The Daily Record has a far right problem

It was a fairly regular Friday in the Daily Record’s sleek offices on Douglas Street. Behind the glass frontage, reporters from the Record and Sunday Mail were working away in the newsroom. It’s a far more modern space than their previous historic Anderson Quay digs, which the papers vacated in 2023, but a few mementos from the paper’s print heyday have survived as decor. 

The office was quiet; many journalists chose to work from home at the end of the week. Those who were in focused on getting the Record’s Saturday edition ready and pulling the week’s Sunday Mail together. 

But then, late morning to early afternoon, word started to slowly spread that there was some sort of far-right protest headed their way. The dissemination of intel was “a bit of a mess,” says Andrew*, a journalist working for Reach Scotland, the owner of the Record and the Mail. Top brass had received intelligence from Reach’s London security and now the news was starting to trickle down through the ranks. 

Details on the exact nature of the protest were scarce. “It was a bit scary,” admits Andrew, who asked us not to use his real name. But staff were assured that if they vacated the building by 6pm, “it would be fine”; they’d miss whatever was coming their way. So everyone remained calm, says Andrew, and got their heads down for a while longer. 

Just after 5pm, panicked calls from Reach’s head of security in Canary Wharf started coming in. The security team at 55 Douglas Street ran upstairs, shouting: ‘Why are you still here? You should have been out already!’. At this point, the previously unflustered staff started to panic a bit. 

Some still didn’t clock the gravity of the situation. ‘What if we just hang out around the corner to see what they were like?’ one joked. But within minutes, the Record’s offices were cleared, the staff of the Daily Record and Sunday Mail trooping out, along with the team of Sky call centre workers on the fifth floor, who “had no idea what was going on”. Access through the revolving doors was shut off.

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