Well, as we predicted, recently departed UKIP Party Director and NEC member Pat Mountain has now also resigned her Directorship of UKIP Ltd, the company which controls the party, and indeed as a party member. So, it’s an angry goodbye from her, the latest in a long list of high level departures, as concerns about the current leadership spread.
Oddly though, Lois Perry, the former party leader who resigned on June 16, during the election campaign and after only a few weeks in the job, continues to be listed as a director in company records. There is, of course, a legal requirement to notify any change to Companies House within 14 days of it taking place.
On 15 June, influential white nationalist “Groyper” leader Nick Fuentes attempted to hold a fourth version of his America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC IV) in Detroit, Michigan. It was his latest move to pull the right in a more antisemitic and fascist direction.
Amidst the chaos of an ill-planned event, Fuentes (above) and a coterie of followers and “VIPs” were booted out of three venues. Along the way, Fuentes made clear his current strategy is not “America First,” but “antisemitism first” – a move befitting longtime neo-Nazi David Duke’s appearance in the Motor City to sing Fuentes’ praise.
David Duke turns out to hear Fuentes
When Fuentes and the Groypers emerged in 2019, they targeted the influential far-right college-oriented group Turning Point USA (TPUSA). In Detroit, Fuentes continued this practice with his near-annual ritual of showing up at TPUSA’s event to be quickly ejected.
Kicked out again
On 14 June, Fuentes was accompanied to TPUSA by a gaggle of Groypers and former MMA fighter Jake Shields. At Fuentes’s side, Shields confronted TPUSA security with the refrain that Nick’s expulsion was because “you can’t criticize Israel” there. Fuentes added, “Because Israel controls this event.” Getting laughter from his trailing Groyper sycophants, he declared, “This is America first, not Israel first.” The antics signaled the antisemitism rampant at the failed AFPAC IV.
White nationalist Nick Fuentes (red hoodie) at the first cancelled venue
Fuentes Fraud
Fuentes’ jaunt to TPUSA came on the same day AFPAC IV was booted from the Russell Industrial Center. On 15 June, Fuentes wrote, “The venue called the cops to kick us out 24 hours before the event.” Fuentes’ 330,000 Twitter followers and 62,000-plus Telegram subscribers were not informed until a day after the cancellation.
Jaden McNeil, an estranged former Fuentes ally, declared, “Instead of letting people know and working overtime to find a new one [venue], he did his routine TPUSA walkthrough and streamed on the couch with Sneako and Jake Shields.”
A spokesperson for the Russell Industrial Center explained that “The event was canceled due to fraudulent, knowing misrepresentation of the true nature of the event by the production company for their client.” They were told it was a “private, high-class corporate event” and that the center “downsize our normal security protocols as they kept ensuring this was a corporate event with all professional corporate attendees.”
McNeil contrasted this with previous AFPACs, “Nick’s team would call and report that there would be a Nazi event to see if they’d cancel” and “write contracts so if the venue pulled out they’d pay a ridiculous fee.” He added, “What you’re seeing is Nick for the first time attempt to do an event alone and fail MISERABLY.”
The number of Groypers scheduled to attend the event is in dispute. Fuentes claimed 2,000 guests were expected. A Proud Boys chapter argued Fuentes “wildly exaggerated how many were attending the conference. Claiming they’d sold out the space, but the organizers were trying to sell tickets at the door for the 700-person venue.”
Just under 300 Fuentes fans attended an outdoor speech by the Groyper leader, probably offering the best estimate of the potential size of an AFPAC IV crowd.
While far fewer than Fuentes’ “count,” it was larger than generally mustered by white nationalist groups like Patriot Front, National Justice Party, Blood Tribe, or Active Clubs.
Left to Right: Kevin DeAnna, Jared Taylor, Anthony Cumia, Nick Fuentes, Lucas Gage, Keith Woods
Behind closed doors
Booted from the Russell Center, the Groyper crowd went to a club in Greektown for a “close-door event” for “sponsors, AF [America First] students, and VIPs.” Those VIPs were drawn from longtime white nationalist movement figures Jared Taylor of American Renaissance and James Kirkpatrick (real name Kevin Deanna), as well as white nationalists Lucas Gage (Angelo John Gage) and Irish antisemite Keith Woods.
