Far-right activist Jim Dowson, a Scot with connections across Europe and the US, has launched a campaign encouraging white homeless people in Scotland to relocate to Northern Ireland, where he claims they can buy up homes and land and drive out ethnic minorities.
Dowson, a former fundraiser for the British National Party, has set up a website promoting the move, following revelations in the Daily Record that he is now a key figure uniting the far right in Scotland and Northern Ireland. He has joined forces with Mark Sinclair, a former UVF-linked bank robber known as FreedomDad on his online channels.
Campaign details and claims
On the new website, Dowson claims Northern Ireland is "the most British place in Britain" and the safest, despite recent instances of vigilante attacks on black people. He appeals to desperate homeless people, suggesting it will be easy to get a house, stating: "It's easier to find an affordable house in Northern Ireland than almost anywhere else in the United Kingdom."
The website advises people to join the Housing Executive waiting list and come over "sofa surfing with friends or producing a convincing appearance of homelessness." It adds that a community group can help secure homes for new arrivals in many loyalist areas, and tells incomers they "won't keep getting leapfrogged by newly arrived Third Worlders."
Dowson's site says Catholics are welcome, as long as they are white. He said: "As long as you're white, from the mainland and happy to become part of the Ulster British community, you'll be welcome. Though if by chance you got Irish-themed tattoos when you were younger you need to get them covered up."
Reactions and concerns
Mohammed Asif, of the Stand Up to Racism group, said Dowson's plans were a clear signal of the growing threat of fascist and far-right activism in Scotland. He said: "Things used to be covert but racism is now very blunt and mainstream. In some respects it would be helpful if all racist people flocked together in one place. But I don't think anyone heading to Northern Ireland will be getting the life they have been promised by these men."
A spokesperson for the End Deportations Belfast civil rights group called the invitation a "dangerous" development. He said: "Conveniently ignoring decades of conflict, Dowson has used ex-UVF bank robber Mark Sinclair aka Freedom Dad's online platform to promote his 'relocation' website to people living in Scotland. The failure of the state to adequately police the far right has left a generation of Scots exposed to far-right extremism and chaos."
Wider context and history
Daniel Holder, of the Irish human rights group the Committee on the Administration of Justice, said: "The language on this website is so extreme it appears, at first reading, a parody. It seems the far right, in the context of Northern Ireland, get away with things that wouldn't be tolerated by authorities elsewhere.
"That can be seen with Knights Templar flags used for a sort of racist intimidation and racist intimidation leveraged from housing, which has now escalated into racist pogroms for three summers in a row. It's increasingly being talked up as kind of that Northern Ireland is a model for far-right organising, that can be emulated elsewhere."
Dowson, who led anti-abortion campaigns in Scotland in the 1990s, went on to become a major figure in the BNP before leading far-right movements in the US and Hungary, where he led vigilante border patrols to intimidate asylum seekers. The Daily Record has approached him for comment.
