Fascism, fancy dress and underhand tactics: this is the latest in a series of articles investigating the Homeland Party’s core activists by region, following our exposés of Homeland’s branches in the West Midlands and Scotland.
The Homeland Party is a new political party that splintered from Patriotic Alternative, the UK’s most active neo-Nazi group, in April 2023.
Homeland, which attempts to conceal its extreme ideology and present a “squeaky clean” image, aims to get its activists co-opted into parish and community councils, the lowest tier of local government. The party hopes to use such positions — which activists can often enter practically unopposed — to build local support, despite the fact that leading figures have praised the Third Reich, made Nazi salutes, used extreme racial slurs and much else.
The Eastern branch had been one of PA’s most active, known for distributing intentionally misleading leaflets made to appear as Conservative campaign literature in an attempt to influence parliamentary by-elections. While a cohort of young Eastern members left for Homeland last April, the new group has since failed to sustain the same degree of momentum in the region, its members tending to be isolated and some lapsing into inactivity. It has, however, received a small influx of middle-class maladjusts since registering as a political party.
By contrast, in the South East — which had been an underperforming branch for PA — the group’s Regional Organiser, Fraser Patterson, and one of its best-known activists, Alec Cave, have defected to Homeland. The area has taken a greater importance for the new party, being home to two of Homeland’s councillors and also its sole local election candidate, Roger Robertson in Hart, whose candidacy has become a point of intense focus for the fledgling party.
Fraser Patterson (AKA Fraser Edwards), from West Berkshire, sits on Flitwick Town Council in Bedfordshire.
The software developer had been involved in PA since 2020 although sought to maintain a low profile, using the online alias “Redd Cat”. He became PA’s South East Regional Organiser in the summer of 2022 under pressure from Kenny Smith.
On the messaging app Telegram, he has posted variants of the antisemitic “Happy Merchant” caricature and photos of Adolf Hitler and Oswald Mosley, leader of the interwar British Union of Fascists. On Twitter, Patterson wrote:
“When we become a minority,we will not have a white majority in politics.Also,whites do not own the majority of wealth, that’d be the Jews – they are over-represented in the 1%.We are watching our countries slowly crumble from the inside out because we don’t stand up for ourselves”
Twitter, 20 August 2020
He has repeatedly used the white supremacist 14 words slogan and various racial slurs. Elsewhere, he has mockingly referred to George Floyd, who was murdered by a US police officer in 2020, as “Saint Floyd” and written that:
“You know as well as I do that as soon as a black criminal dies at the hands of the police, he suddenly was a “good boy” who was an aspiring wrapper (and probably on his way to church). When in reality they are a scumbag who has never treated anyone in his community with respect”
Telegram, 27 April 2021
Callum Barker, from Harlow in Essex, is a core Homeland Eastern branch activist.
He joined PA early in 2021, becoming one of its most active members before being exposed by HOPE not hate in February 2023. He cited the lack of support he received from PA in the wake of his exposure — which lost him his job and, he claims, his girlfriend — as a factor in his defection two months later.
Barker, who used the pseudonym “Half Pint”, was a contributor to PA’s art group and submitted a painting to an internal competition themed around the Nazi slogan “Blood & Soil”. He has also posed with a copy of the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski (AKA The Unabomber), the American terrorist who murdered three people and maimed many more in a 17-year bombing campaign.
He has elsewhere boasted about purchasing alcohol with “1488” in the branding, a popular neo-Nazi slogan that combines the 14 Words slogan and “Heil Hitler” (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet).
Barker also attended PA’s national conference on 29 October 2022, claiming it was “excellent to meet” the Swedish neo-Nazi Andreas Holmvall (AKA Andreas Johansson), who addressed the event. In Holmvall’s own words, he delivered a speech “about National Socialism, about Hitler and about Jews” at the conference to a receptive audience.
Holmvall is a key propagandist for the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), a pan-Nordic, militant neo-Nazi organisation that is banned in Finland. The group aims to install a “national socialist” dictatorship and eventually rid the Nordic region of ethnic minorities. Barker went on to write:
“I had the pleasure to meet Andreas Johansson from the NRM at the latest PA conference. they seem like a solid group.”
Telegram, 1 November 2022
He also posted memes featuring the American nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell and the n-word, among much else.
Alec Cave, from Milton Keynes, is one of Homeland’s best-known activists nationally and often performs media duties for the group.
Cave established himself as a fascist micro-influencer through his little-viewed “Renew Britannia” and “Nefarious Podcast” shows, making hours-long monologues under the pseudonym Wesley Russell (HOPE not hate exposed his real identity in 2021).
