Ukip candidate refuses loyalist ‘protection’

David Coburn, Ukip’s top candidate in Scotland, has declined offers from a far-right group to provide military-style protection for Nigel Farage during a planned protest in Edinburgh today.

Farage is expected to face hundreds of demonstrators this evening on a rare visit to the Scottish capital ahead of the European Parliament elections. Groups including Unite Against Fascism, the Scottish Greens, and the Scottish Socialist Party are planning to protest against Ukip “xenophobia”.

It echoes an impromptu protest last May, when Farage was forced by activists from the Radical Independence Campaign to cut short a press conference in Edinburgh’s Canon’s Gait pub during a by-election campaign.

But The Targe reported on Thursday that Britain First, a far-right political party which is also contesting the European Parliament elections in Scotland and Wales, had offered “armoured patrol vehicles” and ex-soldiers to defend Farage from “leftwing hooligans” on his latest visit.

Britain First is fielding co-founder Jim Dowson, a prominent loyalist campaigner in Belfast, as their top candidate in Scotland for the 22 May election. Hope not Hate claims Dowson has links to loyalist paramilitaries.

The party’s offer of protection made front page news in Scotland, prompting Coburn to tweet: “A Group called Britain First have offered to provide protection for Farage Edinburgh today – I have declined that offer”.

Coburn, who characterises the SNP’s stance on immigration as an attempt to “fill the country with people from God knows where”, believes he has an “extremely good chance” of winning one of Scotland’s six European seats, a break-through the likes of which Ukip has never experienced in Scotland.

Farage told the Herald that the election of a Ukip MEP in Scotland would mean they could no longer be “shouted down” north of the border.

He said: “Mr Salmond is hoping that UKIP do not nudge over the line on May 22 because he knows as soon as UKIP is there the whole Scottish debate changes, the word independence starts to mean something different in the context of the EU.

“It will expose the fact that you are not having an independence referendum. The whole thing is a misnomer because the package is ‘say No to Westminster and say Yes to Mr Van Rompuy’.”

Distancing himself from today’s protests, First Minister Alex Salmond said Farage and his party would “not be defeated by demonstrations, which only give him the chance to play the victim, but by being humiliated at the ballot box – as they have been many times before in Scotland”.

But the Scottish Greens’ top European candidate Maggie Chapman is expected to attend the demonstration today, after telling journalists at the Green campaign launch this week that her party stood in stark contrast and opposition to Ukip’s “politics of fear”.

As of time of publishing, the Facebook event page for today’s anti-Farage demo says 620 plan to attend.