A CAMPAIGN targetting Nicola Sturgeon that has received huge amounts of media coverage is being run by a right-wing holocaust-denying blogger who was kicked out of Ukip for his extreme views.

Alistair McConachie, who was paid thousands by the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland for “social media” during the independence referendum, has put up posters around Govanhill, in the First Minister’s constituency claiming she’s been “Missing from Glasgow Southside since 5 May 2011.”

“If found”, they add, “please return to her to the day job.”

The posters have been picked up by media, including ITV, and the Daily Express, and our sister paper, the Glasgow Evening Times.

Govanhill has become notorious of late, in part, due to what one charity boss recently described as “1960s poverty”. At the heart of this area’s problems are landlords operating outside the law, letting out flats to large groups of people with no deposits or references needed. Fifteen people sharing a one-bedroom flat is not uncommon. This has made it attractive to the unemployed, the anti-social and huge numbers of migrants.

This, in turn, has attracted the unscrupulous, those looking for cheap labour. Anecdotal evidence from local organisation Community Renewal suggested 30 to 40 per cent of those working in the area were earning less than the minimum wage.

Simmering tensions in the community have also attracted not just the right wing, but elements of the far right.

After the posters started appearing, local SNP councillor Mhairi Hunter tweeted: “Govanhill has sadly become a magnet for fascists”.

There was support for the First Minister from local resident and Labour supporter Jim Monaghan, a former chair of the community council, who works as the administrator at the Govanhill Baths Community Trust: “Despite being leader of a major political party and the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon spends as much time in her constituency as any MSP and, as far as I can see, has been working hard for her constituency. She was part of the protest to save the pool in 2001 as a Regional List MSP and has been involved in most of the positive work in this area since then.”

McConachie, who lives in Bath Street in the centre of Glasgow, miles away from Govanhill, was Ukip’s Scottish organiser from 1999 to 2001 but was banned in 2001 for disputing that Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews during the Holocaust.

In an email to Ukip members, he said: “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 films of execution gas chambers ...”

McConachie was thrown out of the party for five years, though that was commuted to just one year after an appeal.

He did not respond to requests for a comment.