The Homeland Party is a fascist political party that splintered from Patriotic Alternative (PA), the UK’s largest neo-Nazi group, in April 2023. 

The group formed after Kenny Smith, a former British National Party (BNP) organiser, led chunks of the PA membership – including almost the entirety of the Scottish and West Midlands branches – to defect en masse. The split was strategic rather than ideological, stemming from a loss of faith in PA’s leadership and a desire to contest local elections. 

Homeland has since experienced a remarkable rise and fall. Gaining momentum in 2024, the group ballooned to 1,400 members, eclipsing PA as the UK’s largest fascist organisation. However, a series of spats and splits in 2025 has seen the membership plummet and soiled Homeland’s reputation among the wider far right. The group is unlikely to fully recover.

Ideology and Strategy 

Homeland is desperate to project an image of “sensible nationalism”, adopting inoffensive branding and euphemistic language. Influenced by the National Front and BNP, the group promotes the “ladder strategy”, believing that establishing power at the local level through sustained, localised campaigning must precede national power. 

Like the BNP, Homeland aims to exploit feelings of grievance in majority-white neighbourhoods against minority communities and the major parties. It hopes to gain “control of the levers of power” locally, encouraging activists to infiltrate parish and community councils, the lowest tier of government, as well as other local institutions.

Homeland eventually hopes to leverage its local power into national influence, with the ultimate aim of realising “remigration” – essentially the same policy of repatriation championed by the extreme right for decades. 

Homeland attempts to present itself as both an ideologically coherent and more “sensible” outfit than PA, but also a hard-line alternative to Reform UK. However, it retains a highly ideological cadre of activists who are just as antisemitic, misogynistic and conspiratorial as PA. At the core of Homeland is the “White Genocide” myth, the notion that Jews are orchestrating demographic changes in order to replace “indigenous” Brits, but this is only alluded to in its public output.

Rise…

After spending 2023 with fewer than 100 members, Homeland benefitted from its registration as a political party in January 2024, a pursuit at which PA had failed numerous times. Now with a veneer of legitimacy, Homeland recruited a coterie of fascist social media influencers, including Sam Wilkes (AKA Zoomer Historian), a neo-Nazi YouTuber. These figures greatly boosted the group’s presence on X, where Homeland’s following rocketed from 1,000 to 30,000 in little over a year. 

A second major boost followed Homeland’s national conference in Wirksworth, Derbyshire in September. The event was addressed by representatives of the anti-Muslim Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the Polish far-right party Konfederacja, allowing Homeland to boast of the “endorsement” of these far larger European organisations. 

Most significantly, Steve Laws, a popular fascist influencer, was recruited at the event. Laws, who was subsequently appointed South East regional organiser, was instrumental in driving recruitment over the next six months. During this period, Homeland also swallowed Identity England, a tiny and ineffectual successor of the far-right youth group Generation Identity (GI) UK, gaining an active presence in London. 

Laws, Wilkes and other activists led aggressive recruitment drives on X, and the group peaked at roughly 1,400 members around April 2025, of whom Smith estimated 70% were younger than 30. The group also boasted 14 councillors at the parish/community level. 

Homeland also gained recognition among far-right groups overseas, and the leadership enjoyed outings to Berlin, Ghent, Milan, Oslo, Paris and Vienna in 2025. Notably, the group successfully courted Martin Sellner, the figurehead of the international GI network. Homeland enthusiastically joined Sellner’s international effort to normalise remigration, attempting to own the term in the UK. 

…and fall

HOPE not hate has long highlighted inconsistencies and tensions within the party. Homeland’s euphemistic language, and Smith’s habit of telling potential recruits what they want to hear, has led to wildly conflicting understandings of the group’s purpose. 

Moreover, Homeland’s new recruits were politically inexperienced and more interested in internet posturing than the mundane realities of local politics. This is especially problematic as the ladder strategy is highly time intensive and does not guarantee success. The failure of Homeland’s sole local election candidate in 2024, ex-BNP official Roger Robertson, to win his seat in Hart, despite a decade’s experience as a parish councillor, is a case in point. 

The May 2025 elections proved more humiliating, when the group’s five council candidates 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 Robertson the previous year, despite the party enjoying far greater resources, membership and exposure.

This lamentable showing owed partly to the fact that the leadership appeared more interested in impressing foreign politicians than local voters. For instance, Smith kicked off the election campaign by taking the group’s Folkestone candidate Steve Laws to Paris. Smith also scheduled the group’s own national conference the weekend before election day, thereby taking every activist off the campaign trail to listen to AfD politicians. 

The conference itself was overshadowed by the fact that Laws and Wilkes had recently quit in homophobic outrage after the fleeting appointment of an organiser with an LGBT+ background. The party’s so-called “moderates” resigned shortly after, notably Pete North, who became widely reviled within the party for criticising its endemic antisemitism. 

The spat exploded again in July after a group of party officials, led by former treasurer Jerome O’Reilly and Norfolk organiser Kai Stephens, demanded Smith’s resignation in a public letter. The letter, signed by dozens of members and officials, labelled Smith “volatile, paranoid, and ideologically inconsistent” and listed organisational inefficiencies, strategic errors and ideological compromise – especially the perceived softening of its homophobia and antisemitism. 

Most of the group’s media team quit en masse, among them founding member Callum Barker. Barker complained of a lack of support during the anti-migrant protests in Epping, Essex, with Smith jetting off to Europe as local tensions peaked.

The party responded with personal attacks on the ringleaders, which alienated yet more members. 

Prospects

The split is not fatal, and most of Homeland’s National Council remain loyal to Smith. However, activity has dropped dramatically both on and offline. X is now dominated by a large and noisy community of critics. 

Laws, unshackled by any concern for “optics”, has launched his own pressure group “Remigration Now”, offering a home to defectors. Others have trickled to PA, the National Rebirth Party and particularly the British Democrats, which offers a similar political vision to Homeland. 

There appears to be little political space for Homeland. It has none of the necessary brand recognition with the public to trouble Reform UK at any level, while its “sensible nationalism” is deemed insufficiently radical by its former base. 

The risk posed by Homeland continues to be at a local level. Committed fascists are attempting to infiltrate local institutions, and this demands the close attention of anti-fascists and campaigners. However, nationally Homeland remains a peripheral political force.