Reform UK council candidate accused of attending Neo-Nazi summer camp

Candidate in May's local elections accused of links to extreme far right after photo appears to show his presence at a summer camp run by Patriotic Alternative, a Neo-Nazi group

A Reform UK council candidate at May’s local elections has been accused of subsequently attending a summer camp run by a Neo-Nazi group, raising questions about his links to wider extreme far right activities.

The individual, who is believed to have finished in second place in the local contest, has been accused by anti-fascist magazine Searchlight to have attended a summer camp in the country run by Patriotic Alternative. The group, which was founded in 2019 by Neo-Nazi and antisemite Mark Collett, has focused on the “white genocide” conspiracy theory, which claims that Jews are attempting to organise a demographic shift, via immigration of non-whites, to make white people into a minority in Western countries.

Searchlight reported that the Reform UK candidate was subsequently pictured in a photograph of the summer camp shared online by Mark Cotterill, a former National Front and British National Party member who now edits Heritage and Destiny, described by Searchlight as “Britain’s leading racist magazine.”

Having consistently failed in attempts to register itself as a political party, Patriotic Alternative has attempted to engage in politics by other means. In 2024, four members of the group stood as local candidates for the ‘English Democrats’ party. However, last year Collett wrote a piece for Heritage and Destiny suggesting that fellow Nazis “who are not known, who have a clean public image and who wish to get elected to high office should join Reform UK, help to steer that party from within.” He went on to say that “Having a number of officials and candidates within Reform UK, and potentially having an ethno-nationalist elected to parliament under the Reform UK banner would obviously be advantageous in a number of ways, not least in bringing Farage and his party closer to our positions.”

Reform UK faced a significant number of revelations about highly problematic candidates ahead of the general election in 2024. Nigel Farage subsequently blamed a vetting company the party had used at the time and announced that the party would be instituting a more rigorous vetting system. But in March of this year there were reports of significant unhappiness from the party’s rank and file at ‘extreme vetting’. Earlier this month, Farage contacted all party members to tell them that the party would be introducing a new vetting system, which he described as a “blank state”. In the message, the Reform UK leader said that “if you have previously failed vetting, you are strongly encouraged to reapply under the new standards”, which implies the new system may be less stringent than the old.