Hiding at a village hall in Staffordshire, Mark Collett’s Patriotic Alternative today confirmed that they intend to abandon any attempt at “mainstreaming” racism.
Collett has given up electoral politics and intends instead to follow the extra-parliamentary road previously travelled by Colin Jordan’s British Movement, even though similar strategies have already led to the jailing of several senior PA activists for crimes including terrorism.
His choice of overseas guests was a clear sign of Collett’s intentions. Three weeks ago in Wirksworth Town Hall, Derbyshire, Collett’s rival Kenny Smith welcomed guest speakers from the German AfD and the Polish Konfederacja, parties which between them have well over a hundred members of national and European Parliaments.
Today, though they were meeting just a few miles away across the border in Staffordshire, at Hanbury Memorial Hall, Collett’s guests were from a different political world where activists are more likely to be found in a jail cell than a council chamber or parliament.
As Searchlight reported yesterday, one guest was Australian nazi and convicted criminal Blair Cottrell. Joining him today, in front of an audience that included veteran British nazis Mark Cotterill and notorious Holocaust revisionist Lady Michèle Renouf, was the Bavarian stormtrooper Sascha Rossmüller, from what used to be the NPD and is now (confusingly for British readers) called Heimat (Homeland).
Rossmüller has been an active nazi for over 30 years and was a leader in the “radical” faction that persuaded the NPD (for years Germany’s leading far right party) to adopt the name change. He helps edit the party magazine Deutsche Stimme and spent years as a full-time party employee. During internal faction fights within the NPD, Rossmüller spent several years as its national deputy chairman.
As with his Australian fellow speaker, Rossmüller has criminal convictions involving violence, in his case connected to the biker scene where for years he has been involved with the “Bandidos” gang.
He has also been an official of Roberto Fiore’s “Alliance for Peace and Freedom” which claims to be a pan-European nationalist alliance though many of its affiliates are only three fascists and a rottweiler.
Having Cottrell and Rossmüller on board may encourage Collett’s most thuggish members, including Cardiff football hooligan Joe Marsh, but will do little to stop the flood of defections by more politically minded extremists to the rival Homeland Party.
It’s now a brutal bare-knuckle fight for leadership of British fascism. During the past 48 hours open hostilities have broken out between leading figures from the Homeland Party and Patriotic Alternative, with Homeland’s leader Kenny Smith describing his ex-comrades in PA as “a corrupt and disingenuous fringe cult”.
In one corner is Smith (above, left), 52, born in the Hebrides and a committed racist since joining John Tyndall’s BNP as a 19-year-old. Like most of the Scottish members, Smith deserted Tyndall to support Nick Griffin’s BNP takeover in 1999. He then helped lead an attempted coup against Griffin in 2007 and was expelled. At that time a bitter enemy of Griffin’s close aide Mark Collett, Smith patched up his differences and joined Collett’s Patriotic Alternative. But then at the start of last year Smith led a cadre of prominent PA organisers who split from Collett to form the Homeland Party.
In the other corner is Mark Collett (above, right), 44, born in Leicestershire and (like his rival) a racist activist since his teenage years. While a student at Leeds University, Collett joined the city’s National Front branch that was then controlled by one of Britain’s most violent but erratic nazis, Eddy Morrison. He quickly abandoned Morrison and became one of Nick Griffin’s young acolytes, before an acrimonious split with the BNP führer in 2010. Collett became one of the most hated men inside the far right and spent several years away from active politics, then worked his way back into nazi good books. He built contacts via mysterious fundraiser Larry Nunn and some of the leaders of the now banned terrorist group National Action, before creating Patriotic Alternative in 2019.
A few months back, some of the greybeards of the far right tried to patch up a non-aggression pact between Smith and Collett, but the idea faded quickly. This week it became obvious that their feud will continue in a permanent and bitter split.
Just as Blair Cottrell, one of Australia’s most violent nazi leaders, was unpacking his bags before speaking at this weekend’s PA conference, Smith decided to denounce Collett’s party openly, ignoring advice to tone down the infighting. And Collett’s errand boys have been dishing out similar abuse in return.