Jared Taylor at AFPAC’s hastily organised pub gathering
For years, Jared Taylor boosted the need to open the movement to white nationalist Jews – something that had led to conflict with neo-Nazi David Duke. At the beginning of his bar room speech, Taylor was greeted with cheers and chants of “Jared.” In turn, the veteran racist called the gathered Groypers “an inspiration.”Taylor, whom Nick Fuentes had recently dubbed “pro-Jewish” and a “Zionist,” did not visibly raise the issue of the event’s stark antisemitism.
In the wake of Fuentes’ loss of top lieutenants in recent years, Fuentes settled for a motley crew of lesser “VIPs” like Shields, anti-vaxxer Anastasia Loupis, and online “influencers” Anthony Cumia, Elijah Shaffer, Dan Lyman and “Leather Apron Club.” Other VIPs included activists who had moved to the right of their old far-right groups, like former TPUSA leaders Evan Kilgore and Morgan Ariel.
Fuentes’ VIPs also included a few people of color, such as streamer Tenyro, CensoredTV figure Ryan Katus Rivera, “journalist” Sulaiman Ahmed, and Patriot J.
People of color at such events have led some analysts to talk about a “multi-racial” brand of fascism. It would be a misnomer for this event. A handful of people of color had long traveled alongside the white nationalist movement.
“VIP” streamer Lyndon Perry pushed back against the idea that the event was multi-racial in any meaningful way. Bemoaning that the movement must face the reality of a multi-racial society and can’t expect “100 percent purity,” he pointed out that the crowd was some “95 percent” “white dudes,” save for a few “token minorities.” Perry also described that AFPAC speakers Jared Taylor, James Kirkpatrick, and Vincent James spoke “all about white identity.”
The inclusion of a few people of color caused consternation among other white nationalists, including Jason Kessler, a lead organizer of the murderous 2017 Unite the Right rally, and a Telegram account linked to the crassly racist American Futurist.
As the bar room event droned on, the speaker’s racism led things to escalate, resulting in the group being booted from the bar and Fuentes’ acolyte “Sneako” being punched by a security guard.
As Perry recounts, James Kirkpatrick stepped to the podium and gave the “most extreme” speech, including talking about needing a “white identity” and getting AIPAC “out,” referring to the American Israel Political Action Committee – something Perry interpreted as “like fuck Israel.” Perry continued that during Kirkpatrick’s speech, patrons at the bar celebrating a birthday “got angry” and turned up their music, leading to Perry getting a drink thrown at him.
The most telling ideological moment of the day came during Nick Fuentes’ 15 June speech in front of around 300 supporters across the street from the facility where the TPUSA event was held.
Antisemitism First
Fuentes’s 29-minute balcony bullhorn address amounted to little more than political posturing and antisemitic diatribe. Following audience chants of “Christ is King,” a common mantra among white nationalist Groypers, Fuentes primed his audience by declaring of TPUSA, “I don’t think they believe that Christ is king…At Turning Point, they think that Israel is king.”
While criticizing Israeli government policies in Gaza does not in itself constitute antisemitism, Fuentes’ version rehashes age-old antisemitic tropes of a “Jewish mafia” being in control of the United States.
Asserting that Detroit is a “city that was built by the great industrialist Henry Ford” (rather than the trade unionists who built the automotive industry), Fuentes praised Ford as a “great patriot” for “his activism in exposing the influence of the Zionist movement and the Jewish mafia,” specifically referencing the auto mogul’s publishing The International Jew. [This led to cheers and applause].”
Through his Dearborn Independent newspaper, Ford published antisemitic screeds, including The International Jew and a reprint of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic forgery used to gin up pogroms against Jews in Czarist Russia, later being embraced by German Nazi leaders. In 1938, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the German Nazis.
