The NRP, a new party led by the fascist caricature Alek Yerbury, seems destined for electoral failure. However, it has recruited a potentially dangerous collection of nazis and other maladjusted individuals. HOPE not hate explores the group’s ideology, strategy and key figures.
The National Rebirth Party (NRP) is a new fascist microparty led by Alek Yerbury, an oddball would-be dictator now based in Manchester.
The NRP, which gained party status in February, aims to harness populist anti-migrant sentiment into a formal political movement. So far, it has recruited a small collection of activists with pasts in a variety of far-right groups, including Patriotic Alternative (PA), the English Defence League (EDL), Britain First, the British National Party (BNP), National Front, the British Movement and more.
The organisation is predicated on obvious strategic errors and is staffed by figures extreme and off-putting even by the standards of the far right. However, there is reason to be concerned about the degree of extremism fomenting within the group.
Below is a brief overview of the NRP’s platform, prospects, branches and key individuals.
The NRP is just the latest vehicle for Yerbury, who has cycled through several projects in his three years of activism.
A privately-educated former soldier from Australia, Yerbury joined the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative (PA) in the autumn of 2021. He split with PA in February 2023 to launch his own organisation, the National Support Detachment (NSD), aiming to establish a faux-military force that would confront left-wing activists at street protests.
Unsurprisingly, the reality was a far cry from the disciplined “NSD platoons” Yerbury had envisaged. Accompanied by a band of former EDL activists, Yerbury toured the north addressing a series of diminishing anti-migrant protests in his khaki suit, only to be reliably outnumbered by counter-protestors.
This phase culminated in the calamitous protest camp outside RAF Scampton, a site earmarked to house asylum seekers, last winter. The camp was defined by squalor, squabbles, arrests and accusations of stolen funds and substance abuse, as Yerbury desperately tried to control the chaos. The ultimate outcome of this months-long effort was the total alienation of any local sympathy his campaign may once have had.
Abandoning street protests, Yerbury now heads a political party that is both highly ambitious and extreme. Unlike other PA splinter groups, he has dismissed the much-vaunted “ladder strategy” once embraced by the BNP, i.e. the notion that establishing support at the local level through sustained, localised campaigning and council seats is a necessary precursor to national power. The NRP forgoes council contests, aims directly for seats in parliament and primarily targets urban areas.
Yerbury appears to sincerely believe that, through this strategy, he can seize national power in 10-15 years. This has puzzled many observers, not least because the NRP makes little effort to broaden its support and instead offers a startlingly authoritarian raft of policies.
For example, the group’s manifesto states that “only people of British heritage or lineage” would qualify for citizenship and that “foreigners whose presence is harmful to the interests of the national community be expelled, without exception”. Moreover, citizens “who refuse to carry out their duties will be stripped of their rights”.
The death penalty would be handed to those who commit “the most serious crimes, including crimes against the nation and its people”, a category would include those who “carry out crimes that cause direct or indirect harm to enormous numbers of people (including habitual low-level crime)”.
This definition would seem to include several people Yerbury has rubbed shoulders with at his own events. For example, Tommy Allan, a former EDL and North East Infidels activist, has travelled to at least six events organised, co-organised or addressed by Yerbury since the start of 2023. The serial criminal has 91 convictions to his name, most recently for an attack on two police officers in which he repeatedly kicked a female officer in the stomach and racially abused another.
In pursuit of its lofty aims, Yerbury is spending the NRP’s limited resources launching a print magazine and travelling the country to address handfuls of activists in noisy pubs while dressed like a mid-20th century dictator. Even the NRP’s branding would have felt outmoded decades ago.
While Yerbury is prone to lecturing others on strategy, it seems the main function of his group is to enable its members to more fully inhabit their Weimar-era fantasies. While it may prove attractive to PA offcasts and other fascist fantasists, it will never break free of the extreme fringes.
However, he and his followers are pushing a dangerous kind of politics that demands close attention. We have already identified several individuals convicted for the country-wide riots and disorder this summer who have previously rubbed shoulders with Yerbury and his allies at various events.
Moreover, Yerbury has long nurtured a preoccupation with political violence, for example fantasising about killing and interning his perceived enemies in labour camps and making appalling comments about the assassination of Jo Cox MP. Others now active within the NRP have themselves previously endorsed violence.
At present, the NRP is engaging with the political process. However, it has potential to act as a crucible for violent extremism, especially if disillusionment sets in following its inevitable failures at the polls.
