of an armed Ukraine-based anti-Putin formation called the Russian Volunteer Corps. In April, the unit crossed the border from Ukraine into the Bryansk region of southern Russia, occupied a couple of villages for a few hours, took photographs of themselves, then withdrew.

The incursion, which led to Putin cancelling a planned trip and convening an emergency meeting of his security council, attracted worldwide publicity, despite being little more than a stunt. The Ukraine government denied any part in the action, but some observers think it could not have gone ahead without its knowledge.

Russia claimed that two civilians had been killed and a child wounded in the operation.

Nikitin, who is 38 years old, is a veteran neo nazi, who has long been involved in martial arts and paramilitary training. In August 2014, he was in the UK offering training at secret camps in remote country locations.

Two of the camps he attended were in Wales and the West Country. Searchlight reported at the time that guns were present and on show. There was training in knife fighting, how to take out sentries and how to provoke riots.

Organising the camps was a former National Front and British National Party activist Larry Nunn. Among those present were also members of the right-wing Iona London Forum and the Traditional Britain Group.

Nikitin also used his trip to build contacts in the UK. He spoke at a meeting of Iona and linked up with Arkadiusz Rzepinski, the UK leader of a far-right Polish group, the NOP [National Rebirth of Poland]. Nikitin’s activities in Europe led, in 2019, to a 10-year ban on him entering to the Schengen zone of the European Union.