Patriotic Alternative (PA) is a neo-Nazi group launched in September 2019 by Mark Collett, a former leading member of the British National Party (BNP). PA quickly became the most active far-right group in Britain and established new activist networks across the country. 

In recent years, however, PA has lost momentum. A series of splits — not least to the new Homeland Party in 2023 — and the imprisonment of key activists has damaged both capacity and morale. Despite its rebrand as a “white civil rights” organisation last year, PA has been overtaken by Homeland as the largest fascist organisation in the UK, and the group’s fortunes seem likely to decline further in 2025. 

Ideology and Strategy 

Launched with the aim of uniting isolated fascists into offline communities, PA quickly gained recruits from across the splintered British far right, connecting ex-BNP stalwarts with alt-right social media personalities, veteran Holocaust deniers, politically inexperienced young fascists and several former members and associates of the now-proscribed neo-Nazi terror group, National Action (NA). 

Organising these recruits into regional and national networks, PA has embarked on various forms of traditional political organising, online activism and media-baiting stunts, alongside internal “community building” activities, to spread its core message.

At the heart of PA’s ideology is the “White Genocide” myth, the notion that Jews are subversively orchestrating a demographic shift in order to destroy “indigenous” Brits. However, the group downplays its most extreme elements, particularly its antisemitism, when dealing with the public, claiming to simply be “raising awareness” about “demographic change”. 

PA is unable to contest elections in its own name, due to its repeated failure to register as a political party. Instead, it has supported candidates from other fascist vehicles or resorted to dirty tactics to influence elections, including distributing misleading leaflets made to appear as Labour or Conservative campaign literature but designed to discredit the major parties. In 2024, the group stood a lone activist as an independent at the local elections, and four PA activists stood as English Democrat candidates at the general election following a pact between the two groups. Collett has since dismissed the viability of electioneering, however. 

PA draws from the playbook of the alt-right, the loose, tech-savvy white nationalist movement to which Collett previously attached himself, and is orbited by various fascist social media personalities who produce large quantities of content each week. Banned from most mainstream online platforms, PA depends on loosely-moderated alternatives, most notably Odysee and Telegram, on which extremism can flourish more freely. 

PA aims to capitalise on hot button issues to foment a sense of white grievance. This includes exploiting cross-Channel migration, in particular targeting temporary asylum accommodation sites, and latching onto campaigns against Drag Queen Story Hour, a series of storytelling sessions for children organised at public libraries, in order to push its conspiratorial anti-LGBT+ outlook. Last year, it attempted to fuel feelings of injustice in the wake of the legal crackdowns that followed the summer riots, calling for the end of “two-tier policing” in the hopes of amplifying notions of “anti-white” discrimination.

Fault Lines and Splits

Despite its high output and considerable media coverage, the group’s growth has stagnated. There are several apparent reasons for this loss of momentum.

Firstly, PA’s brazen neo-Nazism has alienated many on the British far right, not to mention the wider public. Collett himself has a long history in fascist politics and carries much baggage. As HOPE not hate has repeatedly revealed, PA has accommodated and even promoted former activists from the proscribed group, National Action, a fact that has gained PA much negative attention. Members have also come under increasing scrutiny from the authorities, raising the potential cost of activism. 

PA has also struggled to retain activists, many of whom have lapsed into inactivity or defected to other vehicles, having grown frustrated with its endless social events and online streams. Others have been forced out amid bitter disputes, often with Collett himself.

PA’s structure renders it particularly vulnerable to splits. Its branches act with considerable autonomy, and the national rank-and-file gather only a few times a year. This fosters significant gulfs between regions and a disjointed understanding of strategy and purpose.

The first splinter occurred in July 2021 when a cluster of activists, mostly in the Midlands, formed the Independent Nationalist Network (INN). Next, a handful of former Scottish activists launched the Highland Division in October 2022. Both groups dissolved after achieving little of note, with some activists drifting back to PA. 

More significant was the desertion of the Leeds-based activist Alek Yerbury in February 2023. Allying himself with a circle of former English Defence League activists in Yorkshire, Yerbury headed numerous anti-migrant protests throughout 2023, before successfully registering his own political party, the National Rebirth Party (NRP), last February. 

However, by far the most consequential rupture occurred in April 2023 when Kenny Smith led a group of disgruntled officers to form the new Homeland Party. Smith took with him some of PA’s best-known figures, most of its regional organisers and its Scottish and West Midlands branches almost wholesale.