The overt difference between these groups is that Homeland has registered as a political party and at least in theory aims to fight elections. In practice things haven’t worked out well. At the May local elections Homeland made a great song and dance about its single candidate Roger Robertson, a former BNP organiser who attempts a country squire image. Smith and his friends made no secret of their ambition for Robertson to win a district council seat in Hampshire, and concentrated the party’s entire resources on this single ward. But Robertson could only scrape 13%.
After this weak vote by his party’s flagship, Smith avoided the General Election. To general surprise it was Collett who pushed a handful of PA activists forward to stand in July. As PA is still not registered with the Electoral Commission (and exists as a private business run by Collett and his deputies Laura Towler and Steve Blake, not as a political party), Collett struck a deal with the far right’s favourite solicitor Robin Tilbrook. This resulted in PA nazis standing officially as parliamentary candidates for Tilbrook’s “civic nationalist” English Democrats.
Steve Laws, a prolific racist video blogger, also stood as an ED and for a short time seemed to be cosying up to PA. But last month Laws abandoned Collett and openly signed up with Homeland as a guest speaker at their conference. He now encourages his many online followers to follow him into becoming a card carrying member of Kenny Smith’s party.
Steve Laws speaks at Homeland conference
Collett’s fury at Laws’ decision is one reason for the increasing bitterness of the PA-Homeland split.
PA’s partisans argue that Homeland is selling out to civic nationalists. Smith and his allies argue that PA isn’t serious about political activism and is more of a club for online hobbyists and Hollywood Nazis.
On Wednesday night hostilities worsened when Collett interviewed one of Blair Cottrell’s fellow Australian nazis Jacob Hersant, founder of the National Socialist Network. Hersant is the first person to have been charged under new anti-nazi laws in the state of Victoria, after he gave a Hitler salute on the steps of a court in Melbourne. This followed his conviction for violent disorder after he was part of a group of fifteen masked men who attacked two passengers in a car.
Australian nazi Jacob Hersant
A naïve viewer commented on Steve Laws having recently given a “great speech” at the Homeland Party conference. Collett testily replied: “No, do not join them. He (Laws) can do whatever he wants, but if you’re here on this stream and you’re listening to Jacob, Jacob’s basically saying ‘don’t cuck’. Jacob’s saying ‘don’t give in to the pressure to sell out’. These clowns have got a handful of community councillors, which are non-elected positions. They pretend they are serious elected positions. One of their community councillors, in order to keep his position, has already voted for diversity and inclusion on the council. So they had a vote and this supposed nationalist councillor voted in favour of diversity and inclusion. At the end of the day, if you call yourself a nationalist party, and you have the mildest toehold on power in Britain that you could possibly have, but you’re already voting for diversity and inclusion, then what’s the point in even existing. There’s none.”
The PA take on diversity and inclusion…
Collett continued: “I don’t think that anyone who sits with a bunch of liberals and endorses anti-white policies can be held up as a nationalist. And if Steve Laws wants to support that kind of nonsense, that’s up to him. You know, that’s on his head, that’s on his conscience. I’ve never sold people out in my life. I’m not going to start selling out. Although I might have certain differences with people about optics, one of the key issues is this. If you call yourself a nationalist, and you endorse the policies of replacement; if you endorse the policies of diversity and inclusion, which is just a series of codewords for anti-white, then you’re not one of us. It’s as simple as that.”
