This article has been updated with corrections and extra information, with thanks to Andy Bell.
In 2024, three new fascist parties were approved by the Electoral Commission: the Homeland Party, the National Rebirth Party (NRP) and the Identity Party. The Homeland Party was founded in 2023 by former British National Party (BNP) regional organiser, Kenny Smith, and approved in January 2024. Homeland has become the go-to hub for the British radical right. At the time of writing, it has an estimated 1,300 members and 43,200 X (formerly Twitter) followers.
The NRP was registered last February. A fringe party compared to Homeland, the NRP still has branches in Birmingham, Hull, Leeds and London. Its leader, Alek Yerbury, has a history of membership of neo-Nazi movements, as well as a small militant fascist street group, the National Support Detachment. In 2023, HOPE not hate revealed Yerbury made repeated comments advocating violence against elected officials, leftist activists, and migrants since 2021.
A shared fascist predecessor
The Homeland Party and the NRP have a common link: they are both splinter groups of Patriotic Alternative (PA). Founded in 2019 by the BNP’s former Youth Division chairman Mark Collett, PA was the largest neo-Nazi movement in the UK until Homeland’s detachment. In November 2024, PA registered with the Electoral Commission under another name, the Identity Party.
Established by Craig Buckley, a leading figure in PA’s Northwest division with close ties to Collett, the Identity Party is yet to stand a candidate or even put up a functioning website. Still, it marks the third neofascist party registered in 2024. PA itself continues to focus on convincing young newcomers to the fascist cause. HOPE not hate estimates its membership at 500 and it has received tens of thousands of pounds in donations supporting its members convicted of hate speech and assault.
These movements did not come out of nowhere. They are steps in a legacy of fascism that has existed on the edges of British society for almost 100 years.
The beginnings of British fascism under Mosley and Leese
The most famous British fascist movement was the British Union of Fascists (BUF), founded by Oswald Mosley in 1932. A Baronet who stood as an MP with both the Tories and Labour, Mosley founded the BUF after visiting Fascist Italy the previous year. In its short eight-year lifetime, the BUF attracted financial support from Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Its paramilitary Fascist Defence Force (the infamous Blackshirts) transformed civic life by unleashing a wave of anti-socialist and antisemitic violence on the streets. At its height, the BUF claimed 40-50,000 members with a strong base of support from aristocrats and business magnates, including the Daily Mail‘s Lord Rothermere.
Two key events defined the party’s political style and signalled its downfall. The 1934 London Olympia Rally, attended by 10,000, was intended to solidify the BUF’s relevance as a rising political star. Instead, it unmasked the party’s penchant for violence. Whenever Mosley’s speech was interrupted by antifascist protesters, the overhead spotlight would single out demonstrators and Blackshirts would swarm in attack. The brutality at Olympia alienated voters and establishment politicians, relegating the movement to the political fringe.
The infamous Battle of Cable Street in 1936 saw Blackshirts plan a march on one of London’s most prominent Jewish-populated areas. Antifascist resistance forces, comprised of Labour politicians, Communists, and Jewish People’s Council members, showed up to counter-protest, outnumbering the fascists by 100,000 to 3,000, with 7,000 police officers standing between. In the aftermath, the Public Order Act outlawed political uniforms and required police permission for large demonstrations.
The BUF might be the best-known British fascist movement, but arguably the more influential group was the Imperial Fascist League (IFL), founded by Arnold Leese in 1929. The IFL is the more direct predecessor to the movements described below and is also a far more radical movement than the BUF. When approached by Mosley with an invitation to merge in 1932, Leese turned the offer down on the grounds that the group had not yet embraced hardline antisemitism and he advocated mass extermination of Jews via gas chambers as early as 1935. While the party likely had fewer than 500 members, scholars such as Richard Thurlow consider Leese the predecessor to the most influential British fascist activist of the postwar period, John Tyndall.
Tyndall continues the fascist fight as BUF and IFL fall
The BUF’s ties with the Nazi regime and the outbreak of war in 1939 led to the detainment of leading party members. Mosley himself was imprisoned from 1940 to 1943, though this by no means killed his involvement in politics. In 1948, he founded the Union Movement, a neo-fascist party advocating the instalment of a single pan-European nation state. The Movement never took off, but Mosley continued to advocate for its principles of anti-miscegenation and Holocaust denialism until his death in 1980. Leese was also detained in 1940. In 1946, he and six other members of the IFL were arrested for aiding two escaped Waffen-SS prisoners of war, leading to the breakup of the party.
