A BIT OF INTEL ON FALKIRK

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c23evz4jen3o

Falkirk’s protests around the Cladhan Hotel, now used to house asylum seekers, illustrate how local anger can be rapidly weaponised by far-right opportunists. Beyond the visible chants, confrontations and the online amplification by figures such as Tommy Robinson, an OSINT-led review reveals quieter, under-reported networks and linkages that reach well beyond Scotland.

Background and Trigger Points

Tensions have increased after 2021, when asylum seekers—predominantly men from Iran, Sudan and Eritrea—were accommodated in the Cladhan Hotel without meaningful local consultation. A key flashpoint came in June 2025, when Afghan asylum seeker Sadeq Nikzad was jailed for the rape of a 15-year-old girl, an event that energised groups such as “Save Our Kids and Our Kids Future.”

Protests have continued since, marked by heavy policing, counter-demonstrations and incidents including eggs thrown at a local mosque. Street numbers have declined over the winter, but online abuse has remained constant, with tactics such as false accusations and misidentification (for example, branding counter-protester Kevin Doyle a sex offender) circulating on social media.

The overarching narratives fuse genuine frustrations—especially around housing shortages, with more than 11,000 locals on waiting lists—with anti-immigration rhetoric framed around cultural clash, “queue-jumping,” and unfair allocation of resources, despite the fact that the costs are centrally funded (around £2.1 billion annually at national level).

Falkirk is different from other local protests because of less visible — but just as significant — hidden affiliations of key agitators which, once exposed through Intel, sharply undercut their claims to be “protecting the community.

At the heart of these protests are individuals with criminal histories and links to extremist networks, often presenting themselves as community advocates. The table below summarises key figures, their backgrounds, and their lesser-known associations; I will focus on the less obvious but more interesting for security agencies:

Connor Graham

Connor Graham is the founder and frontman of Save Our Future & Our Kids Futures (SOFOKF), the local group leading twice-weekly anti-refugee protests outside the Cladhan Hotel in Falkirk. Local court reports show he has allegedly previous previous problems with the justice....., including a 2019 assault at Falkirk police station in which he bit a police officer, with the sheriff noting earlier assault convictions that had already resulted in custodial sentences. Graham insists his campaign is simply about “community safety”, but anti-racist monitors document repeated appearances at his events by neo-Nazi and white-supremacist activists, plus banners carrying the “14 words” slogan and other far-right messages, despite his public denials of any extremist links.

Alistair McConnachie

Alistair McConnachie is the founder of the far-right micro-party Independent Green Voice and the pro-Union campaign group A Force For Good (AFFG).

He was expelled from UKIP in 2001 after publicly claiming he did not believe gas chambers were used to kill Jews during the Holocaust. UKIP characterised this as Holocaust denial, and monitoring groups along with multiple journalists, have continued to describe him as a Holocaust denier — a label he rejects while maintaining the substance of his original statements.

AFFG has organised hard-right, anti-immigration “Enough is Enough” rallies outside the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, which sit within the same broader ecosystem of unionist-nationalist, anti-migration protest politics that interacts with Falkirk and similar hotel protests.

John Watt

John Watt hosts the Bring The Noise podcast and has emerged as an anti-immigration campaigner and regular speaker at far-right-backed rallies, including a recent “unity rally” in Glasgow and events linked to Justice for Innocent Men Scotland (JIMS).

Mainstream outlets describe him as the driving force behind Bring The Noise and record that he was allegedly convicted in 2018 for assaulting two former partners – a domestic-abuse case that sits awkwardly with his self-fashioning as a defender of women’s safety and civil liberties.

His podcast and rally appearances give him a platform to amplify anti-immigration narratives and to normalise collaboration between conspiratorial, anti-feminist and far-right networks.

These figures reveal a clear pattern: several have histories of violent behaviour that sit uneasily alongside their public emphasis on “safety,” risking severe damage to their credibility if brought to light. Graham’s repeated denials of racism, for example, jar with his now-deleted posts depicting asylum seekers as “evil due to their religions.”

Covert Coordination and Encrypted Ecosystems

A less known consider dimension is encrypted platforms for logistics , aimed to evade monitoring while retaining public deniability. Here protest timing and most important tactical guidance (assembling Molotov cocktails or arson techniques) is explained . In Falkirk, patterns from comparable incidents strongly suggest a similar infrastructure:

Migration from Other Platforms.

Focus should go yes on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and Telegram BUT also SimpleX, Zello, Session, Briar, or Element

This architecture sustains a form of “leaderless resistance”, in which local figures such as Graham organise visibly while drawing on national networks covertly.

Symbolic gestures—such as a banner reading “Kill ’Em All. Let God Sort Them Out” (long associated with the Ulster Defence Association, a Northern Irish loyalist paramilitary group)—operate less as proof of direct operational coordination than as cross-border ideological signalling, still providing clear cues and affirmation to aligned extremists.

Symbolic and Ideological Underpinnings

Recent protests mask anti-Islam sentiment behind local grievances (such as pressure on housing and services), while a secondary symbolic layer features white supremacist posters and Nazi salutes at rallies.

The “raise the colours” campaign, quietly embedded in these actions, draws on a lineage of racist violence and seeks to visually “reclaim” territory, directly recalling EDL street tactics. More broadly, Telegram has become the space where disparate factions are stitched together, shifting mobilisation from single flashpoints (e.g. the Southport stabbings) towards rolling anti-immigration disorder framed through Islamophobic narratives.

No formal funding infrastructure is visible, but a self-sustaining economy operates through channel donations, merchandise, and ad-hoc crowdfunding.

Potential Countermeasures

• Relentless Platform destruction

• Understand mechanisms of platform migrations and follow rebranding

• Disrupt funding

• Understand links outside UK

Falkirk is a huge "headache" for intel unit : protests are rooted in genuine local grievances and fronted by people who appear to be community advocates rather than ideologues, yet they are linked, through less visible channels, to wider extremist networks. As a result, traditional monitoring frameworks—built to track overtly ideological movements—are likely to underestimate these hybrid mobilisations until violence actually occurs.