The Pimlico Journal companion to the British fringe right, 1999-2026
We've been here before
With an audible sigh of relief, Emma Graham-Harrison opined in 2024 that Britain had bucked Europe’s rightward trend. With intrinsic British cordiality, the governing centre-right party had ceded power to the centre-left party. First-past-the-post had neutered Reform’s 14% finish, delivering them just five seats in the House of Commons. Along with much of the continent, France and Germany would continue their spiral into division — but here, the adults were back in the room. Not even two years later, Reform’s inexorable march has left them nearly ten points clear of any rival in the polls, with Nigel Farage poised to enter Number 10 at the next opportunity.
This month’s by-election represents a key juncture in that procession. Robert Kenyon’s victory in Makerfield would be Labour’s death knell. A historic decapitation of their PM-in-waiting would deprive them of a potentially life-saving second roll of the dice. Should Burnham take power, on the other hand, those around him will urge that he implement proportional representation. Others have noted the cynicism in this – it’s a carrot to tempt the Lib Dems and Greens into a unity ticket, a coalition of the left which could lock the right out of power and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Once upon a time, calls for a new voting system proliferated just as widely among right-wing parties, their various iterations thwarted by FPTP for decades. In 2024, this dynamic prevented a ninety-three-strong turquoise tidal wave from hitting Westminster. Today, it has reversed — offering Reform a previously unimaginable pathway not just to govern, but to do so with a majority all of their own.
Never in British political history has an insurgent party on the right truly threatened to take power. Where Labour supplanted the Liberals a century prior, and itself narrowly avoided replacement by the SDP six decades later, the Tories have long been uncontested in their own territory. On their right flank, many outfits posed a challenge, with varying offerings of radicalism before inevitably petering out. Compared to Europe, the populist right is late in coming to Britain — due not to a lack of demand, but a lack of available supply. The British system is uniquely unsuited to facilitating the rise of new parties.
Today, after Reform has dominated the polls for more than a year, it has become far easier to imagine such a transformation of the political landscape. Having witnessed the rise of one new party, it has become all too easy for many — especially those who came more recently to right-wing conclusions, and therefore have little knowledge of those years in the wilderness — to assume that the process can be reliably repeated, that an establishment which still controls more than 90% of seats in Parliament has already been defeated, and that the prize of power lies undefended. This situation is partly to blame for the growth of Restore Britain, which now stands as the biggest risk to defeating the Labour Party in Makerfield first, before taking down both major parties at the next general election.
It is therefore a prudent time to look back at the history of the British right outside of the Conservative Party, and remind ourselves just how rare this opportunity truly is. Nigel Farage is the first leader of the national-populist right to have the opportunity to supplant Britain’s oldest party — in fact, he is the first to secure more than 2% of the vote at a general election — but he was not the first person to try. It was the British National Party who, at least cosmetically, first fashioned themselves in the nationalist-populist mould (even if their politics were very different to Reform) after Nick Griffin assumed leadership in 1999. This is a fitting Year Zero for this essay — what came before has no extant point of reference in our politics.
John Tyndall: The backdrop of British Fascism
Griffin’s predecessor, John Tyndall, had dominated Britain’s fringe right since the sixties — cutting his teeth in the League of Empire Loyalists before, among other outfits, founding the British National Party (BNP) in 1982. Tyndall’s role in the right-of-right-of-centre is fascinating and laden with intrigue, but is beyond this essay’s scope. While he and Griffin shared similar views, the latter would enforce a more clandestine expression of these tendencies. Tyndall’s BNP was fascistic, where not outrightly national socialist, as were the National Front (NF) and the various outfits which splintered from the two parties before 1999.
Tyndall founded the BNP after being ousted from the NF in 1980, with the intent of reuniting the right under his leadership. Tyndall’s ironclad commitment to national socialism, which had so often undone his own aspirations, had perhaps spared the BNP from the National Front’s fate — spiralling into such esoteric and contradictory positions that left the Front unrecognisable to potentially curious voters: less preoccupied with keeping Britain white than making it Gaddafi green. Despite what might have been an advantage in that regard, the BNP were unable to capitalise, even with the disillusioned electorate of the early Thatcher years. They were bereft of success in the eighties, not because of an inability to convince voters that they weren’t Hitler worshippers, but by a refusal to attempt the task.
