How loyalist culture, Britain’s far right and anti-migrant politics are converging in the West of Scotland

From Orangeism and the politics of empire to asylum-hotel protests and “patriot” networks, an older machinery of division is being adapted to a new racial politics.

On 25 July, Glasgow Green became a junction point for several currents of the British right. An anti-immigration demonstration called by Unite the Clans Scotland drew activists from beyond the city and was met by a much larger anti-racist mobilisation. Police made 15 arrests for offences including assault, possession of offensive weapons and breach of the peace. A huge 4,000 strong anti racist demonstration far outnumbered the 500 or so racists and fascists.

Anti racist/ anti fascist counter protest

Among those present was Glen Kane, a northern Irish loyalist convicted for his role in the sectarian killing of a Catholic man in 1992. Kane has also been associated with the British National Party. Another participant was Mark Sinclair, a former UVF member convicted of armed robberies in Scotland. It showed in concrete form how people can move between loyalist paramilitary networks, the old fascist right and the new anti-immigration movement.

Jim Dowson is another central figure in this process. A Scottish-born anti-abortion activist with deep links to Ulster loyalism, Dowson became involved in the BNP and helped found Britain First. Through Knights Templar International, he has backed so-called patrol groups with equipment and money.

The far right event looked new: online “patriot” networks, talk of remigration, livestreamers, English far-right visitors and a political atmosphere sharpened by repeated agitation around asylum accommodation. Yet it also drew upon something old. Glasgow and the industrial west possess a dense loyalist culture formed through two centuries of movement between Scotland and Ulster—Orange lodges, flute bands, commemorative marches, football-supporting networks and a political language of siege, betrayal and territorial possession.

The relationship between that culture and the contemporary far right is neither a conspiracy nor a simple identity. The far right does not need to capture every Orange lodge, Rangers supporters’ club or loyalist band. It needs access to a smaller layer accustomed to militant British nationalism, street mobilisation and the idea that a threatened community must reclaim its territory. In moments of crisis, that layer can connect a local grievance to a wider racial politics.

An old politics, not an ancient hatred

Scotland’s sectarian divide is often narrated as an inexplicable quarrel between Catholics and Protestants, periodically released through football or marching season. That story is comforting because it locates the problem among supposedly backward supporters and leaves the country’s respectable institutions untouched. But the divide was never simply theological, and it did not rise spontaneously from the streets.

Its modern form grew from Scotland’s intimate role in the colonisation of Ireland and the construction of the British Empire. The first Scottish Orange lodges appeared among soldiers and migrants connected to the suppression of the United Irish rebellion of 1798. Later, mass Irish Catholic migration—above all in the famine years—was presented not merely as the arrival of people with another religion, but as an alien population whose loyalty, morality and fitness for citizenship were suspect.

In the late nineteenth century, opposition to Irish Home Rule gave this prejudice a mass political organisation. Scottish industrialists depended upon imperial markets; the Conservative Party reinvented itself as the party of Union, monarchy and Empire; and Orangeism offered a means of binding sections of Protestant workers to their employers and to the British state. In 1913 and 1914, Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law shared Glasgow platforms with Orange leaders while armed units of the Ulster Volunteer Force paraded in the city.

In parts of Clydeside, skilled employment and promotion could be filtered through Protestant and Masonic networks. The churches gave respectability to anti-Irish agitation. The political right transformed fear of Catholic immigration and Irish independence into a form of popular Unionism. Sectarianism travelled downwards from parliament, pulpit and boardroom as well as sideways through the pub, workplace, street and football ground.

Instead of asking if one part of the working class is naturally bigoted, we should ask who benefits when workers understand housing shortages, low wages or collapsing services through the language of communal competition. The ruling class does not manufacture every prejudice from nothing. It selects, legitimises and directs existing fears, repeatedly renewed by modern political interests.

From the Catholic “alien” to the migrant “invader”

The contemporary far right offers loyalism a new enemy. The traditional targets of loyalist politics were Irish republicanism, Catholicism and the perceived advance of a hostile all-Ireland nation. The new racial right identifies migrants, Muslims, refugees and asylum seekers as the internal threat. The categories are different, but the political grammar is strikingly familiar.

The outsider is said to receive preferential housing and welfare. He is portrayed as sexually dangerous, culturally unassimilable and politically protected by a treacherous elite. Public institutions have supposedly abandoned “our own people”. A local crime or allegation becomes proof that an entire population is dangerous. The crisis of schools, housing or the NHS is detached from austerity and class power and attributed to those with the least control over any of them.

Loyalist culture in the north of Ireland has long organised memory around defended streets, contested parade routes and neighbourhoods imagined as belonging to a particular community. The anti-migrant protest outside a hotel uses the same elementary picture: outsiders have been placed in “our area”; remote authorities refuse to listen; local men must defend women, children and the community. Social media aided by the mainstream press compresses the transition from incident to racial mobilisation into a matter of hours.

The Erskine hotel protests is indicative. From 2023, opposition to the use of the Muthu Glasgow River Hotel for asylum accommodation became a sustained organising site for Patriotic Alternative and later Homeland. Far-right activists attempted to turn anxieties about services and decision-making into a durable campaign against the people living inside the hotel. The point was not only to stage a protest. It was to acquire relationships, test slogans, identify recruits and make racial nationalism appear like ordinary community politics.

The corridor across the North Channel

The West of Scotland is distinctive because loyalism here is not simply Scottish unionism decorated with Ulster symbols. Successive migrations created a political community stretching across the North Channel. Bands, lodges, football trips, commemorations, family ties and ferry routes connect Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and Ayrshire with Belfast, Portadown and other loyalist centres.