The split ostensibly owed to a dispute over the vetting procedures enforced by Smith, while Smith believes that Collett prioritises online content creation over offline campaigning, registering as a party and engaging in local politics. However, Collett and Smith were on opposite sides of the civil war that racked the BNP in the late 2000s and their recent alliance has always seemed precarious. 

These schisms, and the successful registration of Homeland and the NRP in 2024, have been demoralising, denting PA’s output, undermining its leadership and providing alternatives to which future defectors can turn. 

Arrests, Convictions and “White Civil Rights”

The jailing of key activists under race hate or terror-related charges has also been damaging. These include James Costello, James Allchurch and Kristofer Kearney, who all were sentenced to years behind bars in 2023. However, the most notable is Sam Melia, husband to Deputy Leader Laura Towler and the de facto third in command of the group, who received a two-year sentence in March 2024 for offences relating to his fascist propaganda network, the Hundred Handers, which was first exposed by HOPE not hate in August 2020. 

Collett, a former spin doctor for the BNP, has attempted to turn these convictions to PA’s advantage. Downplaying Melia’s extremism and portraying him as a martyr for “free speech” garnered considerable coverage among the wider right, and PA was able to raise almost £70,000 to “support” Melia and Towler, as well as far smaller sums for Allchurch and Costello (less than 15% and 5% of Melia’s windfall respectively).

Following the general election and summer riots of 2024, Collett and Towler have rebranded PA as a “white civil rights” group. This enables the pair to fully abandon the pursuit of party status and instead focus on their main strengths — spinning white victimhood narratives for money.

In doing so, Collett is following a path previously trodden by the American white supremacist David Duke, one of Collett’s main ideological influences and most frequent online collaborators, who rebranded the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as a modern “white civil rights” group in the 1970s. Similarly, Nick Griffin — Collett’s primary political mentor — resorted to marketing the BNP as a “civil rights organisation” following its crushing electoral defeat in 2010.

PA’s main campaign since announcing this new direction is fundraising for the families of “political prisoners”, i.e. those incarcerated for participating in the widespread disorder and rioting of the summer. So far, the group has raised £20,000 for this purpose, with beneficiaries including a man who hospitalised a police officer and another involved in a mob attack on an asylum accommodation site in Tamworth. 

Prospects

Since the split, PA’s leadership has attempted to firm up support amongst the fascist fringes through even more extreme messaging, for example inviting the Australian neo-Nazi and serial criminal Blair Cottrell to speak at its annual conference in 2025. In order to swell numbers, the group has also permitted organisers more freedom in vetting, although this has implications for the group’s security. 

However, PA activists have continued to trickle out to Homeland and other organisations. In January 2025, the group suffered a further blow when a significant chunk of its North West branch, which had been by far its most active, jumped ship to the openly neo-Nazi British Movement.

That month also saw the release of a BBC documentary that featured undercover footage obtained during a year-long infiltration of the Welsh branch. Among those filmed was Aaron Watkins, an activist exposed by HOPE not hate in 2023, who claimed that they should “Round [migrants] up into camps and if they refuse to leave, we shoot them.” Cottrell was also filmed claiming that the way to deter black criminals is to “literally skin them and hang a few of their bodies up across some traffic lights”.

The documentary has reignited internal fears that the group may be proscribed. Since 2021, PA has come under increasing scrutiny for its links to National Action, and in March 2024 was named as a group that promotes “neo-Nazi ideology” in the former government’s definition of “extremism”. Dame Sara Khan has led calls for a new law that would enable PA to be banned as a group that is “creating a climate conducive to terrorism”. 

With roughly 500 members, PA remains a large fascist organisation, and the return of Melia and other key figures to activism may provide the group with some much-needed energy. However, it remains a diminished force and its rebrand is unlikely to reverse its fortunes. As such, our concerns about PA relate less to its potential for growth but rather to its future direction. 

HOPE not hate, anti-fascists and media organisations have repeatedly exposed a dangerous and potentially violent degree of extremism within PA. Since the collapse of the BNP 15 years ago, a militant style of politics has spread into the UK’s fascist fringes, the most notable proponent of which was National Action, a group that casts a long and troubling shadow over PA. The possibility remains that a more overtly violent splinter, or individual acts of violence, may stem from the group.

PA has reinvigorated British fascism, and in one way or another, its ripples will continue to be felt on the political margins for years to come.

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