Nick Fuentes is also known for praising Adolph Hitler. Driving home such a presence in Detroit, Groypers Tyler Russell and Dalton Clodfelter posted a photo of themselves the day before the event – Clodfelter holding up a picture of Adolph Hitler and Russell appearing to raise a beer to the German Nazi Fuhrer.
Fuentes also drove home that his antisemitism and fascist proclivities are bound to Christian nationalism, castigating Israel for controlling “the Christian country that’s the United States of America,” blasting the idea of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” and repeating the antisemitic canard that Jews killed Jesus. Fuentes mocked the Judeo-Christian tradition, “If they’re talking about the Inquisition, well, you know, maybe I can get behind that.”
Asserting, antisemitic-style, that Israel controls the United States in a manner akin to 18th-century British colonialism, Fuentes proclaimed, “That is why the only patriotic movement that can claim the mantel of ‘America First’ is the one that says we must have a second American revolution from the Jewish mafia and the state of Israel.”
Loud cheers and chants of “America First” from the crowd ensued.
As if on cue to undergird Fuentes placing antisemitism at the heart of his white nationalist politics, veteran neo-Nazi David Duke showed up in Detroit where he described that he was present “to support Nick” and that he considers Fuentes a “comrade.”
The dramatic demise of UKIP continues unabated: another long serving, senior party loyalist has cut and run for the hills in the wake of the party’s disastrous election campaign and the fallout from it.
Pat Mountain, UKIP’s Party Director, has over the last few days been airbrushed out of all leadership positions recorded on the party website. Three weeks ago she was taken off the party’s Policy Team where she specialised in immigration, and over the last few days has also been quietly removed from the NEC list, from the list of party spokespersons (she spoke for them on Immigration and Housing) and from the leadership list where she was Party Director. She has not yet been removed as a director of UKIP Ltd, the company which controls the party, but that may now only be a matter of time.
Of all the recent departures, this is one of the most significant. Mountain has been a member of UKIP for more than a decade. She was interim leader during the 2019 general election and deputy leader for a period after that, and has been a party candidate in local council, parliamentary and European elections on numerous occasions. She was one of the group of ‘plotters’ who delivered the chairmanship to Ben ‘rogue builder’ Walker in 2020.
Her spell as leader, however, was not without its difficulties. During the 2019 election she appeared in an interview with Adam Boulton on Sky TV in which her, let us say, fragile grasp of basic facts became a topic of much derision within the party. You can watch it here.
It was this car crash interview which led to the sobriquet ‘Catherine Tate’s Nan’ being conferred upon her.
Mountain has not officially announced her resignation from any of these posts so there is no clear reason why she has gone. There are, however, unconfirmed rumours that it may be to do with her concerns over the manner in which a Reform candidate withdrew his nomination at the very last minute in the Wyreley and Penkridge constituency, leaving a clear run for UKIP candidate, Janice MacKay.
As the dust settles on an election campaign which for them was universally catastrophic, the UK’s extreme right is licking its wounds and eyeing up potential targets for blame.
The main factor behind their dire performance, of course, was the involvement of Reform UK especially after Farage announced his candidacy in Clacton in mid-campaign. Reform, itself stuffed with racists and extremists, will be the main force on the far right for the foreseeable future, but its success in hoovering up right wing votes which might otherwise have gone elsewhere, is leading to a period of instability and feuding amongst other groups further to the right.
UKIP, which fielded 24 candidates of its own and a couple under the banner of Patriots Alliance, its electoral coalition with the English Democrats, is watching its membership shrivel by the day. This trend is not new but was seriously exacerbated by the total fiasco of Lois Perry’s election as leader in May to be followed in short order by her endorsing Farage and Reform in the general election and then quitting, citing health reasons.
Her departure, throwing the UKIP campaign into chaos, was the subject of dark mutterings about a Farage-inspired plot to bring UKIP down (a suggestion, we hasten to add, for which no evidence has been offered).
