So, Lois Perry finally recovers her health sufficiently to appear on Andre Walker’s online TV chat show and “tell all” about her resignation as UKIP leader mid-election campaign, after only 34 days in the job. And, frankly, ‘delusional’ doesn’t remotely do it justice.
Firstly, she claims that the main reason she left was that there was something “sinister” going on, which she had not foreseen: certain elements in the leadership, whom she does not name, “wanted to go after quite an extreme viewpoint”. Specifically, people “at the very top of the party” who were anti-Muslim, homophobic, and anti-Semitic, wanted a tie-up with Tommy Robinson. This shocked her. Oh really? And she didn’t know that only the previous year UKIP had lifted its membership ban on former members of fascist and neo-Nazi groups?
Then she claims that she had personally brought in Nick Tenconi as her “brilliant” Deputy Leader who, she says, “doesn’t represent” that extremist tendency. Nor does Chairman Ben Walker, apparently. And yet, Tenconi, who on her sudden departure became Leader, is the man now driving UKIP in the direction of working together with, yes, Tommy Robinson, with whom he sat down very recently to discuss co-operation. And it was Ben Walker who described admitting fascists and neo-Nazis as members as a move to “attract like minded people”.
After that it all becomes even more absurd, narcissistic even. She says that when she took the job she believed (“not blowing my own trumpet”) that she could be the “female Farage…charismatic or whatever”, a fantasy shattered when Farage returned to active politics during the election, and she realised there wasn’t room for two Farages in British politics. Oh, dear…
Then she claims, mysteriously, that she was ‘the plaything for a group of very wealthy Brexit millionaires, who wanted to get a message across”. Sadly, her inept interrogator, the right-wing gobshite Andre Walker, failed to explore this intriguing claim. Or perhaps just decided it was imprudent to do so.
We are tempted to conclude by saying that Lois Perry gives every impression of being someone who doesn’t even know what day it is. Not just because she tweeted that this confessional interview would be on Thursday, and then took place on Wednesday. No, it is the bizarre claim that she was at death’s door in hospital, with pneumonia, when “I’d been leader for a couple of days”. Now, it’s quite true she had been hospitalised with pneumonia; this was indeed the reason she gave when she announced she was quitting. But she was actually discharged from hospital a week before her leadership election victory was even announced.
Former UKIP deputy leader Rebecca Jane, who savaged UKIP and especially Ben Walker in a recent open letter to UKIP members published in Searchlight, put it succinctly:
“It’s just all so overly dramatic… and the line ‘female Farage’ – is honestly insanity. She really thinks a lot of herself. I’m all for confidence but this is narcissistic delusion!”
The battle between Mark Collett of Patriotic Alternative and Alek Yerbury of National Rebirth Party, is becoming very bitter and very personal.
Yesterday, Collett (pictured right) went online to accuse Yerbury’s partner, Kate Fanning (pictured left) of being a grass. This, it seems, is because she went to the police when some kind of threat was made against her and her child, by someone connected with Patriotic Alternative. Collett said she’d sent voice notes to him saying she’d reported the matter.
She responded: “If people want to invade the privacy of my child, threaten and endanger my newborn baby, then yes of course you will get reported to the police, especially if it’s an organisation known for harbouring paedophiles and terrorists”.
Yerbury’s NRP is, of course, a split from Collett’s PA at which this particular barb was aimed.
Collett retorted that this was evidence she reports ‘nationalists’ to the police. His view that you don’t inform on nazis, no matter what they are accused of, is well known.
This, however, prompted Yerbury (pictured centre) to join in with the obvious question: unless Collett knew who had made the threats, how would he know it was a nationalist?
Hostilities show no sign of abating between the principal rivals for leadership of the neo-Nazi movement, Mark Collett of Patriotic Alternative and new kid on the block, Alek Yerbury of the National Rebirth Party.
Now things threaten to get even more acrimonious. Collett has announced that PA’s annual ‘White Lives Matter’ jolly will this year take the form of a demonstration outside Hull prison, where their race martyr hero Sam Melia is currently banged up. The event, says Collett, will also highlight the ‘plight’ of other PA members like James Allchurch and James Costello, also rightly jailed for race hate offences.
“This” he says, “is an event that EVERYONE can get involved in!”
