Active Patriot UK: ‘man on the front line’ or chronically deceitful white supremacist?

Let’s talk about Alan Leggett, aka ‘Active Patriot UK’. Leggett is currently a leading figure of the far right, and the man lauded by all factions of the far right as ‘exposing an illegal invasion’. As of February 2021, Leggett has some serious online reach – his YouTube account has 51.6k subscribers, his back up YouTube channel has 9k subscribers, and his twitter account has 15.9k followers.

But who is he really? We took a closer look at the grifter named by Tommy Robinson as ‘our man on the front line.’

Background

Alan Peter Leggett was born on 7th May 1979 to Steven and Christine. He has resided in Grimsby for most of his life. He was brought up with four siblings in South Humberside, but moved to nearby Cleethorpes in the early 2010s with his two children and their mother. Spending the majority of his life unemployed, grifting has become his life’s work. Leggett’s antisocial behaviour and trouble with the law often put strain on relationships with many of his family members, who he is now largely estranged from. Leggett has also been accused by family members of domestic violence, claims which have since made their way into far right circles but have not been verified. In late January 2021, Leggett mentioned during a stream that he had been instructed to self-isolate due to an ongoing family court matter.

As mentioned, Leggett was also no stranger to the criminal justice system before his radicalisation, and has spent time in prison previously – he has previously described himself as being “in jail over the years” and when he “was a kid”. While he largely tries to keep information on his previous convictions under wraps and has suggested during livestreams that it was mostly drug dealing offences, a recent slip of the tongue suggests that Leggett has more to hide. In a livestream with Yorkshire based ethnonationalist ‘Bonnie Lad’ recorded in January 2021, Leggett let slip that around 2013, he was on tag with a 12 month suspended sentence for an incident where he banged on the door of a Muslim neighbour and threatened him, saying “the only person who’ll be burning down houses and cutting throats is me”. Leggett’s defence is that he had heard from a neighbour that the man’s children had threatened his son the day earlier.

Leggett currently resides between Cleethorpe and a B&B in Dover which he uses as a base for his ‘migrant hunting’ activism. He claims he is planning to ‘move’ to the Dover B&B permanently to get around being banned from the area.

Radicalisation

While Alan Leggett’s political activity prior to his foray into activism in 2017 was minimal, he has always been on the far right – Leggett once described being “laughed at” back in 1998 for putting a BNP placard in his window which compared Muslim family sizes to ‘White British’ families. In an interview with the BBC, he claims his activism began when the Manchester Arena bombing occurred in 2017, which stoked his fears of terrorism and the UK’s relaxed borders (nevermind that the Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi, was himself born in the UK).

Following the attack, Leggett began to attend EDL-style street demonstrations which focused on anti-Muslim messaging and the grooming gangs scandals, and quickly fell in with Tommy Robinson and his band of devotees. In January 2018, having taken the pseudonym “Active Patriot UK”, Leggett opened a couple of YouTube accounts and a BitChute (YouTube, but unhinged) account, and began posting content. Within a few months, he had posted several predictably clickbait videos which were pro-Tommy and anti-Muslim in nature, as well as videos promoting speeches from the Generation Identity leader Martin Sellner, and demos organised by the DFLA.

Having seen the Tommy Robinson gravy train unfold before his eyes, it was not long before Leggett saw an opportunity to make bank for himself, and decided to get a slice of the action. In August 2018, Leggett started to flog Tommy Robinson merchandise, pocketing the cash for himself using the deceptively named PayPal account “iamtommy”.

In November 2018, Leggett filmed himself attending the far right organised ‘100 Year Independence Day Celebrations’ in Warsaw. As reported by Hope Not Hate’s Joe Mulhall the following day, “Ostensibly, it looked like any other national celebration, […] Yet look a little closer and a more sinister picture emerges. Some wore scarfs emblazoned with the white supremacist version of the Celtic Cross, while some streaming out of the metro station sported Odal Rune and Nazi SS Black Sun tattoos on their arms and faces, sometimes partly obscured by skull face masks and balaclavas.” The report goes onto describe some of the British far right who were in attendance, including members of Generation Identity UK, and other activists with ‘Free Tommy’ jackets on. Indeed, the footage that Leggett posted of the day at the time features Hugh Thorne, aka ‘Based Welshman’ being interviewed in his high-vis Free Tommy jacket.