She was replaced by her deputy Nick Tenconi, a spiteful specimen drafted in from Turning Point UK. But now members are asking how they found themselves with two leaders in quick succession who had each only been a member of the party for a few weeks before taking it over.
Perry did at least have some claim to the post having, on the face of it, won a leadership election. But even this is being looked at with increasing scepticism. Her election rival, UKIP veteran and ex-MEP Bill Etheridge, resigned during the general election campaign pouring doubt and scorn on the integrity of the party’s internal election process. He was followed by NEC member and Defence & Veterans spokesman, Ret’d Squadron Leader Peter Richardson.
None of this was helped by former Deputy Leader Rebecca Jane’s incendiary open letter to members, published in Searchlight. It prompted a wave of resignations from a rapidly depleting membership.
Their general election performance was a total fiasco, with only two of their candidates getting more than 1%. One was the the odious, smirking bigot from south Wales, Stan Robinson who polled 1.47%. The other was NEC member and National Campaign Manager, Janice MacKay, who in very odd circumstances was parachuted into the Great Wyrley and Penkridge constituency in Staffordshire, which lies some 270 miles from her Scottish address and where the Reform UK candidate withdrew his candidacy only minutes before nominations closed. This happy sequence of events meant that she was in the fortunate position of not having a Reform opponent and so managed to harvest the (still not very) handsome total of 6.17% of the vote. She, alone of UKIP candidates, saved her deposit though the other forfeits will not impact on the party’s finances – candidates had to find the £500 out of their own pockets anyway. And, three days after the election, the UKIP website has still not been updated to include its election results.
Another question that the NEC will now have to answer – if they can – is how UKIP came, via a three-party alliance, to be involved with the openly neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative who, like UKIP, forged an electoral alliance with the English Democrats. Members of a more conservative than fascist hue, who were taken aback at the NEC’s decision to admit former members of neo-Nazi groups as UKIP members, believe their worst fears have been realised and are very unhappy.
And there remain the unresolved questions about the mysterious trust which now appears to completely own UKIP and which is in turn controlled by Chairman Ben Walker. As the party’s Returning Officer it is Walker who is also facing questions about the process through which Perry became leader.
For Patriotic Alternative the electoral alliance with the EDs was a thoroughly opportunist arrangement with a party with whom they have little in common. The principal motive for it was PA leader Mark Collett’s panic that if he didn’t have some presence in the election, it would redouble the accusations already flying around that he is more interested in online grifting than real politics. And, with a pile of cash raised on the back of Sam Melia’s imprisonment, he could hardly claim they couldn’t afford it. However, having failed to register as a political party his options were limited – till the EDs leader Robin Tilbrook came to his rescue.
But it has all backfired. The performance of the ED candidates, and especially the PA cuckoos in the nest, was derisory and, like UKIP, PA’s public face – its Telegram channel – is totally silent on its election performance; since the election it has posted only an item about its Summer camp, complete with a cosy picture (below) of Mark Collett with jailed ‘race martyr’ Sam Melia’s wife, Laura Towler.
Collett is now being targeted by National Rebirth Party leader Alek Yerbury as the main architect of failure. Yerbury argued for complete abstention from the election, saying that given their pathetic resources, it was simply a waste of time and effort at this stage.
There is a growing feeling on the right that he was correct, and the others got it wrong. Now, challenged to a debate on future strategy by Yerbury, Collett has had little choice but to agree, though he knows he is on a hiding to nothing. Yerbury is rubbing his hands in anticipation. He is targeting PA’s membership as vulnerable to a raid from a party which positions itself as more serious, with a clear sense of strategic direction. The debate will be held online in a few weeks’ time.
The British Democrats ran only four candidates, and their votes were pitiful though you wouldn’t know that from their website because, yes, you’ve guessed it, three days after the election they feature a long article listing how many leaflets they delivered and how many doors they knocked on, but not one word about how many votes they won.
