The former leader of Britain First is standing for election in the same constituency as First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar.

Jayda Fransen was confirmed as an independent candidate in Glasgow Southside when nominations closed on Wednesday.

Ms Fransen had announced earlier this year that she planned to stand against the “SNP commie, Marxists, naughty people”.

Although a member of the British Freedom Party, documents from Glasgow City Council show Ms Fransen will be running as an independent.

She has previously been convicted of a number of religiously-aggravated crimes, including harassment in both 2016 and 2018 – the latter of which saw her sentenced to 36 weeks in prison.

Ms Fransen has also been pictured outside the constituency office of Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf holding a sign saying “It’s okay to be white” and “All lives matter”.

Speaking outside the city chambers in Glasgow, Ms Fransen, along with Joe Finnie – described as the Glasgow organiser of the British Freedom Party who will be standing in Glasgow Pollok against Mr Yousaf – said: “We can’t wait for this election, we’re really excited and now we can really kick-start the campaign.

“There’s a lot coming guys and as Joe said: Bring it on.”

Ms Fransen was the deputy leader and leader of Britain First before her departure from the party in 2019.

She stood in the Rochester and Strood Westminster by-election in 2014, winning 56 votes.

Meanwhile Jim Dowson, a founding member of Britain First, is standing in the Airdrie and Shotts constituency.

In a video on the British Freedom Party channel of online video platform Purged.tv, Mr Dowson said: “I’m really looking forward to the people of Airdrie at last having the chance to vote for one of their own, because I don’t mince my words and I’m not there to represent everybody, which all the politicians say, I’m there to represent our people, British people, everybody else can go and take a run and jump.”

Mr Dowson will be standing against former SNP MP Neil Gray, who has vacated his Westminster seat to run for Holyrood.

In a request for funding during the video, Mr Dowson described himself, Ms Fransen and Mr Finnie as “machine guns” and donations as “bullets”.

He added: “Your pound notes equate into weapons of war against our enemy.

“Against the people who are trying to destroy our country and in turn our people themselves.

“We have to get behind this and we have to get wired into this.”

by Dr Matthew Feldman, on behalf of Faith Matters

This paper provides an overview of anti-Muslim ‘cultural racism’, which has arisen fervently this century – particularly amongst far-right activists and movements. Feldman attempts to map the way in which the far-right has converged upon anti-Muslim prejudice as a strategy for populist mobilization.

In this environment of demonising all Muslims in ‘the West’ as potential extremists, the far right are attempting to make a self-fulfilling prophecy out of the notion of a ‘clash of civilisations’. Yet as Feldman shows, this is hardly a recent idea; even if past usage of this term is far more nuanced than in recent times. In reality, Feldman argues, the only ‘clash’ is between extremists on both sides – in this case jihadi Islamists and far-right movements equally illiberal in their prescriptions for British society – which has contributed toward a ‘cumulative extremism’, whereby both sides are feed off each the extremism of other.

This short study then turns to a short case study on the way in which ‘Islamophobic’ discourse acts as a lowest-common denominator for the various far-right factions in Britain today. This is undertaken by recourse to a lecture delivered by Paul Weston, chairman of the British Freedom Party, in early 2012 yet circulated widely online in notably different far-right contexts. Weston’s rhetoric of impending civilizational war – shared across the spectrum of far-right activism – may be fairly dubbed crusading ‘Christianism’; that is, an inverse of jihadi ‘Islamism’. Despite their many differences, the scapegoating of entire societies by illiberal extremists by both Islamist and Christian extremists shares the notion of an unavoidable ‘clash of civilisations’ – revealed here as scare-mongering that should be rejected by all citizens of goodwill.