Matching navy shirts. Red ties. Flags. A lone drummer struggling to keep everyone in step. The National Rebirth Party wanted its Oxfordshire march to project strength and discipline. Instead, the footage was compared with everything from Monty Python to a deteriorating Kraftwerk tribute act.
The clips came from the party’s “March for Our Fallen”, an event led by Alek Yerbury and promoted through its own online channels. One video shows a small group marching across dry grass beside old stone ruins. Another has members standing in formation while Yerbury delivers a speech in front of the party’s red-and-blue flags.
It did not produce quite the display organisers presumably had in mind.
Once the footage reached a wider audience, attention rapidly shifted from the speech to the marching, the outfits and a drummer whose performance became one of the internet’s main talking points.
The mockery was immediate. The politics behind the spectacle, however, are considerably less amusing.
Who are the National Rebirth Party?
The National Rebirth Party is a registered political party led by Yerbury, who is also listed as its treasurer. The Electoral Commission authorised it in February 2024 and records it as able to field candidates in England, Scotland and Wales. Electoral Commission records confirm its current registration.
Yerbury previously belonged to Patriotic Alternative, a far-right organisation described as neo-Nazi by anti-extremism researchers. He left to establish his own movement and has since tried to give it the appearance and structure of a conventional political party.
HOPE not hate describes National Rebirth as a “fascist microparty”. Reporting by The Ferret has documented Yerbury’s previous statements, including calls for political opponents to be sent to labour camps and remarks involving the use of firearms against migrants.
Yerbury told the publication in 2024 that his organisation offered a genuine alternative to the established parties.
National Rebirth’s own published programme removes any doubt about how extreme that alternative would be.
What the party actually proposes
Its official agenda says citizenship by birth should be restricted to people of “British heritage or lineage”.
It calls for foreigners deemed harmful to what it terms the “National Community” to be expelled from Britain. All British men would be required to perform at least 18 months of military service.
The party also says citizens who refuse their duties should be stripped of their rights and supports the death penalty for serious offences, including vaguely defined “crimes against the nation and its people”.
Other proposals include combining trade unions under a system in which the national government would assume responsibility for protecting workers.
These are not claims made by the party’s opponents. They appear in National Rebirth’s published agenda.
That background matters because the clips are easy to dismiss as nothing more than footage of a tiny group making itself look ridiculous. The party’s presentation may invite laughter, but its programme is explicitly authoritarian.
The march that got everyone talking
The official footage shows roughly a dozen participants dressed in similar navy shirts, red ties and black trousers.
They carry matching flags and attempt to march behind a drummer through an open field. The formation quickly becomes uneven, while the drumming gives the procession the atmosphere of an unsuccessful village pageant.
Another video shows members standing apart in a loose formation as Yerbury speaks into a microphone. The flags move in the wind behind him while participants remain facing forward.
The event was supposed to commemorate what the party called “our fallen” and demonstrate its ability to organise in public. Online, viewers were less interested in its message than the painfully awkward execution.
@Parody_PM wrote: “If this is what British Fascism looks like, the greatest threat from it is that people might die laughing.”
@higginscartoons noticed that one clip appeared to end with the words: “We will dong…”
@RealDanGliebitz concentrated on the drummer, congratulating him on practising his “left-right-left” and “hard right flank turn”.
@MirabelTweets1 went with the economical verdict: “Absurd Twats of the Day.”
@wellyousaythatt posted: “If it looks like a Nazi, talks like a Nazi and walks like a Nazi…”
@nw_nicholas said the group could “give Reform a run for its money”.
@TuckerClemens was considerably less restrained, while @mancunianmedic supplied an old line that fitted the occasion perfectly:
“Why does everyone take an instant dislike to us?”
“Because it saves time!”
@WillBlackWriter spotted a possible problem for voters on the outer right, noting that they now have Reform, Restore and Rebirth to distinguish between.
@TheMeldrew thought “Kraftwerk have let themselves go a bit”.
@aBitSquirrely described it as the product of a Monty Python sketch having a baby with an episode of The Office, before renaming the group the “National Afterbirth Party”.
@waelgenga delivered perhaps the shortest musical review: “When the Saints Come Marching Incel.”
The matching outfits raised another question
Michael Rosen also questioned whether political uniforms are legal.
The Public Order Act 1936 was introduced amid the rise of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. It generally prohibits wearing uniforms in public in circumstances indicating association with a political organisation or the promotion of a political objective.
Whether the clothing seen in National Rebirth’s footage meets the legal definition is not something that can be determined from the videos alone. No official finding that the group broke the law has been reported.
The fact that its appearance prompted immediate comparisons with Mosley’s movement is nevertheless unlikely to trouble an organisation that has deliberately adopted rigid styling, nationalist symbolism and openly authoritarian policies.
The joke only goes so far
National Rebirth wanted its march to make the group look organised, disciplined and ready to grow. What viewers saw was a very small gathering struggling to cross a field in formation.
That is funny. Its politics are not.
HOPE not hate made that distinction in its own response, describing the footage as resembling a Dad’s Army tribute act while warning that the ideology behind it should still be taken seriously.
A group can look absurd and remain dangerous in what it advocates. National Rebirth’s manifesto seeks to restrict citizenship by ancestry, make military service compulsory, strip rights from people who refuse state-imposed duties and restore capital punishment.
The march did nothing to make those ideas more credible. It did, however, give the internet enough material to keep the jokes going long after the drummer stopped.
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