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. 

After a slow start, Homeland gained momentum in 2024, buoyed by its successful registration as a political party in January and its national conference in September. Homeland has now eclipsed PA as the largest and most energetic fascist organisation in the UK and intends to build on its successes in 2025, although it faces serious challenges.

Ideology and Strategy 

Homeland is desperate to shed PA’s toxic reputation and project an image of “sensible nationalism”, adopting inoffensive branding, tightly controlled messaging and euphemistic language. For instance, the group rejects labels such as “fascist” and “ethnonationalist”, describing itself as “nationalist” but defining the term along ethnic/racial lines. 

The group pursues the “ladder strategy” outlined by Steve Brady of the National Front in 1987. Brady contended that establishing power at the local level through sustained, localised campaigning was a necessary precursor to national power. This approach was implemented by several BNP branches in the early 2000s, which became the official opposition on Burnley and Barking councils — successes Smith hopes to emulate.

Like the BNP, Homeland aims to exploit feelings of grievance in majority white neighbourhoods and foment anger against the major parties and minority communities. It aims to gain “control of the levers of power” locally, encouraging activists to join parish and community councils, the lowest tier of local government, as well as to infiltrate trade unions, local parent councils, NHS trusts and even allotment societies. 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 many decades.

While Homeland aims to recruit widely, it retains a highly ideological cadre of activists at its core who are just as antisemitic, misogynistic and conspiratorial as PA. For example, in 2023, Anthony Burrows, the group’s National Nominating Officer, was described by a judge as having: 

“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.” 

Alec Cave, Homeland’s National Media Officer, was described by another judge as having views “akin to Nazism” the same year. Other members have pasts in hardline neo-Nazi organisations, such as the now-defunct Scottish Nationalist Society, or have privately admitted that “normies” [normal people] recoil upon encountering their racist views. 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.

Progress in 2024

After spending 2023 with fewer than 100 members, last year Homeland’s fortunes improved. The group’s first boost came with its registration as a political party in January, a pursuit in which PA had failed numerous times, making Homeland appear the more professional and credible outfit. 

Homeland subsequently recruited a coterie of fascist social media influencers, including “You Kipper”, a Mosleyite propagandist, and Sam Wilkes (AKA Zoomer Historian), a Hitler-apologist YouTuber exposed by HOPE not hate. These figures have significantly boosted the group’s social media operation, leading recruitment drives and popularising its buzzwords on X/Twitter. Homeland’s following on the platform, on which (unlike PA) it is unimpeded by bans, increased from 1,000 to 30,000 in little over a year.

In January, the group launched a “Campaign for an Immigration Referendum” but omitted Homeland branding from its public material. The campaign has yet to gain traction, however, and the pretence of independence has since been undermined by the appointment of Kai Stephens (AKA Barkley Walsh), a young fascist with considerable baggage, as its spokesman.

In the May local elections, Homeland channelled its resources into a single candidate: Roger Robertson, previously a member of UKIP, the BNP, For Britain and the British Democrats. Robertson’s experience of local politics, which includes a decade as a parish councillor, is virtually unique within Homeland. Still, the group was forced to draft in activists from over 150 miles away to campaign for him. Following a HOPE not hate campaign in the ward, Robertson came third with just 13.5%, a considerable decrease from his 22.6% as an independent candidate in 2023. It appears that association with Homeland cost Robertson hundreds of votes. 

Meanwhile, Homeland members continue to get co-opted into parish and community councils, often failing to declare their affiliation in the process. Homeland has at least nine such councillors at time of writing: three in Scotland, four in the Midlands, and two in the South East/East of England. The party plans to build towards election runs in these locations, although some have already received negative local attention, potentially impeding their support..

Homeland’s second major boost followed its national conference in Wirksworth, Derbyshire in September. The event was addressed by the usual party figures alongside Manuel Schreiber, a low-ranking member of the anti-Muslim Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and Robert Grajny, “Foreign relations director” for the Polish far-right party Konfederacja. This enabled Homeland to boast of the “endorsement” of these far larger European organisations, thereby wildly inflating its importance.