Ssshhh…don’t mention the results
They, like Homeland Party who didn’t run in the election but told members to vote Reform, are likely to be targeted next by Yerbury who is already deriding the ‘ladder strategy’ which they have both adopted. This posits years of campaigning at, for instance, parish council level to establish credibility before seriously contesting national elections in a particular local area. According to Yerbury:
“There is a line of thinking that by doing thankless tasks for your local community, at a low level, it will set you up for success in elections.
“In theory, that sounds good, but in practice what will actually happen is that you will become a local dogsbody who is well liked, but also viewed as someone whose function is to clean up problems that other people make, and people will get resentful the moment you stop doing it in order to move on and do things like working in parliament etc.”
That argument is likely to resonate with young activists in Homeland and the BDs who want something a little more positive and exciting to do than collect litter and pick up dog poo in the local park.
It may not be long before the (long) knives are out…
Top pictures, left to right: UKIP’s musical chairs leadership, Lois Perry and Nick Tenconi; PA activist Craig Buckley stands as ED candidate in Leigh; NRP leader Alek Yerbury
It’s understandable for Labour Party members to be euphoric this morning. And anti-fascists outside Keir Starmer’s party might also be tempted to join in the celebrations and avoid looking too closely at the overnight results. That would be a mistake.
After years of deliberate pandering to culture war rhetoric (in other words, “respectable” racism and homophobia) the Conservative Party has suffered a landslide defeat.
Nigel Farage’s dog-whistle racism and despicable recycling of Putin’s propaganda lines has left Reform UK with five seats, about the same as the Greens and Plaid Cymru. It’s five too many, but far short of what he hoped for and some polls were projecting.
George Galloway’s attempt to create a Strasserite movement by combining concerns over Gaza with “culture wars” proved a dismal failure, and gave us one of the best moments of election night television when Neil Kinnock, a longstanding anti-fascist campaigner, was rightly able to celebrate the defeat of the arch-opportunist Galloway.
UKIP, whose stunning collapse during the six-week election campaign, involving the resignation of several officials including their own newly elected leader, has been exposed in detail by Searchlight, had almost uniformly pathetic votes. The one exception was the Staffordshire constituency of Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge, where UKIP saved their deposit with 6.2% thanks to the absence of Reform UK.
David Kurten in happier times with Nigel Farage
Conspiracy theorist and culture warrior David Kurten, once of UKIP and now leader of the Heritage Party, finished bottom of the poll in Bognor Regis and Littlehampton with 1.5%, while the other forty candidates for his party polled between 0.1% and 0.7%.
The perennial Islamophobe and ex-Tory Brian Silvester, once part of Anne Marie Waters’ For Britain Movement and now standing for his own “Putting Crewe First” party, took only 1.2% in Crewe and Nantwich. An assortment of far-right independents were equally dismal failures. Former Griffin bodyguard and notorious Merseyside gangland enforcer Joe Owens polled 0.3% in Liverpool Wavertree, ex-BNP organiser Andrew Emerson fared only slightly better with 0.4% in the latest of his many candidatures in Chichester, David Durant (a relic of Patrick Harrington’s faction in the 1980s’ NF splits, who has now reinvented himself as a community activist) polled 0.8% in Hornchurch and Upminster, and former Tory MP Andrew Bridgen (whose conspiracy theorising led him into short-lived alliance with Laurence Fox) made a fool of himself by losing his deposit with 3.2% as an independent in his old constituency, NW Leicestershire.
And every single candidate from the various conspiracist and extremist parties to the right of Farage – including the four candidates from Mark Collett’s nazi gang Patriotic Alternative, standing under the sickeningly misnamed ‘English Democrats’ label – lost their deposit. As with UKIP and Heritage, most of these borderline or blatant fascists polled not just below 5% but below 1%.
Craig Buckley (above, second left) the PA nazi standing under two different labels yesterday, polled 6.8% as independent candidate for the Leigh South ward of Wigan Council, but only 0.9% as English Democrat candidate for the Leigh and Atherton parliamentary seat. The difference was mainly due to Buckley having Reform UK opposition in the parliamentary election, but not in the council by-election.
