Steve Laws is a notorious ethnonationalist “influencer” from Kent. He has cycled through several far-right organisations in his relatively short time on the scene, including For Britain, UKIP, the English Democrats and Reform UK, as well being closely linked to the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative (PA). He is now the South East organiser of the fascist Homeland Party, a PA splinter group.

Laws helped to popularise “migrant hunting”, a form of activism that typically involves filming, harassing and intimidating refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. Starting in 2020, Laws filmed arrivals on the Dover coast and also made longer form (and poorly produced) “documentary” content, quickly gaining over 10,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Laws now focuses on his X/Twitter account, which was reinstated in 2023 and has 97,000 followers at time of writing. He also owns a sporadically-updated blog, with recent articles including one titled “OPINION: Deaths in the Channel, why should I care?”

Over the past year, Laws’s online output has become increasingly extreme. While he has long used dehumanising language, for example describing migrants and asylum seekers as “invaders” and “swarms”, he is now an open and vicious antisemite and relentlessly promotes the mass deportation of “millions” of non-white people from the UK.

In 2024, he published a multi-stage “plan” to remove immigrants and create an ethnically homogenous Britain (euphemistically referred to as “remigration”) that combines state force with more passive forms of harassment and intimidation. These include not using immigrant businesses, blocking immigrants in the roads and streets and much else.

Over the years, his links to fascist organisations have tightened. For example, he has repeatedly appeared on online streams with PA’s leader, Mark Collett and spoke at PA’s conference in October 2022 alongside a propagandist for a pan-Nordic, militant neo-Nazi organisation that is banned in Finland.

Laws has also been active in the UK’s far-right street movement, including leading a protest in Dover in March 2023 alongside Alek Yerbury, former-PA activist and now leader of the National Rebirth Party, and another in September 2023, alongside the National Front leader and oddball, Tony Martin. Laws spoke at another small demonstration in October in Westminster that he organised with Yerbury.

Laws also stood for UKIP in the 2022 Southend West Parliamentary by-election, held following the murder of David Amess MP, and then for the English Democrats in his home constituency of Dover & Deal at the 2024 general election. He performed appallingly in both, gaining just 185 votes (0.4%) in the latter.

Laws has had various run-ins with police over the years. In 2020, he was found guilty of taking a dinghy without the owner’s consent. He appealed this decision in 2021 (the court discontinued the case in 2022). In 2021, Dover Harbour Board also filed an injunction against Laws and other activists for unauthorised dockside filming. Whereas some of his co-defendants agreed, Laws refused to sign an undertaking to stay away from the docks and opted for a further court hearing.

More recently, Laws was arrested (and promptly released) at the disorderly protest in Whitehall, London, following the horrific Southport attack in July 2024. Laws commented gleefully on the summer’s racist riots, posting (and then deleting) a number of tweets in support of, or explaining away, various despicable acts. Laws has, so far, avoided prosecution for this output.

Last summer he was, however, sacked from his job booking cruises with Aviva after a co-worker, concerned by Laws’ extremism, blew the whistle on him using HOPE not hate’s articles as evidence.

In the autumn, Laws officially joined the PA-splinter group, the Homeland Party, after giving a speech at the group’s national conference in September, and in January 2025 was made Homeland’s South East Regional Organiser. Laws also spoke at the conference of the Portuguese far right group Reconquista in Lisbon last November on the subject of “remigration”, detailing his multi-stage plan to the audience in his characteristic charm-free tone.