The rise of Britain’s neo-Nazis

The first thing to understand about Alek Yerbury is that he is not trying to look like Adolf Hitler. He wears a leather overcoat similar to that which the Führer wore, but it’s just an overcoat. He has a small, sandy moustache and hair combed back across his head, but you cannot change your look just to win votes. And yes, Yerbury has described Hitler as his “hero” — but that, he says, is only because you have to recognise the competency of anyone who transformed their nation, Nazi or otherwise.

Yerbury, by his own account, is an “ethnocentric nationalist” and a third positionist. His economic views lie somewhere between capitalism and communism. He might also be called a fascist. Growing up in Australia, he returned to Britain, his parent’s homeland, and joined the army at 20 in 2015. Six years of service left him with an appreciation of military discipline and structure. Society, he thought, might be better organised along those lines than as a multi-party democracy. Collective will trumps liberal individualism.

Back on civvie street, Yerbury joined Patriotic Alternative, a hard-Right outfit led by another admirer of Hitler , Mark Collett, but came to believe it had no solutions to the nation’s problems and quit after about 15 months. He founded the National Support Detachment to back anti-migrant protests, but this also came to little.

In 2024, Yerbury registered the National Rebirth Party (NRP) with the Electoral Commission. It has high ambitions. Within 10 to 15 years, Yerbury told me, he expects to win national power. The Labour Party had taken longer to move from inception to victory, he acknowledged, but the scale of the crisis facing Britain is greater now. Progress seems slow so far, though. To date, the NRP has a little over 100 members.

The party is interested in addressing the causes of Britain’s demographic shift to a multiracial, multicultural society, rather than simply condemning immigration. Were its cadre to take power, they would establish a one-party state and deport as many non-whites as they could, while recognising that a 100% white Britain is likely a pipe dream.

“The aim,” Yerbury told me when we first spoke over the phone, “should be for the country to be as homogenous as possible.”

“If you’re running for election,” I suggested, “sort of the pitch to the public is: ‘Vote for us, and we’re gonna be in charge forever.’”

“Well,” he replied, “I would say the pitch is actually: vote for us for a genuine national rebirth.”

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A decade on from the murder of Jo Cox at the hands of the white supremacist Thomas Mair, a new generation of hardline neo-Nazis believe they are standing on the edge of a historic breakthrough. Following the Southport attack, asylum hotel protests and the murder of Henry Nowak, they see an opportunity to latch onto a large and dynamic movement. In their eyes, locals concerned about unvetted migrant men are ripe to be converted to a far more radical ideology.

Anti-migrant demonstrations, one particularly hardline activist told me, had achieved two things: expanding the social base for racial nationalism and normalising violent, physical resistance to the state. “That sense of momentum,” they suggested, “is a powerful recruiting tool even if it’s chaotic.”

Over the past 10 years, meanwhile, Holocaust denial and explicit antisemitism have burst into the mainstream. The world’s most famous rapper wrote an ode to Hitler; young male streamers attack Jewish influence; the President of America dined with Nick Fuentes, an impish Shoah revisionist. “Six million cookies?” he asked in a 2019 video , comparing dead Jews to baked goods. “I’m not buying it.” Dark energies, once constrained by historical memory, have been let loose.

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One day earlier this year, members of the National Rebirth Party gathered in Stafford to proselytise. It was raining heavily before I arrived, and the river had burst its banks, its brown water rising to engulf a line of benches. Yerbury and his followers were meeting in a former cinema, now a Wetherspoon’s pub, in the centre of town. Under its arched ceiling, they ate fish and chips and discussed their plans.

These men provided something of a cross-section of British fascism. Daniel (who, like most of those present, would not provide his surname) was dressed like a football casual, in dark jeans and a thin jacket. As we spoke, he leant towards me conspiratorially, his leg shaking underneath the table. He had dark circles below his eyes.

Daniel had grown up in a sectarian, Protestant community in the Black Country, he said, working as a manual labourer from the age of 16 before moving into white-collar management. His father was a Thatcherite, but his friend’s dad had introduced him to national socialism. Its sense of ideological rigidity appealed. “Asking for remigration is like giving someone painkillers because they broke their leg,” he said. What Britain needed, he argued, was to tackle the “international finan…