Well, not quite everyone. Widely considered to have bested Collett in the recent debate, where he accused the PA man of encouraging white flight to racially-pure communities and thus “telling white working-class people in our big cities is that there’s nothing we can do to help you” Yerbury is now rubbishing the idea of the prison demo.
So far he has said nothing publicly but is telling supporters not to attend as it will serve absolutely no purpose, and certainly do nothing to get Melia released. He is also suggesting privately that if Collett and Co had spent some of the £100k they raised on the back of Melia’s trial to get him a better legal team, he might not have ended up serving the sentence he has.
The PA leadership is already spitting tacks that Yerbury came off best in the debate, at times making Collett look a fool. This latest treasonous act will do nothing to improve relations. Yerbury knows that. And it seems he doesn’t really care.
Picture: In happier times, Sam Melia with Alek Yerbury.
Well, look at this. Short-lived UKIP Leader Lois Perry “is back”. And in the pink, it would appear.
And now she’s promising to “tell all” on Talk TV on Thursday. She’s referring, of course, to her sudden resignation as Leader, announced in the early hours of the morning, just a few weeks after being elected to the job, and only three weeks before the general election.
But wait – didn’t she say at the time it was all to do with her poor health, and her ever so slow recovery from pneumonia? Is she saying now that wasn’t true? That there’s another reason? That it was all a bit of a fib? Heaven forbid.
Her departure was so sudden, so disruptive, that it prompted talk within UKIP of a Faragiste sabotage plot. So it’s nice to see that Nigel Farage (and only Nigel Farage) is tagged in. How thoughtful.
Seventy years of hurt. Perpetual failure. Never had an MP elected. Scraped two MEPs in 2009 via the proportional voting system. Offer nothing except hatred and violence. Communities under attack. Ethnic minorities targeted. Terrorist plots failed. This is the miserable history of Britain’s extreme right. Its current representatives include Patriotic Alternative led by Mark Collett, The British Democrats – a party that includes long-time fascist activists including Andrew Brons, Kevin Scott, Laurence Rustem and Jim Lewthwaite – The Homeland Party, a breakaway effort formed by disillusioned PA members, and the recently formed National Rebirth Party (NRP) led by Alek Yerbury. There are other groups, but these are the main neo-fascist formations.
Given a disastrous General Election campaign, constant infighting, the rise of Nigel Farage and Reform, the thuggery, violence and factionalism witnessed on the far-right fringes, it’s no wonder its personalities have been struggling to make a case.
And thus, on the night of Tuesday 16 July, less than two weeks after polling day, it was time for the long-awaited public verbal bout between movement leadership contenders Alek Yerbury and Mark Collett. In the blue corner the fascist, and in the even bluer corner the nazi. Venue: Unity News Network’s media channel. Referee: David Clews. At stake: the future of British Nationalism, apparently. (Bantamweight division, we assume).
Purely as a matter of history, we know more about Patriotic Alternative’s Mark Collett than we do about Yerbury. Collett is a familiar figure, well known as a hater, grifter, con man and long-time failed fascist. An all-round dodgy geezer. A wrong ‘un. From cowering in an armchair and crying when confronted by a masked (but not terribly scary) Kevin Watmough in Leeds two decades ago, to the horribly embarrassing ‘Young, Nazi and Proud’ TV documentary to an optically disastrous appearance on a TV show with Russell Brand, Collett has been a continual political disaster.
So here he was on UNN defending 20-odd years of fatuousness.
Collett says that “ethnocentric community politics” is the only way forward. Elections are no longer a worthwhile use of his time and effort. Which does little to explain why he has twice tried and failed to register PA as a political party. And it sheds no light on why he encouraged people to vote Reform UK in the recent General Election – and admits to doing so himself. It was all tactical, no doubt.
Neither is he able to explain how his strategy, if we can call it that, of running weekend camps, nature walks, banner drops and occasional flash mob operations – normally numbering 50 or so – will bring UK fascism any nearer to power.
Yerbury accuses Collett of having given up: “He has no vision for a future nationalist society”. Collett believes that “it is in white flight areas that we can build a movement.” He believes that this is the “only way to win”. He uses the term “ethnically homogenous” many times in this debate. He talks about harmony and nature and community. Pretty words. But where does it take his membership and activists? ‘To a car park close to a nature trail somewhere near you’ is possibly the answer.