The fall of the BUF and IFL left several movements competing for dominance on the fascist fringe. If there is one man whose life sums up the fractured nature of the postwar British far right, it is John Tyndall.
Born in Devon in 1934, Tyndall spent his life bouncing between fascist groups and starting several of his own. He cut his teeth in the League of Empire Loyalists, founded in 1954 by Mosley’s former Director of Press Propaganda, AK Chesterton. Coming to consider the League not radical enough, he left in 1958 with fellow activist John Bean to found the National Labour Party (NLP).
Birth of the British National Party
Within a few years, the NLP would merge with Colin Jordan’s White Defence League under a new name: the British National Party (BNP), an earlier iteration of the more widely known party of the same name. This new, explicitly neo-Nazi party was based at Arnold Leese House in Notting Hill and Leese was considered a mentor to Tyndall and Bean. The BNP forged connections with disparate fascist groups across Europe and North America. Most importantly, it gave Tyndall financing and infrastructure. In 1961, he established the UK’s first postwar fascist terror group, Spearhead. Its jackboots and military uniforms proved radical enough to concern other BNP members and Tyndall was expelled from the party in 1962.
Over the next decade, Tyndall launched the long-running fascist magazine Spearhead and founded the National Socialist and Greater Britain Movements. In 1972, he used Spearhead‘s popularity to seize control of Chesterton’s new far-right party, the National Front. Under Tyndall, the Front engaged in a series of violent street demonstrations and reached an estimated height of 17,500 members. Ultimately, the anti-immigration turn of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party poached much of its voter share, and campaigning by the Anti-Nazi League and the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight shifted public opinion against the Front. Membership decreased dramatically in the early 1980s.
Tyndall left shortly after this and in 1982 formed his final political party, the new British National Party. Although widely considered the UK’s most electorally successful fascist party, the new BNP started as an out-and-out Nazi-sympathising fascist party, focusing on street marches and rallies rather than consistent electoral victory. In 1992, members of the party created Combat 18, a paramilitary wing linked to several murders across Europe and banned in Germany.
Shifting focus and fortunes for the BNP: the heights of British fascism
Still in the shadow of the National Front and Thatcher’s Tories, the BNP’s membership barely rose above 2,500 throughout the 1980s and 90s. Its fringe beliefs reflected its marginal status; at this time, it held a whites-only membership policy, espousing biological white supremacism and forced deportation of ethnic minorities. It wasn’t until an emerging ‘moderniser’ faction ousted Tyndall in favour of Nick Griffin in 1999 that the party would temper its public image, arguing for the ‘cultural incompatibility’ between whites and non-whites, rather than innate biological difference.
This rebrand worked: in 2004, its membership had risen to almost 8,000. In the 2005 general election, it received 192,000 votes, rising to over 563,000 in the 2010 general election. In 2009, two of its candidates (Griffin included) were elected to the European Parliament with almost one million votes.
These successes were short-lived. Its local election performance began to decline sharply after 2010 and infighting chipped away at the party’s growth. The rise of UKIP and campaigning by HOPE not hate reduced the party’s membership to under 500 by 2015 and in 2016 it was de-registered by the Electoral Commission. Despite its rapid decline, the BNP remains the high-water mark for the success of a fascist ethno-nationalist party in the UK.
The long shadow of hate: the British fascist movement today
And if we’re not careful, it could happen again. Both the Homeland Party and Patriotic Alternative were founded by former BNP officials. Mark Collett, PA’s founder, was not only chairman of the BNP’s Youth Division, but also stood trial beside Griffin on race hate offences in 2005. Homeland’s Kenny Smith stood for the BNP in Glasgow in 2007. The legacy of the BNP, itself tied to the legacy of the British Union of Fascists and the Imperial Fascist League, lives on through these movements today.
Right now, the Identity Party, the Homeland Party and the National Rebirth Party are not considerable electoral threats. But as the antifascist activist group Red Flare reports, Homeland’s TikTok presence is increasingly concerning, with some videos reaching between 70 and 90,000 views. PA continues to recruit newcomers to its movement by targeting young men on gaming forums. And perhaps most troublingly, Collett has expressed strong admiration for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, even advising his followers to infiltrate the new party and push it further to the right.
This article is by no means an exhaustive account of British fascist movements. It has hardly touched on National Action, the British Fascisti, Mosley’s postwar influence or the legacy of anti-fascist activism that has kept this country multicultural and democratic. Still, it should demonstrate a lineage of far-right activism that has been with us for almost a century.
And, hopefully, warn of its return.