In the latter half of the century, this impulse towards Nazism was the fringe right’s black dog. Splinter movements were so often provoked by dissatisfaction with the parent party’s commitment to Nazism — whether they regarded it as insufficient or thought its presence toxic. Nevertheless, no moderate turn ever amounted to a disavowal, and each was followed by fascism creeping back in. At each juncture, every potential breakthrough, Tyndall was unable to suppress the tic, ‘What if we made the Sonnenrad spin?’ Despite decades without lasting success, and with Jean-Marie Le Pen providing a successful case study for moderation, Tyndall failed to connect the dots and recant that which stymied his every attempt at success.
The radical tendency’s repeated boiling over would be Tyndall’s undoing. The early nineties saw green shoots of possibility spring up, with (however minor) electoral gains won through Eddy Butler’s ‘populist localism’ campaigning in London’s East End. Combat 18 (C18), founded as the party bodyguard, became the newest escape valve for party extremists — cannibalising the grassroots after distilling its own political ambitions. Butler was attacked with a knife by C18 activists, and BNP membership dwindled. At the time, Tyndall speculated that regime actors masterminded C18 to discredit the BNP, but this did not prevent him from making overtures to party hardliners — inviting William Pierce (of Turner Diaries fame) to speak at events in an attempt to position himself between the ‘loony’ front and those who had realised that fascism was electorally toxic.
Nick Griffin, formerly of the NF’s ‘proto-terrorist’ Political Soldier wing, would come out to bat for the moderate faction. Perhaps an unlikely hero, Griffin had come to realise which way the wind was blowing via keeping company with moderates, which was hurried along by a suspended sentence for incitement. The BNP’s route to power, he argued, could be achieved through more palatable marketing of the same inherent radicalism — contrasting with Tyndall’s refusal to ‘dress up patriotism in inoffensive clothes’. This proposal appealed to party members, who lent Griffin’s leadership tilt their overwhelming support.
Griffin’s BNP: An attempt at cosmetic surgery
In remaking the BNP’s brand, Griffin looked to Europe. The success enjoyed by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National owed much to moderating their language, moreso than their ideology, reframing the party as a democratic and respectable outfit, communicating policy in ways that ordinary French voters did not find objectionable. As noted previously in this journal, pre-1997 Britain had never been comfortable with immigration and multiculturalism. The right’s earlier efforts to convert these attitudes into electoral momentum had faltered when voters caught wind of extremism — as had happened in 1999, where the BNP stumbled to 1% of the vote after the Mirror uncovered a photo of Tyndall standing next to David Copeland, the man responsible for nail-bombings which had killed 3 and injured 140.
Such baggage proved wearisome for party officials on the doorstep, yet Griffin’s stint as an avowed Third Positionist did little to sufficiently tarnish his image. That he was a Cambridge graduate from a respectable family, and a fresher face at 40 years old, made him appear more respectable than Tyndall. Griffin was at pains to assuage hardliners that his proposed about-turn would not go beyond the cosmetic. In fact, the post-1999 BNP retained its commitment to ethnonationalism and grounded its economic platform in the same romantic agrarian notions as the NF and International Third Position had done. In presenting this to the public, however, Griffin sought to exclude ‘hard talk, hobbyism, and Hitler’. Eddy Butler, meanwhile, was a persistent thorn in Griffin’s side from the ‘reformist’ camp, and was assaulted again in 2007 by a balaclava-clad BNP fixer, Tony Lecomber.
Moving to a more positive nationalism (replete with a 1999 BNP Family Fun Day) enabled the party to launch campaigns on highly salient local issues on comfortable terrain. Tackling anti-white racism in Oldham, racially-disproportionate council funding in Burnley, and capitalising on increasing concern about Islamic immigration across Britain, Griffin was able to string together successes in council by-elections through a highly-disciplined campaign machine. While extremist outbursts still abounded (albeit in lesser numbers), neither these nor concerted pressure from tabloids and anti-fascist protestors could halt the BNP’s advance as they once had in the past. The fringe right was able to win the respectability and sustained success which had eluded Tyndall throughout the years by eschewing the trappings of fascism. The BNP increasingly resembled national populist parties on the continent, such as the FN and the FPÖ.
While under Griffin, the BNP was an ethnonationalist party, explicitly ‘revolutionary’, and implicitly national socialist, its cosmetic changes truly set it apart from the fringe right before; just as its still-present extremism sets it apart from what would come after. Griffin’s BNP was, in itself, a halfway house in the fringe right’s moderation; a transitional moment between the old right, informed by the fascism of the early century, and the further-right we know today. It had found success as a national-populist party in the European mould. The modernising faction remained extremist to varying degrees, having been doctrinally inducted into and still participating internally in the various old factional divisions which had characterised the fringe right.
