INDEPENDENT Green Voice was founded in 2003 by Alistair McConnachie, who was barred from UKIP for questioning the Holocaust.

He was UKIP’s Scottish organiser from 1999 to 2001 and stood as a UKIP candidate five times.

But the party refused to renew his membership in late 2001 because of comments he made in an email about the killing of Jews during the Second World War.

He wrote: “I don’t accept that gas chambers were used to execute Jews for the simple fact there is no direct physical evidence to show that such gas chambers ever existed ... There are no photographs or films of execution gas chambers ... Alleged eyewitness accounts are revealed as false or highly exaggerated.”

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In an interview with the Sunday Herald in 2018, he said: “I stand by that comment,” but has claimed he is not a Holocaust denier.

McConnachie registered Independent Green Voice with the Electoral Commission in 2003. He also founded pro-Union group A Force For Good in 2012 and became the first individual to register as an official campaigner in the independence referendum of 2014. The activities of A Force For Good have included regularly staging “counter-protests” at independence marches.

McConnachie also turned up to heckle a Black Lives Matter protest in Edinburgh last year focused on the Melville Monument which commemorates Henry Dundas. He claimed protesters find Dundas difficult because “he was a Tory and a Unionist”.