There’s a handful of counter-protesters too.
“Are you even local?” shouts one woman at the counter protest.
A poster for the rally, an AI-generated effort shared widely on social media, tells us “The Gorbals has had enough”.
“Stand united folks! All Schemes come together this isn’t about Football or postcodes!! This is about WOMEN & CHILDREN… and the future of our beautiful homeland”.
It called on people to protest outside the housing association “demanding answers and raising the concern people now feel unsafe to due recent incidents.”
The association itself took the decision to close its offices for the day.
One of those protesting, Kate – not her real name – is a survivor of sexual violence who says she has been let down by the housing association. Promises made her safety, she adds, have not been kept.
Speaking to The Herald on Sunday she accused the landlord of looking the other way when it comes widescale subletting, scared of offending.
“If it’s genuine people fleeing, we have nothing against that… but it needs to be fair,” she said.
It’s an accusation New Gorbals rejects. Earlier this week, Fraser Stewart, director of the housing association pushed back against allegations of what he described as “concerning behaviour”.
He said they had received no reports “from the community or our tenants and we have checked with Police Scotland who have confirmed they have had nothing reported to them”.
The association closed the office ahead of Thursday’s protest as they were “worried about the potential for trouble from people outwith the Gorbals at this demonstration”.
Around an hour into the rally, just as it was winding down, a counter-protester, from outwith the Gorbals, arrived with a sign reading “Choose Love.”
“Choose not being raped,” Kate shouted.
(Image: NQ)
Glasgow’s summer of unrest, which has seen protests on the streets of Cranhill, Castlemilk and Possilpark, arguably began in Belfast on the night of June 8, when Stephen Ogilvie was seriously assaulted, losing the sight in one eye.
Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese national who had been granted refugee status in the UK in 2023, was charged with attempted murder and remanded in custody.
The following evening, hundreds of masked protesters moved through Glasgow city centre carrying Union flags and, in some cases, “white lives matter” banners.
Worshippers at Glasgow Central Mosque were locked inside for their own safety as marchers approached.
Three men were arrested and charged, and Assistant Chief Constable Alan Waddell said explicitly that people had been “attacked because of the colour of their skin”.
Smaller, largely peaceful demonstrations were policed the same evening in Edinburgh, Falkirk, Perth, Ayr and Paisley.
Six weeks on, the unrest has shifted from the city centre into Glasgow’s communities.
Many of those coming out are doing so because of allegations of sexual offending involving men described online as migrants or asylum seekers.
Protests in Cranhill on July 8 and Castlemilk the following night both followed reports of this kind circulating locally before demonstrations formed.
Of course, there have been genuine sexual crimes involving asylum seekers and refugees. There has also been misinformation. Dangerous misinformation.
In the Gorbals, a father wrongly accused online of filming children in a park received death threats after the claim was amplified by far-right activist Tommy Robinson.
It is a situation that has left many in Glasgow’s minority ethnic communities feeling anxious.
There are, says Dr Judith Sijstermans, a lecturer in politics at the University of Aberdeen who tracks far-right activity, several distinct groups which have been active in Scotland this year.
They operate with varying degrees of coordination and ideological commitment.
Unite the Clans Scotland is probably the closest thing the country’s far-right scene has to a national umbrella group. They are behind many of the AI-generated posters used to publicise and trigger many of the protests.
AI-posters which have been circulating social media (Image: Sources)
The group, which has more than 50,000 followers on Facebook, was formerly known as Aberdeen Against Illegal Migration, and grew out of anti-asylum-hotel protests in 2024-25.
It describes itself as a “patriot” movement, and rejects the “far right” label.
That rejection is not shared by anti-racism groups, academic researchers or Stand Up to Racism.
It held its first event outside Holyrood in March, where it was outnumbered by counter-protesters.
Their next rally is in Glasgow Green on Saturday, two days after the start of the Commonwealth Games. It will almost certainly be better attended with supporters travelling from all over Scotland.
Organisers have said “at least three groups from England” will be there. According to reports, among them Britain First, which has a record of invading mosques and targeting Muslim communities.
Unite the Clans has adopted Scottish nationalist imagery as a deliberate departure from the Union flag traditionally associated with anti-immigration campaigning in Scotland, a shift Dr Sijstermans sees as a recruitment strategy aimed at people who might not otherwise identify with British far-right politics.
Other groups in Scotland include the Homeland Party and Peterhead United in the north-east.
In Glasgow, groups including North2South, Scots Active, the Scottish Citizens Army and A Force for Good have been linked to demonstrations across the city, while a separate, more overtly militaristic outfit — masked marchers dressed uniformly in black, seen outside Glasgow Cathedral and the Scottish Parliament — has drawn comparisons to 1930s-style fascist symbolism.
Dr Sijstermans has cautioned against treating these groups as a single, unified movement.
Some, like North2South, say explicitly they are community-led rather than ideological — the group completely rejects the far right label attached to its supporters, describing those who took part as “concerned members of the Gorbals community”.
