Neo-Nazi flags over St Enoch Square: how Tuesday’s protest took Glasgow by surprise

Hamza was manning the till in the St Enoch Square corner shop he works in when the men in balaclavas started pounding on the window. It was around 7.30pm on Tuesday evening and twenty-something Hamza was alone in the shop, with just vapes, sweets and drinks for company. “They were banging on the window”, Hamza told The Bell when we spoke to him on Wednesday, “and they had metal rings on”. By then, he and the rest of Glasgow had a broad overview of the protest that took the city by surprise earlier this week, which saw at least 250 demonstrators respond to a call by far-right figures like Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk to take to the streets. 

But as men dressed in black jeered at Hamza — who is visibly South Asian — through the window, he didn’t have any context. He just knew that it was “scary”.

Details are still emerging about exactly what happened in the city centre, and why. The Bell has been speaking to eyewitnesses, protest attendees and trawling through social media material to pull together a fuller picture of events, one that involves neo-Nazi flags flying in St Enoch Square, physical attacks on people because of their skin colour, and the presence of Britain’s “largest far-right white supremacist movement”. Some locals we talked to framed the event as a spontaneous explosion of feeling, with politically unaligned attendees. Is this true? Or was it one prong of a multi-city mobilisation of the UK’s increasingly organised far-right?

The march

It was around 7pm when people started gathering on the Buchanan Street steps outside the Royal Concert Hall. Many — but not all — were men dressed in black. A large proportion had their faces covered. They were there ostensibly in solidarity with the victim of a vicious knife attack in Belfast on Monday. The suspect’s Sudanese ethnicity, refugee status and visceral viral footage of the attack on a man (identified as 44-year-old Stephen Ogilvie), has been seized upon by anti-immigration factions in Northern Ireland. Riots have ensued, with mobs going door to door looking for migrants and arson attacks launched on houses suspected of belonging to ‘foreigners’. 

On Tuesday afternoon, flyers appeared on the feeds of rightwing social media personalities and via far-right groups on messaging apps, urging people to assemble that evening in multiple British cities. “The whole of the United Kingdom is hitting the streets tonight at 7pm following yet another invader attack on our people,” wrote infamous far-right agitator, Tommy Robinson on X. The digital flyers he posted alongside the tweet listed Glasgow as 70 supposed protest locations, and small print instructed people to “check local updates and official sources before attending”.

One of those local updates was posted an hour later by Craig Houston, the podcaster and self proclaimed “people’s watchdog”. The flyer he circulated instructed people to ‘stand together’ at 7pm on ‘Glasgow Concert Hall Steps’. Houston, among others, also claimed in social media posts that the Belfast victim was Scottish — subsequent reporting has revealed he has “links” to Scotland.

When numbers gathering on the steps swelled to well over one hundred, the march began, moving down Buchanan Street to St Enoch Square. Houston, who is currently awaiting trial on hate crime charges, shared footage to his social media accounts. He also appeared in photos posted of the demonstration, positioned behind a large banner held up by members of Patriotic Alternative (PA), a group described by The Times as “Britain’s largest far-right white supremacist movement”. The banner read “Scotland for the Scots”. Houston has not responded to The Bell’s request for comment but has refuted allegations he ‘organised’ Tuesday’s protest.

Inside Masa Kitchen, an East Asian restaurant near the south end of St Enoch Square, customers and staff saw the mass of black-clad men stride past, just after 7.30pm. “It was a little scary”, the manager Huidan Zheng told The Bell. She pulled up timestamped videos on her phone. In one frame, a protester can be seen holding a flag bearing a red cross in the corner above a black and white background — a Knights Templar flag, now associated with the extreme ethno-nationalist movement of the same name. “Those who embrace this ideology articulate extreme hatred… towards Muslims and immigrants,” writes Dr. Ariel Koch, an expert in transnational violent extremist ideologies. “[They are] eventually prone to violence against them”.

Just outside St Enoch subway entrance, at about 7.30pm, a group of protestors attacked at least one member of the public “because of the colour of their skin”, Police Scotland confirmed in a statement yesterday. In a widely-shared video of the incident, which has spread across neo-Nazi groups on the messaging platform Telegram, you can hear attackers, seemingly part of the protest, saying “fucking get this black bastard” while the video shows a forest of legs clad in black tracksuits kicking out at someone on the floor. Shortly after, chants of “Scotland, Scotland” echo through the square. The Bell spoke to a bystander, a local college student on their way home from class, who alleges they saw protestors “chasing ‘illegal immigrants’ and poc [people of colour] down” as others chanted “send them back”. 

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