The NRP’s Leeds branch is headed by David Smaller, who also leads the Yorkshire Patriots, an EDL splinter group. After organising a series of small but costly far-right protests in the late 2010s, Smaller and his circle re-emerged with the wave of anti-migrant protests in 2023, accompanying Yerbury on numerous dismal outings across the north. Smaller was also a fixture of the disastrous camp in Scampton last winter.
Once his stronghold, Yerbury has lost some of his key supporters in the city, including Paul Leeming (AKA Anthony Leeming), who has described Yerbury as an “ignorant Hitler loving Nazi wannabe” who is “out to scam your money”.
Leeming has instead launched his own street protest group, “Rise of the Footsoldier”, adopting the name of a film franchise about football hooligans and violent cocaine traffickers. One might speculate on its appeal to Leeming, himself a Leeds hooligan with a lengthy criminal record, including for breaking the leg of a “friend” while under the influence of alcohol and cocaine.
Notably, Leeming has also been joined in this venture by Scott Pitts, who was Yerbury’s right hand throughout 2023 but appears more interested in street politics than electioneering at present.
Another of Yerbury’s closest supporters, the former EDL and North West Infidels activist Simon Scott, appears to be retreating from activism altogether after serving 10 weeks in prison for his online activity during the recent racist riots.
Active in the NRP’s branch in Hull is Jonathan Mainprize, a former candidate for the BNP and National Front. Mainprize, who has also dabbled in the British Movement and other fringe fascist concerns, spends his free time dressing up as a Confederate soldier and posing with weapons.
Other activists include Harry Jackson, a budding YouTuber, and Barry McGrath, who stood for the now-defunct anti-Muslim group For Britain three times in Hull between 2019 and 2022.
The NRP’s “Membership Officer”, Lauren Vargues (AKA Lauren Brookes), was previously linked to the now-defunct Independent Nationalist Network and writes regularly for the NRP’s website and her own little-read outlets. Her own political record is uninspiring, however, having received just 26 votes (1%) for the Social Democratic Party in Hull (West Carr ward) in the 2021 local elections.
The Manchester branch is headed by Aaron Oates, who was a member of Britain First’s security team in 2019 and 2020. During this period, he pumped out a stream of antisemitic neo-Nazi material via his own Telegram channel, including a propaganda video from the banned terrorist group National Action.
He defected to PA in 2021 but left the following year, citing a lack of support after he was visited by Counter-Terror officials. He eventually found a home in the NRP, which he considers a “‘National Socialist’ type political party”.
For a time, Oates was also a listed officer in the White Indigenous Rights Alliance (WIRA), a supposedly forthcoming “social enterprise” masterminded by Katie Fanning. Despite incorporating more than three and a half years ago, WIRA has yet to formally launch.
Fanning, a former UKIP official turned open fascist, is a highly divisive figure in the far-right fringes. She is also the romantic partner of Yerbury, who was himself listed as a WIRA officer for a period.
Birmingham is among the NRP’s largest branches. A key figure is Donna Brookes, who was active in the anti-Muslim “counter-jihad” movement before immersing herself in anti-migrant activism with the Midlands Says No (MSN) campaign, a now-defunct group that played a key role in the RAF Scampton camp.
Brooks is also involved in a group that practises a form of heathenism, alongside Ian Lord and the former EDL activist Chris Mann (AKA Chris Aenglcynn). The trio attended a recent NRP meeting alongside the National Front activist Andrew Edwards and the Walsall-based fascist Melanie Powell.
The NRP has appointed officials to several other branches that have, as of yet, failed to get off the ground.
A Glasgow branch was announced in April, under the hardcore nazi Martin Grove (AKA Archie Bronson). Grove is a former PA officer, defecting in 2022 to form the Highland Division, an openly nazi PA splinter that collapsed within a year.
Grove, who has a history of promoting violence, is also linked to Active Club Scotland (ACS), an openly fascist “fitness” and martial arts training group. It is unclear whether he remains actively involved in the NRP.
The NRP’s low bar was further evidenced by the appointment of Chris Mitchell, a minor social media figure, to head its Yarmouth branch. Mitchell is a former PA organiser who ran the now-defunct Patriotic Talk podcast alongside Kristofer Kearney (AKA Charlie Big Potatoes), a former member of National Action who is currently serving time for terror-related offences.
Mitchell, who has a seemingly bottomless appetite for infighting, left PA in 2021 to join the Independent Nationalist Network, another tiny and now-defunct PA splinter group. He has since been convicted of hate crime offences for maliciously targeting a drag performer in 2022.
Unsurprisingly, the Yarmouth branch has yet to achieve anything of note.
For more information on Alek Yerbury and his allies, read our report: The Fascist Fringe: Patriotic Alternative and its Splinter Groups
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