Yerbury, for his part, notes Collett’s many “tactical failures”, his “wrong approach” and, particularly, his “defeatist”, and elitist, attitudes. “What you’re telling white working class people in our big cities is that there’s nothing we can do to help you.”
Yerbury points out that some white people are unhappy living in multiracial urban areas, and that Collett’s approach abandons them. Collett speaks of these areas, and their people, with contempt. To him, anyone living in such an area enjoys drug taking, race mixing and degeneracy. These are not “white flight” areas, so Collett doesn’t include them in his worldview. They’re beyond hope, “thus leaving 80 per cent of the UK white population to suffer,” says Yerbury.
Collett’s approach reminds us of the many American ‘intentional communities’ formed over the years. Aryan Nations in Idaho. Almost Heaven in the same state. Elohim City. All associated with survivalism, gun-running and terrorism, not to mention the hideous Christian Identity religion. Although Collett doesn’t strike the listener as especially religious, it’s clear that he’s looking to build white communes, if not white communities. But, as Yerbury points out, without political power none of this could ever be possible on anything more than a highly localised scale. If that.
Of course, this online fash fight is being held within an echo chamber. This pair of bigots claim to speak for, represent even, The British People. As we know, the vast majority of Brits do not obsess about racial purity (whatever that is). What they’re primarily concerned about is environment, hospitals, schools, public transport, law and order. Neither Yerbury nor Collett talks about this. Collett is obsessed by race, and he obviously hates the vast majority of the British population who, he claims, are asking for a terrible future by accepting race mixing. Aka ignoring Collett.
Alek Yerbury, meanwhile, is obsessed by means and ends and victory.
It wasn’t long in this online horror and hate show before Collett started sniping at Yerbury, calling him “insane”. Not good optics in a debate. Collett looked visibly nervous throughout, lots of lip biting, lots of anger, clearly on the defensive. His attitudes and conclusions are probably shared by a majority of nationalists, one supposes, but this means that the fascists are going to go round and round in circles, navel-gazing and continuing to fail.
Serious political movements always end up involved and engaged in some sort of electoral politics. That’s what the NF and BNP were all about. And they saw some success. Smaller parties, the kind of operations like British Movement, and the panoply of other perfectly formed kitchen table operations, achieved nothing. Violence sometimes. Terrorism even. Political posturing certainly. Prison for those who went far too far. A total failure, morally, politically, practically.
Collett’s possible strong suit is his long time involvement in and on the far right. And he’s keen to remind listeners about this. But he’s not responsible for any failures in his 20-plus years of activity. He blames everyone except himself. The system. The Jews. The Muslims. The Reds. Big Business. Small business. Liberals. Democrats. Probably people who support the wrong football team. And no far right chat happens these days without the claim that “It was Margaret Thatcher’s fault in 1978; she stole our ideas and our voters.”
Cue 2024 and discussions about Reform UK (the “system safety valve” according to all fascists) and Nigel Farage, not, it seems, unbeloved by Mark Collett. The racist and, arguably, fascist ideas promoted by many Reform UK candidates and supporters, means that it’s dangerous. But given its profile, structure, financing, and better known personalities, it’s the vehicle people are more likely to support. In Europe, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, it is not Collett’s type of posturing “community politics” (and grift) that’s causing the big waves. It’s the Yerbury style of operation – although Yerbury’s optics are, how can we put this…not the Gucci suits of Giorgia Meloni so much as Hitler: The Trenchcoat Years.
Yerbury is highly critical of Collett’s support for Reform UK in the recent General Election. Even more confusingly, says Yerbury, Collett simultaneously called for voters to support Reform and PA candidates, who were standing under the banner of the English Democrats in a very confusing not so much marriage but tryst of convenience. “You can’t be against elections and then stand candidates in them.” Indeed.