2019 was intended to be a year spent growing his online presence across social media through promoting Tommy Robinson, filming demonstrations and flogging merchandise. It was also around this time that the British far right were beginning to co-opt the French Gilet Jaunes movement that kicked off the previous November. That January, Leggett was seen both filming and participating in a Yellow Vest march in Leeds. The footage shows Leggett shamelessly claiming that he has Tourette’s Syndrome in response to a copper threatening to (unlawfully) book him for ‘swearing in a public place’.

The chaos continued in March 2019 when Leggett, along with Amy Dalla Mura (‘Based Amy’) and Hugh Thorne (‘Based Welshman’) took a trip to Paris, intending to increase their profiles by filming the Gilet Jaunes (Yellow Vest) protests. Upon arrival, Thorne was arrested for carrying a gas mask and being unable to produce press ID when requested. Leggett was subsequently detained for waving his TR News stickered camera-phone in the faces of the French police – with Dalla Mura’s passport and Thorne’s coach tickets in his possession. And so, unable to tell the British consulate the real names of her grifter companions and so unable to find the pair and retrieve her documents, Dalla Mura was left enraged on the streets of Paris, unable to return without her passport. Even upon their separate releases from custody, the men abandoned their comrades, and the three fell out spectacularly.

Unsurprisingly, all three grifters have wiped this embarrassing event from their content pages entirely. Luckily, an antifascist documented the hilarious mishaps on their twitter, which you can still read here.

Leggett quickly lost interest the yellow vester movement and refocused his efforts on being a hype man for Tommy Robinson as he launched his bid to be elected as an MEP in the May 2019 elections. Robinson’s disastrous, milkshake sodden campaign trail made national news. Tommy finished in eighth place, lost his deposit and was laughed out of the room.

During this time, Leggett continued to expand his online presence – his freshly recreated (following the suspension of his old one @DayForFreedom4) twitter account Active Patriot UK continued to pump out the pro-Tommy rhetoric, as well as other ‘alternative media’ far right clickbait around the subjects of knife crime, refugees and multiculturalism. He was also shifting quite a few tshirts.

In July 2019, Robinson was once again jailed after being found in contempt of court for breaching a reporting ban to livestream footage of defendants in a trial back in 2018 – prompting a fresh wave of publicity, demonstrations and further opportunities for people like Leggett (alongside Robinson himself) to benefit. Almost all of Leggett’s efforts were launched at the ongoing ‘Free Tommy’ campaign, he was making enough money to attend demos with costly looking banners (which showed off his own logo), and ‘reporting’ on events as part of TR News.

In August 2019, Leggett was arrested on two separate occasions at demos – for affray, as well as possession of cannabis. It was also during this month that Leggett was called out amongst his own peers for antisemitic messages on Telegram – The Tommy Robinson supporting ‘Eye on Antisemitism’ tweeted screenshots of Leggett sharing an antisemitic video, along with the vile comment, “people will do anything for money, including lesbians Jews”.

‘Migrant Hunting’

At the end of 2019, Leggett’s attention turned to the ongoing refugee crisis in the UK, and together with his accomplices Nigel Marcham (‘Little Veteran’) and Tom Fury (‘Zero News’), sat in Marcham’s house in Milton Keynes, they cooked up a new project. That day, Marcham had attended the impromptu anti-Boris demo that followed the Tories’ re-election on December 12th the evening before, and had spent the evening goading protestors. His tirade was filmed and shared online by Team Tommy, who lapped up the angry little man with the cadet beret yelling about ‘his country’. That evening, Leggett convinced Marcham to step into the cult of personality himself and ‘get more involved in the movement’, and so ‘The Little Veteran’ hatched as a baby Paypal Patriot from his little xenophobic egg.

Now that Marcham had his own channel (and following shortly, his own Paypal account), Fury jumped on board and the three of them were all set to pursue their shiny new venture of pursuing innocents fleeing war and persecution. Leggett had seen the Facebook account of a man called ‘Chris Johnson’, who was posting his own videos of boats coming into Dover, and so decided to nick his idea. In May 2020, the ‘British Border Patrol’ launched with a mid-lockdown boys’ beach camping trip to Pett Level in East Sussex to carry out a few nights of ‘border patrol’, based on a piece of ‘intel’ from an undisclosed source that ‘illegals’ were ‘sneaking weapons into the country’ in the dead of night, by boat’. On a ‘launch’ livestream, they explained that they were launching a patrol comparable to the Home Guard in WWII, where they planned to coordinate volunteers hanging around different beaches along the coastline, ready to ‘look stern and take control’ of potential refugees landing on the shores.

“Once we’ve got a reccie done and know what beaches need to be covered, we need 5 people. There’s 3 of us on one beach now – so you get three on a beach, ‘cos as soon as something happens one’s got the camera to film, one on the telephone and one’s running up the beach rugby tackling them and kicking the fuck out of them.”

