JOHN Swinney’s anti-far-right summit last year was mocked at the time by one wit as the “unpopular front” against fascism.
Now it might also be described as unsuccessful.
That’s certainly the view of one of the participants and a leading expert on populism who spoke with The National about last week’s riot in Glasgow.
The First Minister’s mind will have been focused on the riots which swept across England and Northern Ireland the year before but also will have been fixed on the elections which were coming around in less than a year’s time.
Reform UK – though they reject the label “far-right” – were clearly part of Swinney’s thinking. The party went on to win 17 seats, putting them in joint second place with Scottish Labour.
Just over two months later, a racist riot erupted in the streets of Glasgow in the wake of the attack on a man in Belfast where the suspect was identified as a Sudanese refugee.
Dr Judith Sijstermans of Aberdeen University told The National: “I don’t think that the summit was a success.”
She said that the summit was the “wrong tool” to counter the rise of the far right, saying that the Scottish Government should have been focused on strengthening communities which were resilient to the influence of racism and anti-immigrant politics.
“A lot of my previous research on the far-right outside of Scotland shows that people tend to become involved in these groups not only as an ideological goal but also to achieve a sense of social wellbeing,” said Dr Sijstermans.
“To achieve a sense of community, to achieve a sense of purpose, to feel that what they are doing matters.”
While there was a political dimension to this, as people identify with anti-migrant or anti-globalisation politics, said the academic, these movements also give their members a sense of agency and meaning.
How anti-migrant gatherings, which have frequently boiled over into racist violence, are advertised is instructive.
We reported previously how, in the wake of the murder of white teenager Henry Nowak at the hands of a Sikh man, the neo-Nazi gang Active Club England urged its followers: “Get tribal, white man.”
Elsewhere, an investigation by The Ferret showed how far-right, anti-migrant “street patrols” were popping up across Scotland.
Their aims are undoubtedly sinister but it is not hard to see why people, specifically men, who are sympathetic to the politics of these groups can find purpose and meaning in taking action with the potential to spill over into violence.
Dr Sijstermans said that work should be done to strengthen people’s stake in society with “local communities rather than necessarily consolidating these efforts to combat racist or anti-migration attitudes solely at the central, Scottish Government level”.
Charities that work to combat disinformation need funding to create centres where they can “bring people together” but are put at a disadvantage by models which make long-term planning difficult, she added.
“I’ve done some work with civil society organisations looking at the work they’re doing to encourage better information landscapes to combat disinformation and misinformation and many of them argue that what they need is a more stable funding landscape,” said Dr Sijstermans.
“So what we see is they need, for example, funding for community spaces to bring people together. There’s a lot of demand for a funding landscape that doesn’t require them to reapply every one or two years.
“We need to be funding organisations which have good connections on the local community and grassroots level and enabling them to facilitate closer social connections, to facilitate better wellbeing, to encourage people’s material security.”
This was echoed by Patrick Harvie, who attended Swinney’s summit last April in his then role as Scottish Green co-leader.
He said that the event “should have been the beginning of a political project”, adding: “I don’t think that happened.”
“Scotland as a society should have been readier for events like we’ve seen over recent days,” said the Glasgow MSP. “Readier also to tackle the ability of the far-right to organise and to bring these events together.”
But the answer was not in a “policing-led” response, he said: “There are communities within Scotland that feel marginalised sometimes by the way the police treat them as well.”
Like the Aberdeen University academic, Harvie believes the answer is in repairing the social fabric.
Asked what he believed the solution was, the Green MSP said: “Empowering communities, particularly the kind of community groups that organise to look after the interests of marginalised people like refugees and asylum seekers, community groups which create capacity and understanding and relations between members of a community.
“Things like youth work, community centres are places where people meet and talk and understand one another, where the space exists for communities to grow and to understand the issues and challenges they face and to find solutions to them that are less problematic.”
Youth workers are able to identify young people “who are becoming marginalised, becoming radicalised” and can “figure out what’s going on with them”, he said.
“Not having a policing-led or an authoritarian-led approach – but try and make sure that they’re exposed to other ideas, try and make sure that they’re not led down that path in a way that is going to wreck their lives as well as being hostile and harmful to others.”
The Scottish Government insists it has taken the steps advised by Harvie and Dr Sijstermans.
A spokesperson told The National: “The First Minister convened the gathering in April 2025 to bring people together in support of a cohesive society where everyone feels at home.
“Since then we have taken action to support grassroots projects that build strong, connected and resilient communities across the country, and the First Minister has been clear that he will continue to stand against racism, hatred and intimidation in all its forms.”
While the far-right were vastly outnumbered by anti-racism protesters in Glasgow at the weekend, time will tell whether the Scottish Government’s actions are up to the scale of the challenge.