They see being branded far right as a way to downplay or shut down the genuine concerns they are raising.
There is also, Dr Sijstermans says, a distinction between different tiers of participation in all of the protests.
The first group, she says, are local residents who turn out to one or two over a specific incident in their area, motivated by genuine concern rather than ideology. The second is a smaller, more committed layer for whom organising protest activity is a massive part of their life.
Conflating the two, she argues, risks doing real harm.
Her research with a political psychologist has found that publicly labelling someone as far-right or racist tends to push them deeper into these movements rather than away from them, meaning blanket condemnation of far-right protests — of the kind issued periodically by the Scottish Government and political parties— can end up strengthening the very networks it is meant to weaken.
“If we look at the comparative research across the UK, across Europe, and even across the world, we can see that these types of far-right groups mobilise predominantly on the issue of migration,” Dr Sijstermans said. “But a lot of the time these groups recruit based on other forms of discontent.
“So they might use people’s anger, disappointment, resentment, feelings of what we would call relative deprivation — feeling more deprived than others — as a way of bringing them into the group.”
Gorbals has had enough protest outside Gorbals Housing Association. (Image: Gorbals has had enough protest outside Gorbals Housing Association. Picture by our reporter Emily Mo)
The recruitment strategy, she said, does not require migration to be the initial grievance. “But what these groups do very well is making migration the most salient, the most important or present issue and connecting that to all those other concerns.”
Dr Sijstermans said that the far right’s relationship to these problems goes beyond simply highlighting them.
“We know that the far right actually sees crisis as internal to its project,” she said. “There are real policy problems, which they’re picking up on, and they’re finding a narrative which ties that into their main issue of migration. But they also are creating crisis. So, for example, a crisis in the safety of children.”
Dr Sijstermans argued that part of the far right’s success lies in a failure elsewhere in the political system to offer a competing narrative.
Asked whether Scotland is approaching a tipping point, Dr Sijstermans pushed back against that framing, arguing it risks reinforcing the dynamic it describes.
“For a very long time, in the early era of devolution, we had this feeling that this wasn’t a problem here — this feeling of the kind of Scottish exception to the rise of the far right,” she said. “And now we’ve seen a lot of high-profile moments. So yes, down south, but also last summer, particularly around Falkirk.”
The growth in activity is real, she said, but describing it in terms of an imminent tipping point is counterproductive.
“We are playing into this language of urgency and crisis, which might not be helpful,” she said. “Because we know that crisis is internal to the rise of the far right.”
She placed developments in Scotland within a wider international pattern. “What we’re seeing in Scotland, in terms of the language used by these groups, the tactics used by these groups, the way in which they are recruiting new members — none of this is exceptional in a global context.
“These processes… are very, very similar to those I’ve studied across Europe.”
“I think we should take care not to somehow pathologise this current moment and create crisis where perhaps we know that that crisis language can in its own way feed into the rise of the far right,” she added.
Concerns around immigration in Glasgow are not confined to fringe groups or even right-wing parties like Reform or the Tories.
The SNP has for some time now been warning of the impact on the city.
Glasgow has been Scotland’s asylum dispersal city for more than two decades. There are roughly 4,500 asylum seekers currently housed there, the only local authority in Scotland with such an arrangement with the Home Office.
The real problem for the council arises when asylum seekers are successful.
Since the Homelessness (Abolition of Priority Need Test) (Scotland) Order 2012 came into force on December 31, 2012 any unintentionally homeless person in Scotland has the right to settled, permanent accommodation.
It’s a duty with no real equivalent in England, where support remains largely restricted to households in “priority need”.
That has made Glasgow very attractive. Currently, 12.4% of Glasgow’s annual homelessness demand comes from households who have travelled to the city from elsewhere in the UK after being granted leave to remain.
The Home Office provides no direct funding to the council to help ease the financial strain.
SNP housing convener Allan Casey warned as early as the council’s 2023 housing emergency declaration that the city would struggle to find permanent housing for newly approved asylum seekers, and has since said the resulting cost to Glasgow is “running into the tens of millions, with no end in sight” and warned that the issue is “damaging social cohesion” and putting “unprecedented pressure” on housing.
More than 44% of all homeless presentations in Glasgow are from refugee households. They make up more than half of all households placed in temporary accommodation and more than 60% of children living in temporary accommodation are from refugee households.
Council leader Susan Aitken, in a letter to UK asylum minister Angela Eagle, warned the situation risked “increased levels of community tension” and a “breakdown of the public support”.
The council spent around £27 million on refugee-related homelessness costs in the 2024/25 financial year alone.
Projections suggest the overall bill for homelessness services in the city could climb to roughly £56m in 2026/27, with some estimates warning it could reach £66m within two years and as much as £70m to £90m in the years beyond that, unless UK-wide asylum policy changes.
Choosing love is easy. Finding £90m, easing the “unprecedented pressure” on services and keeping the public on side are far harder.