The conference was Homeland’s first event of any size, and despite the leaking of the location by the anti-fascist group Red Flare and protests outside the venue, a flurry of signups have followed. Homeland is now considerably larger than most competitors on the fascist fringes, with a membership of 750 at time of writing. Smith estimates that 70% of members are younger than 30, which, if even close to accurate, would make Homeland a serious outlier among far-right political parties.

The highest profile signup is Steve Laws, a fascist so-called “migrant hunter” from Folkestone. Laws spent much of 2024 broadcasting base racial hatred and incitement to his considerable audience on X, including during the countrywide riots this summer. Nonetheless, he somehow seems to have evaded legal issues and is now Homeland’s South East regional organiser. 

In October, Homeland also swallowed Identity England (IE), a tiny and ineffectual successor of the far-right youth group Generation Identity (GI) UK, which had itself folded in 2020 after being excommunicated by the international GI network following a series of infiltrations and debacles. In practice, Homeland has gained perhaps ten additional activists from this supposedly “historic” merger, although now has an active presence in London under former GI UK and For Britain activist Sam Sibbons. 

Homeland continues to court more influential groups and figures overseas, including Martin Sellner, the figurehead of the international GI network who is credited with popularising the term “remigration”. Homeland claims that Sellner, who has been banned from entering the UK, reviewed its remigration policy before publishing. 

Pairing its localised politics with broader online campaigns, Homeland has enthusiastically joined an international effort to normalise the notion of “remigration”, its activists flooding X and other platforms with the word and applying to register the slogan “remigration now” with the Electoral Commission. 

Homeland is attempting to walk a fine line, presenting itself as both an ideologically coherent and more “sensible” outfit than PA, but also a hard-line alternative to Reform UK. The party is desperately attempting to recruit figures exiled from Reform for their extremism, and is also courting members of the Lotus Eaters, a far-right media outlet, in the hopes of boosting its visibility. So far, however, these attempts have been largely unsuccessful.  

Prospects

As PA declines, Homeland aims to consolidate its place as the dominant party on the extreme right. The group intends to bolster its infrastructure by hiring paid staff and expanding its branch structure, including filling its vacant Regional Organiser positions in the South West, North West and Northern Ireland. It also aims to build its reputation at home and overseas with the “Big Remigration Conference” in April, which is set to feature Renaud Camus, the French writer credited with coining the “Great Replacement” theory. Importantly, it also intends to target a small number of seats at the 2025 local elections, putting its core ladder strategy into practice.  

However, Homeland faces considerable challenges. The group is roughly 0.4% the size of Reform UK, which is likely to harness the anti-immigrant, anti-establishment vote in upcoming elections, especially if it succeeds in establishing a functioning grassroots structure. Even in seats in which Homeland candidates are not directly contending with Reform, the highly time intensive “ladder strategy” does not guarantee success. The failure of Robertson to come close to winning his seat last May is a case in point. Many of Homeland’s new recruits appear politically inexperienced and chronically online, and may prove ill-suited to the mundane realities and inevitable disappointments of local politics. 

As so often is the case, Homeland also routinely overestimates public support for its views, and its aim to become a mass movement whilst retaining its ideological purity has the potential to cause issues internally. For example, Peter North, a self-styled intellectual who signed up after the conference, has criticised the antisemitism of Homeland supporters as “absolutely vile”. Another short-lived signup labelled Homeland a “demented boys club” after claiming that “their spokesman & a pack of other inadequates told me women shouldn’t be able to vote” at a party social in December.

Homeland has a long-term vision, and the political landscape is unpredictable. Committed fascists are attempting to infiltrate local institutions, and this demands the close attention of anti-fascists and campaigners. While the party continues to gain momentum, Homeland at present remains a peripheral political force.

For more information on the Homeland Party, read our report: The Fascist Fringe: Patriotic Alternative and its Splinter Groups