Hundreds of protected areas are under pressure from Scotland’s massive deer herd. Most agree deer numbers must be controlled to protect the environment, but are split on what should be done.
Edinburgh University students were “interrogated” by police at their desks over posters featuring Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, prompting dozens to complain.
Unsafe levels of faecal bacteria were recorded at dozens of Scotland’s best beaches this summer. Swimmers and paddlers could be at risk, but officials insist water quality remains high.
A far right German politician who handed out weapons and met with neo-Nazis is set to speak at the Homeland Party’s UK conference focused on the mass deportation of migrants.
Alternative For Germany (AfD) politician, Lena Kotré, reportedly distributed Kubotans – self-defence stabbing weapons which are legal in Germany but banned in the UK – at campaign events in Berlin last year.
Kotré, who was reelected to the Brandenburg state parliament in 2024, claimed the weapons would help Germans protect themselves against violence.
She has been confirmed as a speaker at an April conference run by the Homeland Party, which is led by a Scot and registered at a West Lothian address.
The fringe far right party has no elected representatives, but an international counter-extremism organisation claimed the AfD was giving “validation or credibility” to Homeland, which it branded as a small group of “white supremacists”.
Homeland dismissed the comments, however, and argued it was not extreme for Europeans to want to “protect their own ethnic identity, culture and homeland”.
Also speaking at Homeland’s event is the man behind a conspiracy theory cited by white supremacists and mass murderers, as we reported in February.
Billy Briggs
Homeland says the April conference in England will explore “remigration”, which the party describes as removing “illegal, unintegrated, and unwelcome migrants” from the UK.
Kotré last year attended a neo-Nazi conference in Switzerland in which she discussed remigration, an undercover probe by German investigative outlet, Correctiv, revealed.
The far right politician reportedly told attendees she wants DNA samples to be used to determine the origins of migrants in order to deport them to their supposed home countries.
In a social media post, Homeland described Kotré as a “prominent voice extolling the benefits of remigration”, which can be “commercially profitable for private enterprise”.
Jamie Mann
Homeland, which has active members in Scotland, says nationalism should be based on land and the “law of blood” – in which citizens are defined by ancestry. The far right party also hosted an AfD representative at its 2024 conference.
A spokesperson for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank, said: “The far right has historically been a transnational phenomenon dating back decades and ideological and tactical exchange is very much the norm between these groups.
“It’s concerning to see someone from the AfD, which at this point is a major party in Germany, come to a gathering of what is effectively a very small group of white supremacists and give validation or credibility to them.”
Homeland’s chairman, Kenny Smith, claimed the AfD’s historic second place in the recent German election was owed to its remigration policy, which, he argued, “is similar in many ways to the Homeland Party policy”.
Kotré “speaks out against the rising tide of immigrant violence sweeping Germany and the sexual violence targeted at women in particular,” he said, and had “won the support of many of them by distributing Kubotans free of charge to these concerned constituents.”
Smith claimed to know “many women” in the UK who were scared to go outside in some areas due to “the aggressive nature of many of these unwelcome migrants”, but were prevented from carrying self-defence weapons due to “our two-tier police state”.
Correctiv is an “extreme-left propaganda platform”, he alleged. It was “a blatant lie” that Kotré attended a neo-Nazi event, which Smith claimed to be a “political conference”.
He also branded IDS, which has also profiled left-wing extremism, as a “misnamed far-left think tank”, which “absurdly labels the natural desire many European people have to protect their own ethnic identity, culture and homeland as extreme”.
Smith added: “I suspect their concern is already turning to anguish, as 2025 continues to see the word remigration become part of the political discourse and overtake even just the simple demand to end mass immigration.”
The AfD did not respond to a request to comment.
Kubotan header image thanks to Netpilots. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Switzerland license.
Hundreds of protected areas are under pressure from Scotland’s massive deer herd. Most agree deer numbers must be controlled to protect the environment, but are split on what should be done.
Edinburgh University students were “interrogated” by police at their desks over posters featuring Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, prompting dozens to complain.
Unsafe levels of faecal bacteria were recorded at dozens of Scotland’s best beaches this summer. Swimmers and paddlers could be at risk, but officials insist water quality remains high.
Footage of farmed trout suffocating, haemorrhaging, and being beaten with batons in a slaughterhouse has prompted an official complaint to a government regulator.
