In the aftermath of the local elections, we survey the recent shifts and rifts within the fascist Homeland Party. In particular, we look at the group’s international networking and electoral prospects, as online delusions clash against reality.
After six months of rapid growth and much self-congratulation, the Homeland Party’s momentum has abruptly stalled.
Homeland split from Patriotic Alternative (PA), previously Britain’s dominant neo-Nazi group, in 2023 in order to pursue elections and “community politics”. The split revived fierce debates about electioneering on the extreme right, as fascists grapple with a long history of failure at the polls and reckon with the success of Reform UK, which won five MPs last year and 677 council seats this May on an anti-immigration ticket.
Homeland chairman Kenny Smith is committed to the “ladder strategy” — the belief that building support at the local level must precede national influence. After an unpromising start, the group gathered steam last September, its aggressive recruitment drives on X/Twitter sending membership ballooning to over 1,200 by April. The party’s success was “inevitable”, its propagandists insisted.
To many observers, however, it was wholly predictable that Homeland’s first real test at the local elections last month was to be a failure. The group’s five council candidates — who, we were told, have “strong local connections” — were overshadowed by Reform UK so entirely that none of them surpassed 3%. Their combined tally of 291 votes is significantly below that achieved by Homeland’s sole candidate last year, despite the party now enjoying far greater resources, membership and exposure.
The feeble results, coupled with several recent gaffes, has done much to expose inconsistencies and tensions within the party.
For instance, for all Smith’s bloviating about “community politics” and “sensible nationalism”, most of Homeland’s recent recruits are young, politically inexperienced and terminally online. These antisemitic edgelords are clearly more interested in internet posturing than the mundane realities of local politics. Durham-based Jackson Wright is just one example:
The Homeland leadership also seems more interested in impressing foreign politicians than local voters, jetting off to expensive conferences in lieu of campaigning on the ground themselves.
For instance, Smith kicked off the election campaign by taking the group’s Folkestone council candidate and X influencer Steve Laws on a jolly to the far-right Institut Iliade conference in Paris (Laws received just 50 votes in May’s election — one for every 2,000 of his followers on X). In the past three months, the Homeland leadership has also enjoyed outings to Berlin, Ghent and Milan.
The master tacticians also scheduled their own national conference the weekend before election day, thereby taking every activist off the campaign trail to listen to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) officials and a video talk from the French “intellectual” Renaud Camus.
The conference itself was marred by an ongoing rift that saw both Laws and Sam Wilkes (AKA Zoomer Historian) — the group’s two most popular online figures — quitting the party amid a homophobic scandal, alleging that Homeland is “going soft”. The public spat continues to deepen and has done much to dent faith in Homeland’s bumptious chairman among the rank and file. Laws is now poised to launch his own “remigration pressure group”, potentially splitting the Homeland membership further.
Knowing that the semblance of momentum is vital in generating support (and money), Smith is under pressure to prove that his path can deliver. For now, the party is papering over the cracks by associating with far larger and more successful parties on the continent, most notably the AfD. It has also courted Martin Sellner, among the best-known fascists in Europe.
Sellner is the figurehead of Generation Identity (GI), the pan-European far-right network that pushes “identitarianism”, a form of racial segregation. He is now working to inject identitarian concepts into far-right parties across Europe, most notably by normalising “remigration”, a euphemism for the repatriation of migrants and/or non-white citizens.
To this end, Sellner headed the Remigration Summit near Milan on 17 May, designed to build on a wave of support for far-right parties on the continent. The event brought in hundreds of activists to listen to speakers from the AfD, the Italian Lega party, the Portuguese Chega party — and a severely under-qualified Kenny Smith.
The invitation may owe to the fact that Homeland has itself adopted messaging from GI, including embracing remigration as its “key issue”. Several leading Homeland activists have pasts in GI’s hapless UK branch: among them is Tom Huburn-King, Homeland’s West Midlands Regional Organiser, who, as we have previously revealed, is also a former member of a neo-Nazi group described by a judge as having “a criminal and terrorist purpose”. Huburn-King was among those accompanying Smith to Milan.
In attending these events, Homeland hopes to swim in the slipstream of vastly more successful groups, even describing itself as “Britain’s Answer to AfD”. However, the posture remains laughable while it lacks a single elected councillor of its own.
Homeland is committed to the electoral route, but is doomed to fail while Reform UK dominates the anti-immigrant space. The party claims it will offer a viable alternative when Reform falters, but its growth is owed almost entirely to online recruitment and not “community politics”, meaning it is populated by politically radioactive young fascists more concerned with Hitler memes than litter picks.
The party vastly overestimates public support for its fringe positions, and association with foreign extremists is unlikely to do much to reverse its fortunes with the electorate. Homeland’s framing as “community champions” rings hollow when the leadership looks overseas rather than home.
For more information on the Homeland Party, read our report: The Fascist Fringe: Patriotic Alternative and its Splinter Groups
Prefer to listen? Click the play button to hear the audio version. Harry Shukman Reform UK is staffed by oddballs and enigmas, but none odder…
