It’s going to be a long Good Friday for Kenny Smith, leader of what he calls the “sensible nationalist” Homeland Party, after he suffered two serious setbacks in the past 24 hours.
First, the star speaker at Homeland’s remigration conference, one of Europe’s most infamous Islamophobes, was barred from the country on the Home Secretary’s orders. Then a number of his senior activists threatened to resign in protest at Smith’s appointment of a new Northern Ireland regional organiser.
A nasty piece of work
Renaud Camus, 78, is best known for inventing the slogan “Great Replacement”, though he was already in his mid-50s before he began to drift into far-right politics. In 2012 (after abandoning his own presidential campaign) he endorsed Marine Le Pen, and three years later he tried to create a French version of the German Islamophobe group Pegida.
In 2022 Camus abandoned Le Pen and endorsed the more virulently anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant presidential campaign of Éric Zemmour.
Nasty piece of work
Securing Camus as star speaker for his “Remigration Conference” on April 26th was quite a coup for Smith, whose Homeland Party was founded just two years ago as a part of a split in Mark Collett’s explicitly nazi Patriotic Alternative.
Camus is a nasty piece of work, but he operates on a vastly higher intellectual plane than anyone in Homeland or PA.
Most HP officials are ex-PA, with some (like Smith himself) having a record of racist and fascist activism dating back to the British National Party of the 1990s and 2000s. But during the past few months he has tried to rebrand the party as an acceptable home for a wide range of nutters, religious bigots and race-baiters who for one reason or another have fallen out with Reform UK, UKIP, Britain First and other rivals.
State asset
Smith’s European liaison officer Martin Kuziel has been especially active building connections with the much larger and more “respectable” AfD. These connections have puzzled both anti-fascists and Smith’s bitter rivals in PA, whose leader Mark Collett has gone so far as to imply that Smith is some sort of state asset.
Smith himself boasted that the reason he and his colleagues can travel in and out of the UK without being stopped by border security is that they are “sensible nationalists”.
He might now be regretting this boasting, after the Home Office yesterday notified HP’s star conference speaker Camus that he would not be allowed into the UK as his presence was “not conducive to the public good”.
The Home Office yesterday notified HP’s star conference speaker Camus that he would not be allowed into the UK as his presence was “not conducive to the public good”
Some of Smith’s internal enemies had already condemned the invitation on the grounds that Camus is both gay and (as he constantly reminds us all) a longstanding supporter of the State of Israel. Nick Griffin, who has hated Smith ever since a split in the BNP almost 20 years ago, even made libellous claims that Camus would be some sort of sexual threat to young Homeland activists.
Camus and Smith are finding out the hard way that neither the Home Office nor anti-fascists are impressed by bigots disguising their extremism behind either rainbow flags or Star of David flags. It’s perfectly possible for a gay Zionist to be a threat to public order, a vile racist, and/or Islamophobe.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and her civil servants should be congratulated for taking the threat of far-right extremism seriously.
LGBT campaigns
Renaud Camus has one thing in common with HP’s new Northern Ireland regional organiser Carter McAfee, whose appointment caused Smith’s other Easter headache. Both of them are or were openly gay and active in LGBT campaigns.
One Homeland member posting on X attacked McAfee for his “sexually degenerate lifestyle” and for espousing “Irish nationalism in a Party whose members are overwhelmingly Unionist”. He denounced the new regional organiser as “a terrible candidate for leadership within the Party” and called on Smith to think again.
Bulldoze opposition
Smith’s first reaction was to double down on his support for McAfee, confirming that like his former friend turned enemy Collett, his leadership style is to bulldoze opposition. Smith claimed that those criticising McAfee are “cranks and bad actors” who were quick to “attack our young people”.
Will McAfee survive in post until next weekend’s conference? Will Smith secure a replacement speaker of anything like Camus’s calibre? Will HP’s rivals rally round and oppose the Home Office decision, or will they gloat?
Join Searchlight for the next episode of the British nazi soap opera, coming soon to this website.