Collett then invited his Australian guests to join in the mudslinging, but Hersant was visibly embarrassed to have been dragged into this factional rhetoric and replied: “Well’ I don’t know a lot about the Homeland Party, and I don’t know a lot about Steve Laws. I’ve seen some of it on Twitter…”
After Hersant had finished a lengthy evasion, refusing to condemn Homeland on the grounds that as an Australian he couldn’t verify what was being said on either side, Collett became even more irritated and insisted that everything he said about Homeland had been “verified” as it had been reported in the press. He ploughed on:
“They did that because they’re selling out. I can tell you this as well. They won’t be supporting you. They won’t be supporting the kind of work you do. They won’t be supporting political prisoners in the UK. They haven’t supported anyone in the UK that’s been arrested for protesting or for saying things on social media. I can tell you now, they are not the real deal, and the people who set them up are people that everyone should steer well clear of. Especially the ones who have admitted in court to committing basically what are considered acts of terrorism, but the police won’t act against them – when young lads are getting dragged out of classrooms and genuine nationalists are getting arrested for the same thing and being given five years in jail. Anyone that manages to get away with that kind of stuff, when they’ve admitted doing those things in court, it just glows in the dark. I’m telling you that for free.”
The next day Laws replied in what everyone understood as a reference to Collett: “Sly digs from so-called allies do not go unnoticed.”
Smith chipped in with a clear implication that Collett and PA were grifters: “There are gatekeepers actively engaged in subversive behaviour. It appears to mainly be because they fear their grift will crumble if serious nationalism becomes a major force.”
This prompted instant fury from one of Collett’s few remaining Scottish supporters Stephen Thomson, a prolific video streamer who calls himself Chief Moody.
Thomson/Moody told Smith, “The only grifter in this chat is you. Everything you accuse people or groups of doing can be pointed right back at you.” To which the Homeland leader replied: “I don’t give the subversive types any oxygen. You and your disingenuous group do nothing but damage. Cheerio!”
In fact, Smith couldn’t resist chipping in again with further attacks on PA, not only giving them oxygen but giving free entertainment to anti-fascist onlookers. “With so-called allies,” he opined, “it’s usually about the grift and maintaining their niche market.”
As Searchlight readers might guess, the third party in PA’s messy divorce, Alek Yerbury from the National Rebirth Party, was by now craving his share of the limelight. He decided this time to join Smith in putting the boot into Collett and perhaps especially to PA deputy leader Laura Towler, who is specially hated by Yerbury’s partner Katie Fanning.
“Their whole financial model”, Yerbury wrote, “is based on the monetisation of dissidency and being a notorious ‘underdog’. They effectively can’t afford to succeed. It’s why these kinds of people sabotage everything they touch but can offer no rational explanation for why they are doing it.”
A day later Smith was still fuming about PA: “We want nothing to do with that corrupt and disingenuous fringe cult.”
And to think that just 18 months ago Smith, Collett and Yerbury appeared to be best of friends, working closely together in PA’s leadership team. But as Searchlight has seen many times over more than half a century, there’s only one thing a fascist likes more than spewing hate against any convenient minority. And that’s spewing hate against a factional enemy who fishes in the same pond of donors.
A year ago, then Home Secretary Suella Braverman came in for heavy criticism when notorious Spanish neo-nazi Isabel Peralta was allowed in to the UK to address a nazi rally. Now, Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has equally serious questions to answer, as a violent Australian nazi with multiple criminal convictions is allowed into the country to address the Patriotic Alternative conference this weekend.
Blair Cottrell has several criminal convictions and has called for a portrait of Adolf Hitler to be displayed in every Australian school. Yet this weekend he will be speaking at a conference packed with impressionable young people, to an organisation that has seen several of its leading Hitler-worshipping activists imprisoned for inciting racial hatred and terrorist offences. Why does the Home Office – now under a Labour government – persist in allowing violent nazis into the country?
Blair Cottrell first became known in 2015 as Melbourne organiser for an anti-Muslim street gang, United Patriots Front. He took over from founder Shermon Burgess as UPF’s national chairman later that year, and soon became leader of the most extreme nazi wing of Australia’s anti-immigration movement.
Violence regularly broke out at Cottrell’s anti-mosque rallies. Some fellow racists saw him as too extreme, but Cottrell succeeded in publicity stunts including being photographed with the right-wing Queensland MP Bob Katter.
Cottrell has also been one of the leaders of the Lads Society, an early version of the far right’s current strategy of recruiting and training young men through martial arts clubs and survivalist camps.