Nigel Marcham, 13 May 2020 while camping at Pett Level, filmed on a Zero News YouTube livestream

Needless to say, the camping trip was uneventful and the ‘intel’ proved to be largely useless. The trio angered the locals with their behaviour, particularly their interference with property of a local boat rescue service. Most of their time was spent in their tents getting stoned to shite music by outed racist ‘Anglo Saxon’, patting themselves on the back for being such excellent patriots and ranting about ‘illegals’ (with no sense of irony considering their trip itself was in direct breach of covid legislation). Nevertheless, the trio used the weekend as a call to arms to their far right followers for support and donations, and to grow their ‘grifter brand’.

Naturally, their behaviour made local news. Marcham, who claimed to be wearing a stab vest, made a video in response referring to Rye as a “godforsaken shithole of a village”, and accused them of being “happy to let migrants invade this beaches and run into this country with guns and knives”, threatening to ‘go looking for Rye News’ if they refused to take down the article,’ (they didn’t – read it here). Tom Fury dropped from the project due to the backlash. Marcham and Leggett, showing no remorse or regret, were back on their ‘patrols’ of empty beaches less than a week later.

After little success at Pett level, Leggett turned his attentions to the Western docks at Dover, after seeing ‘successful’ footage of boats arriving from the man called Chris Johnson on Facebook. In June 2020, Leggett partially relocated to a BnB in Dover whose owner is sympathetic to the far right, and ordered a fake press pass and a fake Royal National Lifeboat Institution ID card, intending to blag his way around private areas at the dock. His close location and separation from the others, along with tip offs received from far right followers who were watching marine traffic websites, meant that Leggett could lurk as he pleased, and that month, he began to churn out videos of arrivals by boat in the early hours of the morning.

The footage of shivering and bewildered souls wrapped in thermal blankets sent his followers into a frenzy, and his grifter ‘brand’ exploded, his videos were shared across various ‘alternative media news sites’ and was described as Tommy Robinson as ‘our man on the front line’.

By July 2020, Leggett was posting up daily videos, which sometimes featured boats arriving into the Docks, but were mostly footage of him being a local nuisance. He filmed shipyards which he claimed were ‘illegal boat graveyards’, trespassed around buildings he suspected to be used as part of the asylum registration proves, and egged on by his followers, drove around harassing staff on an electric scooter.

That month, Leggett also amassed various charges relating to trespassing of private areas, and driving his scooter erratically and without a license or insurance. He was becoming well known for being a violent nuisance in the area, and this worked to his advantage, enabling him to pump a narrative of conspiracy to his generously donating followers.

His new found popularity encouraged a raft of other grifters and far right figures to cash in on the action – his videos featured appearances from Marcham, as well as Steve Laws, Nick Pledger (‘Patriotic Crusader’), Tracey Wiseman (‘TW’), Hugh Thorne (‘Based Welshman’), Nigel Farage and ex Brexit Party MEP / Hearts of Oak’s Catherine Blaiklock.

Beginning August 2020, Leggett left his crew of copycat grifters to it in Dover and began following asylum seekers to the short-term hotel and holding accommodation they were placed in, in various parts of the country – hitting hotels in York, Hemel Hempstead, Hull, Wakefield. At the premises, he sneaked around the buildings to find migrants to harass and ask invasive questions, and tried to enter the buildings several times. One particular vomit-inducing incident was filmed by fellow grifter Jack Dawkins “shadowing” him, as he showed off to the camera, tussling with upset hotel staff.

He was back in Dover on the 6 August where he was arrested for breach of the peace, while harassing a line of refugees awaiting to board a coach. His arrest was discussed on Alex Jones’ conspiracy nut channel Infowars. On this same day, he had been claiming on social media that the state had ‘pre-planned and orchestrated a family day’, on a day where more children and women had made the crossing than usual.

In another video from around this time, which Leggett has recently reuploaded to his YouTube channel, Leggett can be seen chasing some terrified men on foot who had just made it ashore, wearing his own brand ‘Active Patriot border patrol’ t-shirt that he was also selling to followers at the time. In the footage, Leggett is seen yelling “I’m following these fuckers” as he runs, and telling his viewers “no way am I letting potential jihadis come through”, before trying to question the fleeing men on ‘how much money they paid’. At one point, Leggett forces a man he is tailing into taking a selfie with him.

Also in August 2020, Paypal closed Leggett’s account for breaching their Terms of Service. He responded by putting his direct bank account number and sort code into his video descriptions. He also began shifting t-shirts with his own logo on.

