When a nationalist mob descended on the Tory leadership hustings in Perth recently, those of us who criticise the SNP’s degrading of Scottish political discourse seized on the ugly scenes as another example. However, extremism is not limited to one side of Scotland’s constitutional divide. Last week, as she was attending an event at the Edinburgh Festival, Nicola Sturgeon was protested by a group called ‘A Force For Good’. Their number would generously be characterised as a handful and there is no suggestion they engaged in the sort of behaviour reported in Perth. In videos posted by the pro-Union outfit, a man can be heard shouting at Sturgeon, asking her to ‘apologise for damaging Scotland’ and asking when she will resign. A Force For Good’s Facebook page identifies the man as Alistair McConnachie, founder and director of what styles itself as ‘Scotland’s premier pro-UK organisation’.
Who is Alistair McConnachie? He is a former Scotland organiser for Ukip and has also founded his own political party, Independent Green Voice. He previously published a periodical called Sovereignty. In 2001, he was suspended from Ukip’s national executive and his membership was later not renewed over letters he wrote to the Scottish press about the Holocaust. In one, McConnachie appeared to question the six million death toll, while another rebuked the Board of Deputies of British Jews for objecting to the BBC interviewing David Irving, the disgraced ex-historian and Holocaust denier.
McConnachie asked whether the Board was ‘seeking to establish a monopoly in the market-place of ideas’. He suggested the British Jewish communal body ‘had better get busy with Channel 4’, which was due to broadcast a documentary about Fred Leuchter. McConnachie said Leuchter had been ‘credited with convincing Irving that the Auschwitz gas-chambers were an impossibility’, adding that he had seen the film and was ‘stunned by its revelations and implications’. In fact, Leuchter’s famed report was, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, ‘nothing more than an attempt, concealed beneath an academic-looking smokescreen of graphs, analyses, and calculations, at misinforming readers who have no access to the scholarly literature — or who are looking for precisely the sort of conclusions that Leuchter offers’.
Read the article by Stephen Daisley in The Spectator.