The Lads Club attempted to recruit Brenton Tarrant, who went on to murder 51 people in terrorist attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019. Tarrant praised Cottrell online as “Emperor Blair Cottrell”.
Though Cottrell distanced himself from Tarrant’s terrorism, he has his own record of criminality and violence, both personal and political. In 2012 and 2013 he was convicted and jailed after arming himself with a tomahawk, stalking his ex-girlfriend and her new partner, and setting fire to their home.
He has displayed his violent misogyny several times since learning nothing from these convictions (including drug trafficking and burglary offences). In 2018 he posted on what was then Twitter, sneering at a Sky News political reporter: “I might as well have raped Laura Jayes on the air.”
Cottrell leads the street gang arm of Australia’s nazi movement, while its ideologists include Thomas Sewell, Jacob Hersant and Joel Davis. All these men are in their 20s and 30s. Davis spoke at PA’s conference last year. Now Cottrell’s appearance further cements the links between PA and Australia’s vilest nazis, built up during several years of PA leader Mark Collett’s video streaming.
Have UK border security and the Home Office learned nothing from this summer’s racist violence on British streets? Why are nazis with serious criminal records being allowed into the UK to address extremist conferences?
There’s been a whole lot of outrage on far-right online feeds about a claim made recently by former Reform UK (and Farage) PR man Gawain Towler. He claimed that back in 2010, UKIP, then led by Nigel Farage, asked Hope Not Hate to vet prospective members and candidates who might have extreme far right backgrounds. At that time, of course, HNH was the campaigning arm of Searchlight, splitting away in late 2011.
Towler was, for many years, PR guru to UKIP, and then the Brexit Party and was very close to Farage. Unfortunately, his chum turned on him recently and fired him as Director of Communications for Reform UK. Which may or may not have some bearing on this story. Who knows…?
Whatever the motive, it’s certainly prompted fury on the far right. Most recent to get themselves all worked up are the foul creatures who publish Heritage and Destiny, house rag for self-styled neo-Nazi intellectuals:
“Reform UK showed its true colours this week when one of Nigel Farage’s chief lieutenants – veteran spin doctor Gawain Towler – admitted that Farage’s old party UKIP had shared information with the ‘anti-fascist’ organisation Hope not Hate.”
And H & D doesn’t stop there: the anonymous author (likely either editor Mark Cotterill or his errand boy Peter Rushton) goes on to accuse Searchlight of all sorts of nefarious deeds. But more of that later.
The trouble with Towler’s claim about us vetting UKIP members is that it is, well, in a word…bollocks.
Or, in two words, total bollocks.
Here’s what he said in an online interview online with the Spectator’s James Heale:
“Many years ago, we worked with Hope Not Hate to winkle out the fascists from our own ranks. At that time, when we were ripping them out of our system, there were times when one of the guys in the press office was in touch with them, just to double check: ‘We think this guy’s dodgy, is he on your list?’”
He amplified the claim later when challenged online about this gross act of betrayal by racist activist Steve Laws:
“In about 2010, one of the staff would run names past a HNH staff member. UKIP was riddled with former NF and BNP fanatics, we didn’t want racists then or now.”
Well, for the record, let us state here: it never happened. And, for the avoidance of doubt: it never happened.
But there’s something else spun by the H & D lie machine that never happened either. It alleges, based on a claim made in Simon Heffer’s biography of Enoch Powell, that “during the 1970s Searchlight obtained private papers and other documents from a burglary at the home of Powell’s political secretary Bee Carthew”.
So here’s what did happen. In 1968, Enoch Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech had inflamed racist sentiment across the UK. Prime Minister Edward Heath sacked him from the Tory front bench but even four years later, Powell divided the Tory party. He dominated its annual conference, and there was much debate as to whether he would split and form a new party.
There was an unofficial, arm’s length operation working on his behalf, building a potential membership base among his supporters. It was called Powellight and was run by a nasty racist piece of work called Bee Carthew. She was not, we might add, Powell’s political secretary.