However ardent in their radicalism behind closed doors, the success found following the BNP’s shift away from open racialist and antisemitic discourse marked a sea change for the right. It was the proof-of-concept which put paid to overt national socialism in British politics. In the words of A.K. Chesterton, some forty years prior, ‘mouthing off about niggers and Jews’ was now the preserve of paramilitary groups. The unviability of Nazism needs no explanation, but why did racialism fall out of favour? The conventional understanding is that the black, viz. Afro-Caribbean, neighbours once feared by Britons had simply become part of the demographic furniture. A new generation had grown up accustomed to coexistence with other races — and while public opinion wasn’t unanimous, attitudes towards, say, interracial marriage, had softened since the NF’s heyday.
Islam was a far more obliging target for the BNP. In the early 1990s, the global rise of Islamic fundamentalism provided the party an easy target after the wilderness years, and its 9/11 crescendo coincided with increasing asylum claims and nascent rumours about Pakistani-led rape gangs. A growing Muslim population drew far more public suspicion than long-settled Caribbeans, and the 7/7 London bombings allowed the BNP to frame the 2006 local election as a referendum on Islam. So potent was this angle that Jewish members would now be admitted to the party to bolster its anti-Islam position. This pivot eased supply-side pressure, too: BNP top brass were well aware that, before 2010, discrimination on racial grounds carried more legal weight than religious. On the right, the BNP were the first mover on the question of Islam in Britain — a theme which is now de rigueur from the Conservative frontbench rightwards. The English Defence League (EDL) would later carry the torch for explicit counter-Jihad, before passing it on to subsequent fringe right movements. For now, though, the anti-Islam angle was a rich vein from which the BNP drew increasing support.
It would be wrong to paint this ascent as straightforward. Early in Griffin’s tenure, a feud over a by-election candidacy saw once-friendly modernisers peel off to form the Freedom Party (which would be wound up soon after its founding). A BBC documentary exposed comments from senior party figures which could amount to incitement. Tyndall, still the hardline favourite, was arrested on these charges and later expelled from the party a year before his death. The documentary also implicated Griffin and his chief propagandist Mark Collett, with both avoiding a sentence which risked reigniting the fringe right’s habitual factionalism. Local election wins sparked optimism to be dashed on a bigger stage — the BNP, outshone by a UKIP surge, failed to win seats in the 2004 European Parliament elections. When, in the subsequent election, Griffin and Andrew Brons were made MEPs, the latter’s oft-written-about Question Time appearance became (in his words) a ‘lynch mob’ instead of precipitating a larger breakthrough. A legal challenge against the party’s ‘whites only’ membership policy would spiral into a financial catastrophe and spark dissent among party officials. Among those exiled by Griffin, the careers of Mark Collett and Kenny Smith would outlast their old employer.
The 2010 general election would be the last fought by the BNP as a significant outfit. Their campaign left much to be desired; its manifesto centred on ending the Afghan War, a topic far less salient than their past immigration-focused campaigns. Likewise in Barking, the target seat, their once-impressive ground game failed to deliver Griffin to Parliament — and instead sparked the mythmaking around Morgan McSweeney. The BNP’s would-be candidate in Stoke decided to stand as an independent, then revealed that despite a decade of modernisation, Nazism and Holocaust denial still abounded at the top. The disappointing result spurred Eddy Butler to launch an abortive leadership bid, only for Griffin to narrowly win a subsequent poll against fellow MEP Andrew Brons. Subsequent local elections unwound the party’s remaining representation, and Griffin was forced out in 2014.
Eurosceptic Convergence
A clip of Nigel Farage claiming that he ‘did more to defeat the BNP’ than anyone else demonstrates, for today’s fringe right, that he and all he touches are anathema. In one sense, he did defeat the BNP, which never placed higher than sixth, and UKIP became mainstream. But the BNP’s demise was ultimately at their own hands, and under concerted pressure from the political and media establishment and their cadre of activists. Though avowedly anti-establishment and populist, UKIP did not falter under similar pressure — it was simply harder to label an eclectic libertarian party rooted in single-issue euroscepticism as ‘Nazis’ — nor did its own vicious factionalism tear it to shreds. Prior to 2018, UKIP could not be placed in the fringe right genealogy by virtue of its origins in a wholly distinct ideological tradition.