A regular public speaker for PA, Cave received wider attention after delivering an anti-migrant diatribe at a residents’ meeting in Dunstable, Bedfordshire in February 2023. He abandoned the group just two months later, claiming that he was “disgusted” by the leadership of the “doomed organisation”.
He is also known for his failed attempt to sue his former employer, the Open University, for alleged “discrimination” after he was sacked for racism. Cave’s case was dismissed in May 2023, the judge describing his beliefs as “akin to Nazism” and “not worthy of respect”.
For a sense of his views, this is what Cave had to say about black Brits and Jewish people:
He has also criticised Winston Churchill on the basis that he “destined European peoples toward the nightmare of globohomo” (Globohomo is a conspiracy theory alleging that subversive elites — often Jews — seek to impose a global “uniculture” and “weakening” populations by promoting liberal values, LGBT+ rights and immigration). In Cave’s view, attacking Churchill will “Undermin[e]” faith in the physical embodiment of ‘anti-fascism’” and therefore “liberate our people from the stifling cage that is the failing liberal tradition”.
On Holocaust Memorial Day 2022, he described the Holocaust as “the supposed execution of the 6 million”, and elsewhere said the following in relation to the proposed erection of a Holocaust memorial near Parliament:
“This arrogant move from the organised Jewish community is vile. How dare they feel entitled to lobby for a such a vulgar structure to be constructed in the heart of OUR capital city next to OUR parliament. We have nothing to do with the historic NSDAP apart from the fact that we are, like they were, white Europeans and so in their view we need to be reminded that we’re potential monsters because we’re cut from the same cloth. Whenever Jewish people highlight the Shoah (Jews don’t have a monopoly on the word holocaust) it’s not for the British people’s benefit and wellbeing, it’s cynical maneuvering [sic] to strengthen their cultural hand at our expense. When will Jews apologise for the phycological [sic] ache they’ve inflicted upon us?”
Telegram, 29 July 2021
He has also claimed that “no white British person should be in the army” because it is “controlled by ZOG” (ZOG is a white supremacist slang for alleged Jewish control).
Billy Green, based in Norwich, is yet another PA-turned-Homeland activist.
Green is a former member of the New British Union (NBU), an attempted revival of the British Union of Fascists. Green edited the newsletter of the NBU, a group that mostly consists of middle-aged men dressing up in interwar-era fascist blackshirts who are much-derided by the wider far right.
Green ran his own Telegram channel under the online alias “Kolibri”, through which he posted extreme homophobia, antisemitism and much else.
Green has scorned electioneering:
“There is no political solution. Only a cultural one, our only hope is to create a fifth column in society and culture, inspiring change in that way.”
Twitter, 13 December 2021
He has also admitted that he would prefer a fascist regime to democracy:
“I want fascism to resurge in Europe, so what? Far preferable to “democracies” controlled by oligarchs and bankers.”
Twitter, 15 June 2022
It was therefore somewhat surprising to see him campaigning for Homeland in the local elections last weekend.
Roger Robertson is Homeland’s sole local election candidate, standing in the Hartley Wintney ward of Hart in Hampshire.
Homeland is just the latest political vehicle to which Robertson has attached himself. A former member of UKIP, Robertson first represented the BNP in the European elections in 2004, eventually becoming the South East Regional Organiser for the fascist group. He was forced out of the BNP in 2008 after a rift with then-leader Nick Griffin.
Robertson reprised the South East organiser role as a member of For Britain, the anti-Muslim UKIP offshoot that collapsed in 2022. He then joined the British Democrats, a moribund BNP splinter, the same year.
Addressing the British Democrats’ AGM in 2022, he described himself as “to the right of Genghis Khan” and outlined his plan to obscure his party affiliation and stand as an independent candidate in the 2023 local elections, saying that once they’ve “got enough people with feet under the table […] then we gradually show ourselves”. He scraped second place in Hartley Wintney ward with 22.6%, a sizable increase on his 8.5% under the For Britain banner in 2019.
Robertson, who jumped ship to Homeland in February, is highly unusual among the membership in that he has actual experience in local politics. However, having no local activist base, Homeland has drafted in campaigners as far as Fulford in Staffordshire, some 165 miles away, to canvass for him.
Adam Clegg is a newcomer to the group, joining in March and quickly throwing himself into Robertson’s campaign.
Clegg was previously a Conservative Party activist, featuring in a Telegraph article bemoaning the plight of young right-wingers on campus. He unsuccessfully stood for election in Lincoln in 2019 (coming third with 15.9%), before becoming the “Head of Membership” for the Orthodox Conservatives, a marginal radical right youth group within the party. He left the Conservatives in 2022.
He has now torpedoed any political prospects he may have once had by joining the fascists and antisemites at Homeland.
For more information on the Homeland Party, read our report: The Fascist Fringe: Patriotic Alternative and its Splinter Groups
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