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’.

When another Ukip member complained about McConnachie, he doubled-down, saying:

‘I don’t accept that gas chambers were used to execute Jews for the simple fact there is no direct physical evidence to show that such gas chambers ever existed… there are no photographs or film of execution gas chambers… Alleged eyewitness accounts are revealed as false or highly exaggerated.’

As recently as 2018, he told the Sunday Herald: ‘I stand by that comment.’

Writing in 2007, McConnachie denied he was a Holocaust denier and said he was ‘quite prepared to accept that six million Jews perished’, but added: ‘I’ve questioned and doubt, from a historically-interested point of view, some aspects, specifically with regard to the existence of execution gas chambers.’ In the same statement, he also quoted Desmond Tutu’s claim that Americans were ‘scared’ to criticise Israel ‘because the Jewish lobby is powerful – very powerful’. McConnachie’s Independent Green Voice stood for the Scottish parliament in 2007 on a manifesto pledge to ‘invite Iranian leaders, including President Ahmadinejad, to Scotland to dialogue with the Scottish people’. Two years previously, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had publicly called the Holocaust a ‘myth’.

The United Nations General Assembly and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance both define denial to include ‘publicly denying or calling into doubt the use of principal mechanisms of destruction (such as gas chambers, mass shooting, starvation, and torture)’. This position is echoed by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the World Jewish Congress and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. In Irving v Penguin Books Ltd, the High Court judged it ‘incontrovertible’ that David Irving ‘qualifies as a Holocaust denier’ given that he had ‘denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and asserted that no Jew was gassed there’.

McConnachie exists on the farthest fringes of Unionism but not far enough. A Force For Good has established a presence on social media with a more adversarial tone towards the SNP than is typically heard from the mainstream pro-Union parties and organisations. This has helped it amass 36,000 followers on Facebook, 27,000 on Twitter and 5,000 on Instagram. Among its Twitter followers, I counted four Tory MPs and one MSP.

Ultra-nationalism has a coarsening effect on the campaign for independence and on Scottish politics more broadly. The same is true of McConnachie and his group. It demeans Unionism and, more importantly, the memory of the Shoah for people like this to enjoy even limited traction with thousands of Unionists. Of course, there are those who will seek refuge in the passage of time, the urgency of defeating separatism, early SNP figures’ dalliances with fascism, or A Force For Good’s silence on matters relating to the Holocaust. I would suggest that anyone who finds these thoughts on their lips pause for a moment and ask if their response would be different if McConnachie were a pro-independence campaigner.

There can be no equivocating in this matter. Alistair McConnachie should be shunned, A Force For Good should be shunned, and if you think a shared hatred of Nicola Sturgeon is sufficient excuse for making common cause with McConnachie, you should be shunned too.