This did not prevent it from winning over former BNP voters following the party’s demise. It’s well-understood that UKIP held appeal for those in the BNP’s constituency; UKIP’s right-wing euroscepticism left room for the same voters left behind by globalisation and concerned by immigration. In their death spiral, the BNP shed no viable successor party to UKIP’s right — thus, its voters naturally converged on the most right-wing option. So too could UKIP attract voters who would never consider a party perceived as extremist. In 2014, these right-wing voters united to deliver twenty-four UKIP MEPs to Strasbourg on 26% of the vote. Farage won four times the votes that Griffin could in 2009, further evidencing the theory that the populist right performed better when unencumbered by extreme baggage.
UKIP’s Brexit-focused platform was, naturally, a far cry from the BNP’s avowedly nationalist manifesto in 2005. That Europe, as an issue, was far less salient than immigration in the early 2010s raises questions as to how UKIP came out on top in this period. It goes without saying that UKIP were, of mainstream parties, the furthest right on immigration. So too was the Brexit referendum, their crowning glory, best understood as an immigration poll — sparked by ongoing migration from Eastern Europe, with a refugee crisis and looming Turkish accession provoking far more concern than visions of a free-trading Global Britain inspired joy.
In Ford and Goodwin’s Revolt on the Right (recommended reading for a history of UKIP), it is noted that the EU came to symbolise all which drove voters to the right. An out-of-touch foreign elite was foisting hundreds of thousands of migrants on Britain to undercut wages, in exchange for sublimating British sovereignty into a continental body in which it never comfortably fit. Thus, the loci of the fringe and Tory right vote converged on UKIP’s key issue. In the wake of the referendum, however, the nature of our exit supplanted immigration as the focus of our political discourse. The EU’s position as a proxy for immigration was now so cemented that, on immigration, the debate centred on how it could be controlled after Brexit, instead of scrutinising the ongoing influx.
The Tories fought general elections in 2017 and 2019 on a Brexit manifesto which, understandably, drew right-wing voters into their coalition. UKIP, robbed of its raison d’etre, endured their own death spiral. By the time our terms of exit were settled, immigration had declined so drastically in salience that the usual suspects declared multiculturalism a solved issue. They opined that race was excluded from their conclusion that Britain had never been more divided. Britain was to go its own way from Europe, but it would go guided by Marcus Rashford, Mo Farah, and Michael ‘Stormzy’ Omari.
Interregnum – UKIP’s decline
Brexit was the crest of the 2016-18 populist wave. Subsequently, right-wing administrations took power in the US, Brazil, and the Philippines, and hard-right parties performed well in legislative elections across Europe. Any optimism that this wave would travel back to our shores soon evaporated, however, as the Conservative Party recaptured voters on the right. By 2017, UKIP fell to 1.8% of the vote — a shade lower than the BNP had won in 2010. It was expected that they would falter after the referendum, given that their sole policy aim had, in effect, been accomplished, and it’s doubtful whether even Farage could have forestalled the decline had he remained in post. By virtue of holding power, a vote for the Tories was a vote for getting Brexit done. With immigration slipping out of voters’ priorities, UKIP’s potential reconstitution as an anti-immigration party seemed unviable. With MEPs and councillors leaving the party en masse, the question had to be settled: what is post-referendum UKIP?
Following Paul Nuttall’s resignation, three distinct answers emerged. Henry Bolton’s pitch was that UKIP must be the guard dogs of Brexit, waiting in the wings should the Tories falter. For those opposed to kicking the can down the road, David Kurten and Anne Marie Waters promised salvation in a pivot to ‘Christian values’ conservatism or counter-Jihad respectively. So dire was UKIP’s predicament that neither path was expected to deliver close to the successes of old. Bolton won the leadership election and reneged on his promise to elevate Kurten to the deputy role. Waters’ campaign, which had received the endorsement of UKIP bête noir Tommy Robinson, was lambasted by UKIP’s remaining MEPs who feared that she could steer the party into waters vacated by the BNP. Bolton, Waters, and Kurten would all eventually leave UKIP to found their own parties.
For Britain
Waters, scorned, would move first, establishing For Britain as an explicitly anti-Islam, anti-immigration outfit. Occupying the space immediately to UKIP’s right, For Britain eschewed the ethnonationalism of the still-extant BNP but was, by virtue of its hardline stance on Islamic immigration, its closest successor. Overt fascism had faded from the radical right. None of the party successors on the part of the political spectrum to the right of the Conservatives believed in anything resembling it or shared an intellectual genealogy.