September 2020 brought more chaos in Dover, as a controversial march orchestrated by various members of the far right (including Leggett’s best mate Marcham) went ahead on 5 September, to much ridicule from antifascists, local residents and news agencies. While Kent Antirascist Network held a successful counter-demonstration in the town centre, no more than 150 fascists, Q Anon cultists and a couple of sad neo-Nazis managed to block a roundabout for about an hour and finished with a fight with police. You can read more in this excellent writeup of the day’s events by the Antifascist Network. Leggett was there to film the event – at one point, attendees of the demo approached Leggett to warn him that someone had been handing out neo-Nazi stickers, to which he denied all knowledge of them. Ignoring of course, that Leggett often carries Pie n Mash stickers himself.

That night, Leggett’s BB accommodation staged a party for attendees of the demo. Leggett was spotted on the roof of the building clearly under the influence and shouting his head off at police, who had been called to the scene.

A week later, he was filmed being removed by police from a car park for harassing and filming refugees transferring on coaches. Again, on 23 September following further filming and harassment Leggett’s BnB accommodation was raided, he was once again arrested while on camera, this time for failing to show up at a court date in Doncaster.

His campaign of harassment continued with the opening of Napier Army Barracks in Folkestone, repurposed by the Home Office to act as a temporary holding facility for asylum seekers while they were being processed. Leggett and his accomplices took a break from trespassing around the docks to spend days hanging around and circling the Folkestone premises. In a now removed video from October 2020, Leggett was seen stalking the perimeter of Napier Barracks, zooming in on the numberplate of a car purported to belong to a manager of the centre which began with a J and contained ‘HAD’ – his reaction was to accuse the manager of having a custom numberplate that said ‘Jihad’, going on to claim that the manager himself had “terrorist intentions”. While the video is gone, Leggett continues to bring this up on livestreams and interviews to prove the staff of the barracks are ‘in on’ a conspiracy to bring in Jihadists.

On 5 November 2020, days after the BBC lent legitimacy to his and others racism with their ‘The Wedding DJ Who Wants to Stop Migrant Boats’ article, Leggett was arrested for offences relating to incitement of racial hatred, and his recording equipment was seized. The arrest was due to stickers found while being searched at a train station. Subsequently, leaflets were found at Leggett’s address which said ‘Multiculturalism is genocide’. This is a white supremacist slogan that is a direct nod to neo-Nazi white genocide conspiracy theory (which claims there is a deliberate plot to wipe out white people by encouraging reproduction between races). Leggett received a flood of donations from his far right followers, as a result of having his equipment confiscated.

Leggett was arrested on the Dover docks yet again while filming in the faces of new arrivals just a week later.

In December 2020, Leggett joined in the live chat of a neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative livestream which featured Robin Tilbrook of The English Democrats. In the chat, he palled around with PA regional organiser Chris Mitchell (‘Patriotic Talk’), directly appealed to Laura to contact him, and also called for Dover to be ‘shut down properly’, saying “fuck the racist label, were [sic] it with pride now, we’re English and proud, fuck what everyone else thinks”.

Days later, Leggett livestreamed from a counter demo held outside Kirklees magistrates court, in response to a child sexual exploitation case. While streaming, he once again produced a neo-Nazi Pie n Mash Squad sticker and showed the camera, this time of his own volition.

In January 2021, Leggett and Steve Laws streamed a live interview with prominent ethnonationalist grifter and Patriotic Alternative supporter ‘Horus’. In the stream, Leggett ranted that all stories about paedophiles are “black and brown men”, rather than white men, and called for “the white man to take back the estates”, and “the white drug dealer to take back from the pakistani gangs”. Steve Laws described Horus’ work as “brilliant” and that he agrees on “90% of issues with Horus”, as Leggett nodded along in agreement and showered praise on him. Throughout the video, Horus was able to freely advertise various other ethnonationalist streamers, as well as Patriotic Alternative itself. Just before the stream ended, Leggett interrupted Horus to request that his moderators remove some content of the chat as it relates to discussion of the “Jewish Question” – but only because it might result in his video being removed, and confirmed that he was “not offended himself”.

A week later, Leggett and Steve Laws were back livestreaming with another prominent Patriotic Alternative supporting streamer, Yorkshire based ‘Bonnie Lad’. This stream was arguably Leggett’s most transparent in terms of his political views – at one point, in reference to far right rhetoric often used by PA which claims that ‘whites will be a minority by 2066’ Leggett shouted “2066, guarantee you it’s going to be 2044! We are being replaced!”. He also admitted that he disliked any immigration “except the Polish”.