The best outright fascist General Election result was 3.7% for ‘British Democrat’ Frank Calladine (below) in Doncaster North, who had no Reform opposition. His campaign team included former BNP councillor Jim Lewthwaite as well as British Democrat president Andrew Brons, a veteran of the nazi scene dating back to Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement. Despite grandly advertising their status as “parish councillors”, two of the Brit Dems’ NEC members – former BNP activists Chris Bateman and Lawrence Rustem – managed only 0.9% and 0.4% in their Essex and Kent constituencies, while the party’s newest recruit Gary Butler took only 0.3% in Maidstone.
Labour strategists may be tempted to sit back and enjoy divisions on the right, especially as contenders for the Tory leadership debate whether they should move further in Farage’s direction.
The cynical short-term response would be for Labour to avoid talking about issues, and not risk offending Reform supporters.
But the lesson of the Blair years is that this is a very dangerous game. In 1997 the New Labour landslide disguised long-term problems in some traditional Labour areas, where the Tyndall-era BNP was already starting to rebuild the far right’s electoral strength from its rock bottom years in the 1980s.
In Lancashire and Yorkshire mill towns especially, the BNP was starting to sink roots by the late ‘90s. Soon after Nick Griffin’s takeover of the party, it was able to profit from racial tensions, beginning to save parliamentary deposits and win council seats. Despite many internal problems (many due to Griffin’s own corruption) the BNP ended up with dozens of councillors and two Members of the European Parliament.
It was only thanks to a combination of determined anti-fascist campaigning, investigation by Searchlight and internal BNP factionalism that the party eventually collapsed.
In 2024 some of Reform UK’s strong votes are in the same areas where the BNP once had councillors, or strong branches that briefly became the main challengers to Labour.
Though not coming near to defeating Labour, yesterday Reform polled 19.3% in Oldham East & Saddleworth, 19.5% in West Bromwich, 22.5% in Bradford South, 24.4% in Stoke North, 26.1% in North Warwickshire & Bedworth, 26.4% in Dudley, 28.7% in Amber Valley, 30.3% in Rotherham.
One of the old BNP’s few intellectuals, Kevin Scott, pointed out on X/Twitter that Reform UK has become the main opposition to Labour across a large part of North East England, including Scott’s home city Sunderland.
It’s not good enough for anti-fascists to rely on the electoral system to keep out fascists. First-past-the post can under certain circumstances allow the far right to win, if their opponents’ votes split in a particular way.
More likely though is that for other reasons there will be pressure for electoral reform.
In that case, the only sure way to keep the far right out of power is to take them on directly, not to avoid issues of principle in the 1990s Clinton-Blair approach of “triangulation”.
Not pandering to Reform voters, nor empty sloganising but by patiently and consistently explaining how they have been exploited by Farage’s dog-whistles.
There’s some evidence that during the last week of the campaign, Farage started to lose support to both the Tories and Labour, because of his own mistake in repeating Russian propaganda arguments, and the cumulative effect of repeated revelations about vile racism among his candidates.
In the new Parliament, the Reform leader and his handful of fellow MPs should be relentlessly exposed for what they are. Looking for entertaining television during a sometimes drab election campaign, broadcasters have sometimes seen Farage as a ratings boost, as Trump was seen in the US.
What’s needed now is more of the serious scrutiny that the BBC’s Nick Robinson gave to Farage during his interview late in this year’s campaign.
And while the media and Westminster politicians hold Farage up to scrutiny, campaigners up and down the country should prepare to take on either Reform UK, or any revived fascist party that tries to play the same tunes in local elections during the next few years.
At least four rival factions of old-school fascists and nazis are trying to build up credible parties. Searchlight is aware of several debates, training seminars, and backroom negotiations planned for the next few weeks and months. We can’t assume that the pattern of vicious factional splits will continue. Reform UK’s votes yesterday – even if they could be seen as “protest votes” – will be seen by the rest of the far right as evidence that a modern version of the BNP or NF could take off rapidly.