In the early 2010s, street protest movements had elevated anti-Islam into the fringe’s new lodestar. Foremost amongst these was the English Defence League — the latest guise of football hooliganism’s interweaving with right-wing street protest. The EDL and its successor, the Football Lads Alliance, could count on support from token ethnic minorities with their own axes to grind over sectarian tensions. The outsized role given to ‘based Sikhs’ helped shift the extreme right away from ethnonationalism and into a narrower, more palatable ‘Islamosceptic’ position. These outfits were also often aggressively pro-Israel, which made claims of anti-Semitism far less plausible.
In the EDL, Tommy Robinson and, of all people, Morrissey, Waters found high-profile allies to bolster their movement’s profile. Its primacy on the fringe right was further aided by its absorption of Liberty GB, an older UKIP splinter group associated with the EDL, and an influx of BNP supporters (including oft-assailed Eddy Butler). While Waters’ national profile was small, a broad coalition coalesced around her party, which faced fortuitous circumstances — the reemergence of Islamic terrorism in Britain. Four years after the killing of Lee Rigby, Islamic terrorists had committed attacks in London and Manchester. Despite saccharine pleas not to look back in anger, these incidents focused the mind more than a still historic-high net migration.
Among supporters, there was some expectation of success. The online right had fallen behind their unlikely champion, an Irish lesbian, and the diverse coalition behind her appeared marginally more palatable than the BNP. At the time, a then-significant right-wing influencer/creator insisted to me that the party’s supporters were increasingly optimistic that Waters would find success in 2018’s Lewisham East by-election. In a seat which is today majority-minority, she limped home with 266 votes — placing behind UKIP’s David Kurten. For Britain fared worse in subsequent polls and would wind up in 2022.
UKIP under Bolton and Batten
For Britain’s failure could have vindicated the rejection of counter-Jihad by UKIP’s top brass, if only their party fared any better. Bolton’s tenure as leader never truly got going. After four-and-a-half months, it emerged that Bolton’s lover, Jo Marney, had sent texts claiming that Meghan Markle’s marriage to Prince Harry would, among other things, taint the royal family and lead to a black king. After being ousted from UKIP, Bolton would found the OneNation party, a pro-Brexit patriotic outfit which, like his stint at UKIP, never amounted to much.
In their hour of need, UKIP would turn to Gerard Batten, one of their remaining MEPs, to stabilise the ship on an interim basis. Initially, he fared well, balancing the party’s finances and ticking up in the polls amid Brexit-induced spasms in the Conservative Party. Upon securing permanent leadership, Batten immediately pivoted UKIP towards an anti-Islam platform. Calls for a national rape gangs inquiry were ahead of their time, but these stood alongside prison reform which promised to segregate followers of, in Batten’s words, a ‘death cult’ religion. UKIP gradually came to resemble the party that Anne Marie Waters had sought to create, with Tommy Robinson brought on board as an adviser to the leadership. Predictably, this sparked outrage amongst party grandees. Farage prophesied that UKIP would be ‘electorally finished’ if Batten continued down the path which had already hastened the departure of several MEPs.
Ending the firewall against all things Tommy Robinson was a strange decision, but it’s easy to see the appeal for Batten. Robinson’s electoral toxicity had not yet been fully realised, and with Brexit looming, the party desperately needed a platform beyond ensuring that it came to pass — a role much more effectively played by the Conservative Party’s ERG. Batten’s next foray into the transfer market would, even now, prove utterly inexplicable. Online influencers Paul Joseph Watson, Mark Meechan a.k.a. ‘Count Dankula’, and Carl Benjamin a.k.a. ‘Sargon of Akkad’ were unveiled as UKIP members, with the latter two to stand in the 2019 European Parliament elections.
Watson and Meechan may require some introduction for newer readers. Watson, who once kept company with Infowars’ Alex Jones, had built a significant YouTube following through his punditry on the health of Western civilisation in the 2010s. His videos covered the fringe right’s bread-and-butter issues — refugees in Sweden, ‘soy boys’, etc. — and while rather boorish, may even have shaped the younger minds of some readers of this publication. Meechan’s claim to fame was his farcical arrest and £800 fine for grooming his girlfriend’s dog into a Nazi. Carl Benjamin faced criticism from all sides, dogged then as he is now, over the hardly reassuring assertion that he ‘wouldn’t even rape’ Jess Phillips. This was simultaneous to his own battle with the American Alt-Right, debating Richard Spencer during the era of ‘internet bloodsports’ political livestreaming. Spencer, hardly a man with a spotless career but with the talents of an Ivy League humanities postgraduate, ran rings around Benjamin. Sargon’s humiliation was great enough that he declared the foundation of his own political movement and program of self-pedagogy — the ‘Liberalists’ — out of which the Lotus Eaters podcast would eventually emerge. Whatever may have been learned, it is not clear that good judgment is a trait one can develop at the ripe age of 39.