Bee Carthew (left) marches to Downing St in 1972 to present petition against immigration. With her, left to right: Joy Page, Harvey Proctor and former Deputy Director of MI6, George Kennedy Young. (Photo: Mike Cohen)
And Powellight did indeed hit a bit of a problem. In his biography of Powell, Simon Heffer writes this:
“The divisions within the party, which Powell was doing so much to heighten, may or may not have been behind a burglary at the flat of Bee Carthew, Powellight’s secretary, shortly after the conference…
“Most of Powellight’s files, listing details of members and their addresses, were stolen too, as well as some Monday Club files – Mrs Carthew was its meetings secretary at the time. She had written to The Times about Powellight, a letter that had generated a huge response, but which had also given Powellight’s address.
“The police soon came to the view that the burglary was political; and it set the group back, since among the files stolen was one containing names of would-be applicants for membership…
“Some of the material was published later in the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, and Powellight’s organisers drew their own conclusions about who had been responsible…”
This, needless to say, is an outrageous calumny. At no time was Searchlight involved in a burglary of Bee Carthew’s flat or any other premisses used or controlled by her. The suggestion is outrageous.
The clearest sign yet that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, and UKIP are planning to link up was given in an online interview with Yaxley-Lennon posted yesterday.
Speaking on Tousi TV, the online channel of right-wing commentator Mahyar Tousi, he was asked what he thought of UKIP and its leader Nick Tenconi. He said:
“UKIP are far stronger than any other political party. I believe that Nick has shown great leadership, …
“You need a people’s party that is not going to kick the working class and not going to deem them as racist and far right which Nigel Farage has done multiple times.
“I like UKIP. I actually messaged the lads. It’s just… my life has gone chaotic. I face prison this week, I’m trying to finish a film.
“I messaged Nick, and I messaged Ben Walker, to have a discussion with them”
Robinson makes clear he has no time for Reform UK because leader Nigel Farage does noit oppose ‘demographic replacement’ and is not committed to ‘mass deportations’.
“I thought let Reform be the political party and us be the cultural movement But I saw Nigel Farage’s cowardice in the week of taking over, saw him select the Muslim who funded him the most money, to be the chairman and I thought ‘Well you’re never going to deal with the Islamisation of this nation’.
“So there does need to be a political party that pushes them so maybe UKIP’s that solution.
“I hope to meet the boys when I get back if I’m not in jail.”
UKIP posted the clip online, welcomed Yaxley-Lennon’s endorsement, and said, laughably, “UKIP stands firmly with Tommy and the British working class”.
Searchlight first suggested the possibility of such a link up back in August. There were a number of indications, the main one being a warning from Lois Perry, when she resigned as leader during the general election campaign.
She claimed that there was something “sinister” going on “at the very top of the party” where some people, “wanted to go after quite an extreme viewpoint”. Specifically, she said, they wanted a tie-up with Yaxley-Lennon.
UKIP leadership figures were also involved in a planning meeting for Yaxley-Lennon’s 27 July ‘Uniting the Kingdom’ march and rally in London, where other future co-operation was also discussed.
At that event, Tenconi was allowed to pose at the head of the march, looking for all the world like he was leading it.
Earlier, in March, Yaxley-Lennon was warmly welcomed to a UKIP event in Llanelli by the fraudster Dan Morgan and the former trade union buster, Stan Robinson, local UKIP activists who also run the extremist Voice of Wales online channel. Robinson is the Party’s Lead Spokesperson for Wales and was a candidate in the general election.
The irony, of course, is that in 2018 UKIP was plunged into crisis when then party leader Gerard Batten appointed Yaxley-Lennon as the party’s ‘grooming’ adviser. Batten, who had only recently become leader, was passionately anti-Islam and wanted to move the party firmly in that direction. The association led to a wave of resignations – including most of its 24 MEPs – from the party before Batten was removed and the plan abandoned.
Ironically, UKIP’s present chairman Ben Walker was heavily involved in engineering Battens’ removal but is now a key player welcoming the likes of Yaxley-Lennon and other extreme right wingers and Islamophobes back into the party.
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