The Yorkshire Patriots is a minor splinter group of the English Defence League (EDL). Led by David Smaller (AKA David Sunderland), the group took an organising role in the 2018 “Free Tommy” protests in Leeds that brought hundreds to the streets to support Stephen Yaxley-Lennon during his stint in jail that year.

The group has since failed to recapture such numbers, for example holding a small march in Dewsbury in 2019 that nonetheless saw seven arrests and cost the taxpayer £215,000 to police.

The Yorkshire Patriots re-emerged into prominence in 2023. Smaller and his allies organised and supported numerous anti-migrant protests in the North of England in conjunction with Alek Yerbury and his burgeoning National Support Detachment, with significant overlap between the two groups.

The largest was a 10 June demo that, after months of advertising, brought roughly 100 hardcore fascists and hooligans to the streets of Leeds. This included members of the Patriotic Alternative (PA) splinter groups the Highland Division and the Independent Nationalist Network, alongside longer-standing nazi groups including the National Front, the British National Socialist Movement, Blood & Honour (B&H), Combat 18 and the “Infidels” network.

In 2023 and the first weeks of 2024, Smaller and other activists were active in the ongoing protest camp outside RAF Scampton, a former airbase earmarked to house asylum seekers in Lincolnshire.

Smaller is now the Yorkshire organiser for Yerbury’s National Rebirth Party.