Ostensibly, bringing the nascent online right onside was intended to infuse UKIP with sorely-needed optimism and energy. A more cynical reading is that Batten sought to capture the influencers’ audiences to solidify the party’s anti-Islam credentials. Batten’s political novices were undeterred by a universally negative reaction, sharing in the prevailing optimism that this surprise European election was a great chance to bloody the establishment’s nose.
Any lingering hopes that Batten’s UKIP would have its say were dashed by one of their own. Nigel Farage had walked out over Batten’s rightward turn and established the Brexit Party — a vote for which was an unequivocal affirmation of 2016’s Leave result. From a standing start, this new outfit won 30.5% of the vote compared with UKIP’s 3.2%. Farage’s successful return from exile owes much to this election’s opportune timing and single-issue Brexit focus. Yet it must be underscored that this victory is, to date, the high-water mark for a party to the right of the Conservatives. This result, which trumped UKIP’s strong 2014 showing, takes pride of place in the right’s trophy cabinet. For any doubters, the 2019 European elections truly conferred the mandate of heaven upon Farage.
UKIP after Batten
The writing was on the wall for the Tories and UKIP alike. Boris Johnson replaced Theresa May and won the subsequent General Election, aided by Farage’s decision to scale back campaigning in support of Getting Brexit Done. Regicide was insufficient to arrest UKIP’s decline, however. Dwindling membership and continued internal feuds left Patricia Mountain (who?) with the unenviable task of leading UKIP’s general election campaign. Watching her ‘car crash’ interview on Sky News, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Mountain, who was bottom of UKIP’s South East England list for the European elections. Speaking of a non-white candidate, she said that she ‘thinks he’s Indian’. The damage was done. UKIP’s 2019 manifesto harked back to the pre-referendum days, but inoffensive policies like cutting foreign aid to pay for defence attracted a mere 0.1% of the vote on polling day.
David Kurten, still a London Assembly member, departed in 2020 to found the Heritage Party, busying himself with opposing Covid lockdowns before settling into a religious conservative anti-woke milieu. The Heritage Party is not alone in sabre-rattling for a War on Woke. Erstwhile actor Laurence Fox heads the Reclaim Party, an outfit which won coverage for its staunch opposition to ULEZ. For most of 2023, Reclaim had parliamentary representation, hosting Andrew Bridgen MP between May and December after his expulsion from the Conservative Party for comparing Covid-19 vaccines to the Holocaust. In this sense, it was more successful than Heritage, but neither has since risen to more than by-election rosettes.
UKIP limped on after 2019. An initial revival of ‘libertarian freedom-loving principles’ under amateur koi carp breeder Freddy Vachha (who?) quickly fell away, and the party’s wilderness years became a long, dark night of the soul. Until retirement, Neil Hamilton presided over a party wracked by factionalism. The libertarian old guard struggled against the residual anti-Islam wing — the latter buoyed when ex-BNP members were finally welcomed into the party. After seeing off, among others, Anne-Marie Waters in the 2024 leadership election, Lois Perry formed a coalition with the perennial also-ran English Democrats, before Nick Tenconi assumed power and further tied UKIP’s fate to those of Robinsons, Tommy and Calvin.
The possibility of UKIP (or its splinter movements) mounting a successful challenge to Reform is within a rounding error of zero. Reform now dominates UKIP’s former territory — working-class coastal/northern towns — and has garnered nationwide appeal beyond this. To Reform’s immediate right, UKIP are but one of many contenders; their better brand recognition is insufficient to distinguish them from newer entrants. Its splinters similarly concern themselves with niche issues unlikely to find favour on a national level. To their credit, they are not riven with feuds — Heritage and Reclaim are, in effect, their leaders’ personal fiefdoms. These narrow parties already cater to such small constituencies, and potential fifth columns would gain little from further fractalisation. These hobby horses limp on undeterred in the hope of some distant success.
