Hitler salutes, nazi gigs and fascist fitness clubs: we take a closer look at the Homeland Party’s activists in the West Midlands.
This is the first in a series of articles, exposing the extremism of Homeland’s core activists in each region around the UK.
On 31 January, the Homeland Party successfully registered as a political party. Last April the group split from Patriotic Alternative (PA), the UK’s largest fascist group, in part to gain a fresh start for registering with the Electoral Commission – a pursuit in which PA has failed at least seven times. Nine months later, the gamble finally paid off.
The success has humiliated the PA leadership and provided Homeland some much-needed momentum. The new party now appears a more viable alternative to PA, and its registration has won the endorsement of the well-known “migrant hunter” Steve Laws, as well as a handful of dog-eared ex-British National Party (BNP) and British Democrat organisers.
Eyeing the May local elections, Homeland is desperate to shake off PA’s toxic reputation and to downplay its extreme ideology, in order to win over local communities. However, most Homeland activists are drawn from PA and have spent years steeped in noxious racial ideologies, antisemitic conspiracy theories and a fondness for the Third Reich.
While an in-depth analysis of the Homeland Party can be found in our recent report, below is the first entry in a new series in which we take a closer look at Homeland’s core activists by region.
We start with the West Midlands, Homeland’s main stronghold. The branch was amongst PA’s best-established and defected to Homeland almost wholesale in April 2023. Kenny Smith, the former BNP organiser, former PA administrator and now Homeland Chair, has since moved from the Isle of Skye to the region, in part to better manage his organisation.
Here are some of the core activists.
Homeland’s West Mids Regional Organiser is Connor Marlow, originally from Merseyside and now a parish councillor in Fulford, Staffordshire. Marlow is best-known for his ill-fated attempt to co-opt an anti-migrant campaign in Cannock, co-organising protests against asylum accommodation in the town before he and his comrades were rejected by local campaigners last April.
Like many current and former PA members, Marlow was active in fascist fitness groups, a subculture that blends health and muscle-growth advice with extreme right-wing politics. In one such group, “The Judgement Zone”, Marlow charted his progress with a series of “physique” pictures, which he posted alongside the nazi slogan “Hail Victory”. He also posted a photo in which he performed a Hitler salute in front of his weight-training equipment.
Marlow has also regularly used extreme racial slurs. For example, in March 2021 he responded to a Portuguese speaker with the words: “Yeah I don’t speak n*gger, try again in a human language buddy 👍”.
The following month he wrote that he: “has to explain to my n*gger supervisor on shift yesterday what the word simultaneously means”. He also wrote in June 2021 that “the n*gger mating ritual is amongst the most vile thing in natureid [sic] rather re watch the video of the sloths under the outhouse again”. There are many other such comments.
He also repeatedly posted pictures of Hitler and the crude antisemitic “Happy Merchant” meme, as well as a photo of the gatehouse of the Auschwitz Birkenau extermination camp made to resemble a smiley, among much else.
Chris Gilmartin, a private school-educated activist from the Coventry area, is a writer for the Homeland website and featured prominently in one of the group’s recent propaganda videos, alongside Kenny Smith.
Gilmartin has an extensive and disturbing online history. For example, on 23 December 2020 he posted an audio recording in which he simulated the rape of another chat group user in graphic detail.
He has also praised the Christchurch shooter, Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 Muslims at two New Zealand mosques in 2019 and whom Gilmartin has dubbed “St Tarrant”. On 21 December 2020, he commented on a video celebrating Tarrant that heavily featured footage of the massacre, set to music:
“Nice. Could watch on a loop for an hour. Real talk though do you think you would feel bad about shooting a huddled mass of women in the back even if they were Muslims? Waifu always says she would do it in a fucking heartbeat but I dunno personally i feel like my empathy would get the better of me”.
He continued:
“being there face to face seeing the fear on people’s faces, I dunno. Half of me thinks I would go into rage mode and not give a shit but the other half thinks I would still do it but it would fuck me up a bit. Then again I never thought I would enjoy hunting until I did it and I was really surprised at how easy it is to kill.”
The same day he said of the American terrorist Ted Kaczynski (AKA The Unabomber”), who murdered three people and maimed many more in a 17-year bombing campaign, and the murderous cult leader and white supremacist Charles Manson:
“Kaczynski= nerdy, cold, calculating, brilliant, incisive intellect
Manson= abused, psychopathic traits, ‘crazy wisdom’ in the Zen tradition, charismatic, simple and direct
I prefer Ted as an intellectual and as a person but I think you need a few Charles Mansons in the world to balance out the overly analytical Ted Kaczynskis”
He also routinely used extreme racial slurs, denied the Holocaust and on 16 May 2021, posted the personal details of a black woman and wrote:
“This dumb sheboon got me yeeted off [banned from] fb for making fun of BLM. 🙁 profile is public. And before you say it yes you are my personal army you faggots”
Martin Kuziel is Homeland’s so-called “International Relations Officer”. The Czech-born activist, from a village near Dudley, was previously a West Midlands regional organiser for PA.
His activities include travelling to Dresden in February 2023, where he marched alongside an assortment of neo-Nazis and far-right activists to commemorate the victims of the Allied bombing of the German city in 1945. He has also helped a group of online activists produce a translation of the “Wehrmacht Fitness Manual”, used by the German military under the Third Reich.
Kuziel also previously ran a Telegram channel named “Manual to Manhood” through which he posted guides on shaving, on “how to take care of your feet”, “how to sharpen your knife” and other matters. He also used the channel to promote recruitment propaganda for the White Stag Athletic Club (WSAC), a neo-Nazi “fitness” group that publicly surfaced in October 2021, with Kuziel writing “If you are in the uk, Check this out.”
The founder of WSAC, Ashley Podsiad-Sharp (AKA Sarge) – who had links to PA – is currently serving eight years behind bars for terror-related offences. The judge at Sharp’s trial described WSAC as:
“a cauldron of self-absorbed neo-Nazism masquerading as a low grade all-male sports club. This sought to camouflage your real purpose to incite violence against those you hated with a vengeance. Those individuals were inadequate, ill-educated, unsuccessful, and dangerous.”
King was previously an activist with Generation Identity UK (GI UK), a far-right youth group that promoted a form of racial segregation. The group folded in January 2020, having been cut off by the international GI network after a series of infiltrations, exposés and humiliations, many of them at the hands of HOPE not hate.
The archery enthusiast has photographed himself wearing clothing emblazoned with the nazi sonnenrad symbol and wrote “Happy birthday uncle A 🥳” on 20 April 2022, in celebration of Hitler’s birthday.
Since joining Homeland he has continued to use extreme racial slurs, for example writing “being at war with russia is officially better than having n*ggers” in May 2023.
Liam Hart (AKA Liam Connor), based in Stoke-on-Trent, has also cycled through PA and into Homeland.
Vocalist for the oi! band Ragged Glory, Hart is involved in the nazi punk network Blood & Honour (B&H) and was even part of the security team at last year’s annual Ian Stuart Donaldson memorial event, the key date in the nazi skinhead calendar. Donaldson was the frontman of the nazi band Skrewdriver and founder of B&H, which took its name from the motto of the Hitler Youth and was used to raise funds for the extreme right.
The scene has steadily declined over the decades, now catering almost exclusively for ageing fascists like Hart.
For more information on the Homeland Party, read our report: The Fascist Fringe: Patriotic Alternative and its Splinter Groups
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