The Homeland Party is gaining momentum on the extreme fringes, with membership more than doubling within the last two months. However, the endemic antisemitism within its ranks is already troubling some new recruits.
The Homeland Party, a fascist microparty that splintered last year from Patriotic Alternative (PA), the UK’s largest neo-Nazi group, is gathering steam.
In April 2023, Kenny Smith, a former British National Party (BNP) organiser, led many of PA’s core activists into the new organisation in order to pursue “community politics” and to establish a “squeaky clean media image”. Smith hopes to project an image of “sensible nationalism”, adopting inoffensive branding and tightly controlled messaging.
For instance, the group rejects labels such as “fascist” and “ethnonationalist”, describing itself as “Nationalist” but defining the term along ethnic/racial lines. Homeland pursues the “ladder strategy” — i.e. gaining local power as a means to national influence — with the ultimate aim of realising “remigration”, a euphemism borrowed from the Identitarian movement.
This is essentially the same policy of repatriation championed by the extreme right for many decades. While Homeland avoids public displays of overt antisemitism, belief in the “White Genocide” myth — the notion that Jews are orchestrating demographic changes in order to replace “indigenous” Brits — is widespread internally.
After spending most of 2023 in obscurity, the group’s manoeuvrings are yielding fruit. Since registering as a political party this January — and especially since its national conference in September — the membership has boomed, standing at 520 at time of writing. While this is only roughly 3-4% the size of the BNP at its height, Smith has estimated that 70% of this membership is younger than 30. If accurate, this would make Homeland a serious outlier among far-right political parties.
Its youthful demographic owes partly to Homeland’s incessant recruitment drives on X/Twitter. Since January, the party’s following on the platform increased dramatically, largely thanks to a coterie of well-known fascist social media influencers. This includes “You Kipper”, a Mosleyite propagandist notable for having his videos promoted by the Christchurch killer two days before he massacred 51 Muslims in 2019.
Steve Laws, a so-called “migrant hunter” turned fascist from Folkestone, Kent, has also done much to boost the group’s online profile. Laws has already cycled through For Britain, UKIP, Reform UK and the English Democrats, and was formerly close to PA, for example speaking at the group’s national conference in 2022.
Laws has spent much of 2024 broadcasting a stream of base racial hatred and incitement to his 90,000-strong audience on X, including during the countrywide racist riots this summer. Nonetheless, he somehow seems to have evaded legal issues, and was a guest speaker at Homeland’s national conference in September and has since been appointed its Kent branch organiser.
However, Laws has already clashed with another post-conference signup, the former UKIP member and self-styled intellectual Peter North (AKA Northern Variant), who claims he joined despite regarding the group to be “underdeveloped intellectually” and that he himself is not “instinctively ethnonationalist”.
North has since expressed his unease after encountering the reality of Homeland’s antisemitic support base, which he described as vile, adding that his “membership is contingent on Homeland shunning crackpots”.
Quite how North had failed to register the widespread antisemitism within Homeland before this point remains mysterious. It appears he was either deceived by Smith, or deceived himself.
HOPE not hate and others have made the Jew-hatred, crank conspiracy theorising and Third Reich fetishism within Homeland entirely plain from its earliest days – for example, here, here, here, here and here.
Homeland is entirely dominated by cranks — they are not exceptions but the norm. For instance, Anthony Burrows, one of the party’s three central figures, lost his shotgun licence in 2021, the judge rejecting his August 2023 appeal on the grounds that he had:
“demonstrated views that were sympathetic towards violence aimed at non-white ethnic or religious groups, and his reckless provision of links to potential terrorist manifestos and literature were such that he was a danger to the peace.”
“Sensible nationalism” indeed. Buying the carefully confected image Smith wants to convey will cost joiners their public reputations, at minimum.
For more information on the Homeland Party, read our report: The Fascist Fringe: Patriotic Alternative and its Splinter Groups
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