Resurgent extremism
Britain First
The BNP’s own retreat beyond the margins left stragglers of its own. Jim Dowson, a former Calvinist minister and BNP fundraiser, founded Britain First in 2011. Britain First took the emergent anti-Islam strain, infused it with the trappings of Ulster loyalism, and took it to Facebook. This was distinct from today’s online right in eschewing Catholic Zoomers in favour of lukewarmly Anglican Boomers. Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen fronted viral content which owed more to growing anti-EU sentiment than latent white nationalism — although a suggested ‘clash of civilisations’ found an outlet through marches in search of morality-policing ‘Muslim patrols’. Britain First was a party (though its electoral efforts came to nought), but is best understood as a fellow traveller of the EDL.
Patriotic Alternative
While UKIP’s post-2017 attempts at reinvention frightened party moderates, some on the nascent online right lamented the insufficient radicalism of even Anne Marie Waters. It was well understood by many in these spaces that Tommy Robinson’s brand of nationalism was a wrong-end (and perhaps even state-backed). So too was it suggested that a strict anti-Islam focus was overly lenient, and that all civic conceptions of Britishness would fail to truly reverse the Great Replacement. Those of a similar vintage will recall the emergence of red squirrels as a handy metaphor in communicating this. Of the many hypothetical ethnonationalist parties pitched in sympathetic Telegram groups, Patriotic Alternative (PA) was the only one to gain traction offline.
Founded in 2019 by Mark Collett (the same man who stood trial alongside Nick Griffin), PA offered the ethnonationalist right a real-world vehicle to organise. Former BNP figures like Collett coalesced with the hitherto online right through livestreams and an offline activities programme. The latter was, in effect, ethnonationalist networking. Hikes and stickering sat alongside litter-picking, a twenty-first century iteration of the ‘community action’ pioneered by Tyndall in the 90s.
In both its ideology and approach to activism, PA was the inheritor of Tyndall’s legacy. Activists disregarded Nick Griffin’s avoidance of the ‘three H’s’ and were routinely sentenced for incitement, terror offences, and in one case, attempted murder. Of the incarcerated, the most high-profile was Sam Melia, husband of second-in-command Laura Towler. Melia served just ten months of his two-year sentence (released in the government’s drive to free up prison space), incurred for his role in the Hundred Handers — a decentralised stickering operation which disseminated print-at-home material calling attention to ‘white genocide’. As an openly national socialist movement, the immense scrutiny faced by PA culminated in various exposés from usual suspects HOPE not Hate and the BBC alike. Likewise, the party’s struggle to register with the Electoral Commission has rendered PA as something of a dead end — lamented as a social club by those who departed.
Homeland
The modern fringe ethnonationalist right is wracked by the same divisions as in the twentieth century. If Patriotic Alternative is the heir to Tyndall’s BNP, the splinter Homeland Party owes more to Griffin’s tenure. Founded by Kenny Smith (a former BNP administrator), Homeland set out to be a more ‘sensible’ and electorally viable party than PA, yet its explicit commitment to remigration placed it substantially to Reform’s right. Compared to PA, its online support was driven by ‘comparatively moderate’ figures with wider reach, including Steve Laws and Zoomer Historian. It soon surpassed its parent party’s (admittedly meagre) achievements — boasting Electoral Commission registration and an influx of recruits — and, for a time, attracted support online as a ‘viable’ outfit to Reform’s right.
Reticent to commit to a harder line, Farage had fallen out of favour with these parts of the online right. For those unwilling to give Reform time, Kenny Smith’s firm support of remigration held appeal. Homeland itself was a long-term project — reviving the ladder strategy employed by the NF and BNP whereby local election wins precede parliamentary representation. So too would they engage in community litter-picking, in a ploy to soften the party’s image.
Despite Kenny Smith’s alleged chest tattoo of a tantric good luck charm, Homeland’s hopes were dashed not long after it hit its stride. A feud erupted in 2025, sparked by a Northern Irish branch organiser moonlighting as a ‘femboy’. Among other activists, Steve Laws would exit the party before another row emerged over Smith’s personal conduct. A snapshot of a drunken brawl’s aftermath, showing Smith standing bow-legged alongside the officer resolving the scrap, is the latest entry in a series of compromising photos. Homeland had been more successful than their immediate predecessor, but they were not immune to the same pitfalls which dogged the extreme right for decades.