“Some of these [refugees in Napier Barracks] look proper inbred, proper deformed, proper fucking mentally not stable in the head”

“When the white man was a dealer, yeah, running the estates, they had control, the kids weren’t being groomed, you know what I mean? Soon as the black people bring the cheap drugs over, the white man gets manipulated because he wants cheaper drugs, so he runs underneath a black man, then they get the girls for the black men…. [in response to Steve Laws mentioning ‘trafficking’] ..yeah the Albanians are the worst bastards.”

Vile racism from Active Patriot, streaming with Bonnie Lad in January 2021

Leggett also discussed his plans for 2021 – namely, he plans to “focus on whites being killed by non-whites”, as well as becoming even more of a 50p Tommy Robinson by “putting on a shirt and trousers” to attend grooming gang trials. His recent banner update on his YouTube account reflects this direction.

Lastly, but unarguably the most sinister plan of all – Leggett plans to publish the photos of refugees he has taken over the months in order to expose their faces and ‘match them’ to crimes. We’ll be watching this closely.

On 15 February, Leggett answered bail for an arrest for harassing staff and asylum seekers at a hotel in York, and was arrested once again – this time for an allegation relating to an offence under the ‘malicious communications act’. While not much is yet known, Leggett claimed on a livestream prior to his arrest that it was related to ‘racism’, something which he has ‘dealt with before’.

Further Notes on His Politics

Alan Leggett has often been mistaken as sitting further to the ‘civic nationalist’ end of the spectrum (nationalism dictated by birthplace as opposed to skin colour), likely because of his affiliation with Tommy Robinson and football lads. While he often attempts to claim to authorities and to his followers that he only “has a problem with illegal immigration” and is otherwise welcoming of immigrants, our analysis of his activity makes it clear that this is complete bollocks, and he is much further to the extreme right than he wishes to publicly let on. This is not to say that his racist views aren’t evident simply through looking at the content he publishes – they are – but he also has a history of feigning ignorance and denial in order to evade challenge, which he often gets away with amongst his allies. Collating the evidence together allows us to see him very clearly for what he is.

One glaringly visible moment was the incident at the 5th September demo, when event attendees warned an apparently surprised Leggett about the neo-Nazi stickers being spread at the demo, unaware that he often has stickers from the same group in his possession.

The language that he uses to describe the people who he targets when filming – the refugees arriving by boat – criminalises and dehumanises them. He refers to them as an “illegal invasion” and calls them “jihadists, rapists and murderers”. He mocks them when they ask for humanity and compassion. He chases after them, shouting “these motherfuckers”, and describes his actions as “hunting” them. He uses tactics of harassment, intimidation and bullying to incite responses from them when he follows them to their lodgings.

His social media posts, especially when sharing ‘alternative news’ on his Twitter, are extremely focused on whiteness, often attacking anybody or any subject he believe is anti-white. In a recent reply tweet, he referred to the concept of diversity as “white erasure”.

His social media is often peppered with racist posts and jokes that get deleted a short time later.

Several of his logos used over the years have included imagery such as the ‘Always Anti-Antifa’ wraparound text. His backup twitter account uses the ‘Smash Cultural Marxism’ logo. Both are popular on the far right, particularly in the white power skinhead scene.

The evidence also suggests that, rather than a slow radicalisation to ethnonationalism similar to James Goddard’s, Leggett has always held such views. By his own admission, he was a supporter of the BNP back in 1998, and spoke about putting their placards in his window. This is important to note, as the BNP during this time was led by the former co-founder of both the National Socialist Movement and National Front, neo-Nazi activist John Tyndall. [Correction: while Tyndall was a highly influential member of the National Front in its early days, he was not a co-founder. Initially he was not allowed to join due to concerns he would try to take the NF in a more explicitly neo-nazi direction – he was too much of a neo-nazi for them.]

Again by his own admission, at least one of Leggett’s violent convictions prior to his involvement in activism were clearly racially motivated.

Leggett has also embraced, rather than distanced himself from, the increased support from fascists further to the right than his previous TR News comrades – such as neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative and their fascist fanboys at The Reality Report, Horus and Bonnie Lad. From recorded interactions, it is clear to see that far from experiencing any discomfort from working with white supremacists, he agrees with them. On the recent stream with ‘Bonnie Lad’, he openly stated that he welcomes support and collaboration with those who have racist and/or extreme views.

To summarise, Alan Leggett is a raging neo-Nazi sympathiser, with a history of racially motivated violence and documented white supremacist views.