A far-right extremist group has been accused of trying to hijack a Renfrewshire community’s protest against asylum seekers being housed in a hotel.
Campaigners in Erskine have said they fear the involvement of Patriotic Alternative (PA) will besmirch their image as they continue to seek answers as to why nobody was consulted about the move to house up to 174 asylum seekers in the MGM Mutha Glasgow River Hotel, which is being managed by the Mears Group on behalf of the Home Office.
Derek Stitt set up the Erskine Against Asylum Hotel Facebook group last week. It has almost 700 members.
Derek and others from the group had planned on staging a demonstration at the hotel this weekend.
However, the protest has now been taken over by Patriotic Alternative, whose supporters have included neo-Nazis and former members of the British National Party.
The group has been circulating leaflets in the area as it tries to drum up support in advance of a demonstration this Sunday lunchtime.
Derek said his group would be taking no part in any protest this week in order to distance themselves from Patriotic Alternative.
Earlier this week, he was contacted by the group with offers to help with the protest.
“PA have totally tried to hijack our campaign,” he said. “At first, they were showing me all this stuff about successes they’d had at other demonstrations.
“But I was getting advised by people to look further into this group, so I did. And I thought, ‘no, that’s not what we’re about’.
We’re just normal people, it has nothing to do with race, nothing to do with get asylum seekers out, we just want the government the local authority and Mears to come out and say, ‘these are the issues, these are the measures we’re putting in place,’ etc.
“But they’ve done nothing to put people’s minds at rest.”
In response to Patriotic Alternative’s hijacking of the Erskine campaign to further their racist agenda, anti-fascist, pro-immigrant groups are planning to protest their presence this Sunday.
Stand up to Racism Scotland (SUTR), in collaboration with the Paisley and Clydebank Trades Union Congress, will aim to counter the Patriotic Alternative’s vitriol by holding a counter-demonstration.
An SUTR spokesperson said: “Patriotic Alternative is a Nazi organisation whose founder praises Hitler.
“PA members are trying to stir up hatred in Erskine by exploiting concerns over asylum seekers being housed in the local hotel.
“Asylum seekers are being subjected to dehumanising treatment as a result of the government’s hostile environment.
“We welcome that more and more people originally unaware of the nature of PA have now publicly distanced themselves from them and from the hotel protest on Sunday.
“The counter-protest against PA will go ahead to expose the fascist ideology at the heart of PA and reject all their poisonous attempts to blame asylum seekers, refugees, migrants and ethnic minorities for problems they haven’t caused.
When contacted by the Daily Record over their presence in Erskine this weekend, Patriotic Alternative’s Scottish organiser Kenny Smith said they attended events all over Scotland and were “changing the face of modern nationalism”.
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