Final thoughts
It would be trite to say that UKIP’s referendum success sparked an inevitable demise and leave it at that. Inversely, to posit an alternate timeline where Batten didn’t rock the boat and instead kept Farage’s seat warm until May 2019 — thereby unlocking Reform’s purple shiny variant — requires more foresight of Batten than he could muster in our own. UKIP's collapse as it occurred wasn’t priced in, but its abject fate was a consequence of the innumerable unforced errors made after 2016. Pinning UKIP’s collapse on entropy alone elides crucial lessons for the right.
UKIP’s shift to the fringe right accomplished nothing. Of the three thousand-plus candidates to stand for UKIP or its splinter parties after June 2018, none were elected. Immense quantities of time, money, energy, and reputation were expended in creating new parties and pivoting old ones. Batten gambled his career on Tommy Robinson and Carl Benjamin — their careers have outlasted his own, and we’re worse off for it. Both walked away unscathed, in search of new hosts to feed off (namely, Advance UK and Restore Britain).
UKIP isn’t the only case study in failure that we have to hand. Those of us with long memories can point to the Brexit Party to evidence Farage’s political acumen, but its finest hour came a decade before. Griffin rightly recognised that people would like the BNP better without the periodic outbursts of fascism. He decreased their incidence but could not wholly eliminate them — this tendency was inherent to his party. Farage, campaigning on an issue far less salient than immigration, was able to make the EU synonymous with everything the right despised. Asked ‘Do you want a Reichsadler atop your closed borders?’, voters will respond as expected.
Reform’s proscription of the BNP and other extremist groups is oft-critiqued, but is expedient when one considers how often right-wing parties have been hamstrung by impulsive outbursts of Nazism. In Britain, Adolf Hitler is reviled with good reason — and short of The Greatest Story Never Told and Europa: The Last Battle featuring in an ITV1 Christmas Day double-bill, this isn’t changing. State-funded charities exist to find compromising photos. Journalists prowl parties in search of an immature activist throwing up romans after one Baby Guinness too many. In 2016, a whole generation twigged that progressives call everyone they disagree with nazis. Those whose unforced errors lend credence to these otherwise baseless smears cannot be trusted. Likewise, Adolescence has made room in our national pantheon of scaries: online misogyny is Nazism’s monster under-the-bedfellow. Just as hailing victory has torpedoed past attempts at immigration restriction, solving the crisis of fatherlessness can find more palatable expressions than banning divorce and putting women back in the kitchen.
Latent Nazism and bad-faith actors are just two contributors to the fringe right’s high mortality rate. When UKIP members snubbed Anne Marie Waters, she calculated that there was an untapped constituency crying out for a counter-Jihad party led by an Irish lesbian. History has proven her wrong, as it has for David Kurten, Henry Bolton, Paul Weston, Robert Kilroy-Silk, and other, more forgettable names. Euroscepticism is unique in being a niche battle won through founding a new party. A hypothetical Usury Kiboshing Immediately Party has a ceiling of 3%, and its constituency forms a circular Venn diagram with that of the Gaza independents. Reform has found success by not radicalising itself down unpopular niches, instead remaining a broad-church party united by a popular rallying cry. A charge levelled against Farage is that he can’t handle sharing the limelight, but in truth, Reform is a big-tent party.
Something I often seek to impress upon those who came to the right later than myself is that we’ve never had it so good. Those of a similar vintage will remember the immense sense of optimism which Brexit brought (no doubt engendering many of us to the cause), and the subsequent years of false starts and dashed hopes. In my formative political memories, Brexit plays second fiddle to the Manchester Arena bombing. Like many, I can recall the utter despair. Twenty-two young people had their lives cut short, all because successive governments believed, for some reason, that settling Salafi Libyan refugees would do more good than harm. That millions of people, in response, followed the state directive to sing songs, get along, peace and love — if you had told me then that a right-wing populist party would one day chalk up two hundred polling leads, I’d have shaken your hand off.
This is a bag which must, for the sake of the country, go unfumbled. That those short in the tooth are tempted astray because a couple of young interns are posting BASED things on an old man’s X account is wholly understandable. But history is littered with this sort of thing, and it has never worked. Farage is the only right-wing politician to win a national election, and every success that the right has enjoyed has been under his auspices. Reform is the most-rightward viable party. I hope the good, patriotic constituency of Makerfield avails us this near-miss with Andy Burnham’s Coalition of Chaos. Likewise, I hope the open-minded reader of a fringe persuasion can see where they’ve gone wrong before and take stock.
This article was written by Thomas Bretton, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?