Collett despises the fact that Yerbury served in HM Forces. He’s been in the trenches, literally. Collett hasn’t. He’s wimped out at every turn. Yerbury believes that nationalists can learn useful skills and gain experience by serving in the military. Collett has nothing to say here apart from suggesting that “Alek wants white youth to die for Zionism.” Yerbury is basically suggesting that Collett has been a parasite on the back of nationalism in the UK for 20 years. And, as Yerbury hints, a goodly number of those associated with Collett have mysteriously ended up in big trouble with the law, and yet somehow Collett hasn’t.
Yerbury does, at least, offer a vision. This ideal, of the kind of society he and serious nationalists want to create, is a vital element missing in the past. “We didn’t know what we were fighting for. Everybody knew what we were against but never what we were for.” Collett, it is argued, has already given up. He’s a defeatist. Why? Because only a few chosen areas, reserved for the chosen people one assumes, will be worthy of saving under his proposals. Unacceptable, says Yerbury. “What about working class people that can’t afford to move out of urban areas?” Good question, and not one that Collett has an answer for.
No amount of Woodlander nature initiatives or nice walks in the countryside waving flags will affect political change. That’s what Yerbury says. Collett, he believes, is simply going through the motions, making a bit of noise and raking in the funds. Collett says that “we haven’t got the resources to fight elections”. Well, what about the near £100k raised on the back of the Sam Melia conviction? That might go some way towards running an effective campaign…
Yerbury comes across as someone who sees the future of nationalism as primarily a matter of organisation, belief, the triumph of the will; of practicality and organisation. Of effectively organising trained activists in precisely the places he’s already operating: Leeds, Manchester, Hull, Birmingham. Yerbury takes something from the Strasserite style of urban politics, of Goebbels organising in Berlin making a ‘red city’ much more friendly to National Socialism. When Goebbels was first organising in that city (after 1926), he was told he’d never be able to win. But he did because of organisation, effective use of violence, belief and focus. This offers a potential model for Yerbury and co, as worrying as that might be.
Collett loses it several times during the debate. This doesn’t look good. He’s clearly a man with brittle self-control, unable to accept any criticism even from close supporters. Many of the approximately 1,500 people watching this live stream are critical of his rudeness, his patronising and pompous approach. Livestream chat-room comments are biting: “Mark is a reactionary not a revolutionary.” “Nobody with leadership ability talks about people like this.” “If Mark is so good at politics how come he messed up his political party application three times.” “Mark 1 Alek 2.” “PA is just a money making machine.” “Why doesn’t Mark just move to the Orkneys” (Please no, say the islanders) “Mark is recruiting for the Homeland Party.” “Collett is too busy in hotel rooms with…” (no, we’d better not repeat that one). “Mark has been the biggest let down in British Nationalism since Nick Griffin…”
Yerbury’s support for “young white men joining the military” may not be popular within nationalism but this doesn’t affect tonight’s viewer’s opinions very much. People appear to be angry with him because he’s the newer kid on the block, highly motivated and not much interested in listening to former and current activists telling him about their difficulties, or telling him he’ll never achieve anything. It’s certainly true that older activists will not enjoy being told how useless, incompetent and inept they’ve been by some Johnny-come-lately whippersnapper.
Criticism of Yerbury is varied. “We don’t have 15 years Alek.” “Bet I’ve fought more elections than him.” “Bin them both.” “Alek Yerbury is going places. Mark is not.” “Alek is an agent provocateur.” “Alek has no real ideas.”
While no one landed a knockout punch, we reckon the battle of Britain’s aspiring Führers was a points win for Alek Yerbury. While we find it hard to lend much credence to his belief that his National Rebirth Party, at some point in the future, sweep to power, we can’t visualise Collett sweeping anything more impressive than the fag-ends in a staff car park.
All in all, a most instructive evening if only because it demonstrates how far Britain’s fascist fringelets are from achieving political power. They can’t even agree as to the basics. They’re largely living in a distorted fantasy past, of Empire and war, of domination and control, where they imagine themselves living the dream life. Their dream, our nightmare.
But there is one other thing only vaguely hinted at during the two hours of to and fro. The elephant in this room is us – not just Searchlight but other anti-fascist groups, from those involved in direct action, to mass movements (Anti Nazi League, Unite Against Fascism) to community campaigns like the one organised to kick the BNP out of Dagenham some 14 years ago. Between us, we have tripped up quite a few aspiring British Führers in the past. And we will help them to fall over their own feet again and again in the future.