The Orange lodge, football crowds, flute bands are not automatically far right. But together they create channels through which people, symbols and arguments can move. It is a ready-made social infrastructure.

The traffic has never been entirely one way. British fascists have periodically regarded loyalist paramilitaries as authentic practitioners of armed British nationalism. Loyalist figures, in turn, have used far-right networks for propaganda, prestige and contacts in Britain. Those relationships were generally factional rather than an alliance between whole organisations. Their importance lies in the recurring ability of individual activists to pass between loyalist, fascist and anti-immigration environments.

The modern far right is less dependent on formal membership than its predecessors. It operates through a field of parties, small organisations, influencers, Telegram channels, local protest pages and temporary coalitions. Reporting before the July Glasgow event described the expected participation of Britain First and activists moving between Scottish and English protests; a police coordination assessment cited the “fluidity” and “cross-pollination” of these networks. That fluid form fits the loyalist milieu particularly well: contact and mobilisation can occur without a committee ever voting for an alliance.

Football, bands and the battle for the street

Football is a meeting ground, but not the explanation. Glasgow Rangers has historically provided a mass cultural setting in which Scottish and Ulster Britishness overlap. For most supporters this remains football, family and belonging. But it also creates pubs, buses, songs, symbols and trusted relationships that political minorities can try to use. The far right does not need the conversion of an entire support.

The same is true of the band scene. Loyalist flute-band culture is younger, more mobile and more directly oriented towards the street than the formal lodge. Bands travel between Scotland and the north of Ireland; commemorative culture can include references to loyalist prisoners, paramilitaries and battles over parade routes. Its importance to the far right is not that every band shares a racial programme, but that the culture supplies a repertoire: discipline, spectacle, collective movement and the public assertion of territory.

That repertoire was visible after the 2014 independence referendum. In George Square, young pro-Union demonstrators used loyalist slogans and racist abuse; some appeared to give Nazi salutes before violence broke out. It represented a harder political element able to turn defence of the Union into aggressive street nationalism.

A decade later, the September 2024 anti-immigration rally promoted by Tommy Robinson attracted only a small crowd to the same square and was overwhelmed by several thousand anti-racists. It showed both the reach and the limit of far-right mobilisation in Glasgow: national influencers could call people out, but the city’s trade-union, migrant, faith and anti-racist traditions remained capable of taking the political initiative.

A crisis manufactured from above

The danger is not confined to the organisations that openly call themselves nationalist or patriotic. A far-right street movement grows within a wider political climate. Years of austerity have stripped resources from working-class communities. The asylum system then places traumatised people in unsuitable hotels run through lucrative government contracts, often with little democratic involvement from residents or local services. The right presents the resulting tension as proof that migrants, rather than the system itself, are the problem.

Mainstream politicians supply much of the language. Borders are described as broken; refugees as an intolerable burden; neighbourhood change as loss of national control. The harder right radicalises the message, but it does not invent the premise that migrants are responsible for social crisis. When respectable politics defines immigration as the emergency, street forces compete to offer the most brutal solution. The growth of Reform UK supplies ideological fuel to the street movements and at the same time the anti immigrant measures of the Labour Government emboldens Reform.

The old divide was sustained because it joined elite interests to popular insecurity. Protestant workers were offered symbolic membership of the imperial nation while employers retained power over wages, housing and employment. Today, racial nationalism promises neglected workers ownership of the border and the street while leaving landlords, employers and government contracts untouched.

The far right turns deprivation into a hierarchy of belonging: not more homes, wages and services for everyone, but fewer rights for those placed "beneath" us.

Its politics aims to mobilise rebellion and at the same time is deeply conservative. It rails against elites while defending the social order that creates insecurity. It condemns the state for weakness, then demands stronger police powers, prisons, borders and deportations. It claims to protect working-class communities while dividing the workers who clean hospitals, drive buses, build homes, staff warehouses and care for the elderly.

The force that can break the chain

Scottish loyalism contains constitutional conservatives, religious traditionalists, community workers, trade unionists and people for whom the identity is almost entirely cultural. Many reject fascism and racism. More importantly, the history of the West of Scotland contains repeated moments when common struggle cut across the communal divide.

The rise of industrial militancy on Clydeside depended upon Catholic and Protestant workers acting together. That unity was never automatic and was repeatedly undermined by employers, churches, unionist politicians and failures inside the labour movement itself. But it demonstrated that sectarian identification could be weakened when collective organisation made class power visible.

The lesson is not that economic demands magically dissolve racism. Anti-racists have to confront racist organisation directly, defend those targeted and contest the street. But confrontation is strongest when joined to an alternative explanation of the crisis: homes are scarce because they have not been built; services are breaking because they have been cut and privatised; wages are low because employers suppress them; asylum hotels enrich contractors while isolating refugees from the communities in which they live.

The large mobilisations that have repeatedly outnumbered the far right in Glasgow point towards that alternative. Their strength comes from trade unions, migrant communities, anti-racist campaigns, Palestine solidarity, churches, mosques and the city’s socialist inheritance.

The battle, then, is not between an enlightened Scotland and a foreign extremism. The far right has British and Scottish roots; so does the resistance to it. Loyalism provides one possible bridge into racial nationalism, but it also exposes the political mechanism by which division is made. A culture shaped to defend Union and Empire can be redirected towards the defence of a racialised nation. It can also be broken apart when workers refuse the bargain that offers them status over others in place of power over their own lives.

Glasgow Green was a warning, but not a verdict. The possibility of racism linked to loyalism could be a destructive force but Glasgow and Scotland have other more powerful traditions - internationalism and solidarity.
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