Here is a sentence you do not want to read about your student organisation. An Al Jazeera investigation has found that Allan Nesbitt, a convicted criminal who is a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force — a loyalist paramilitary group proscribed as a terrorist organisation — has close ties to Turning Point UK, the right-wing student group. The investigation, by the Al Jazeera Investigative Unit, is titled Contract Killers and the Far Right, which tells you roughly where it is going.
Where it is going, according to The National’s account of the programme, is Glasgow, where Nesbitt is from, and where Al Jazeera’s undercover cameras filmed a man in what the broadcaster describes as an alleged contract killing offer. Al Jazeera’s own description of the film says it exposes links between Turning Point UK — which it says has organised and participated in anti-immigrant protests in the UK — and an armed paramilitary underworld. The word “alleged” is doing a lot of work here, as it should. But the work is being done on camera.
A little history. Turning Point UK is the British offshoot of Turning Point USA, the American campus-conservative machine built by Charlie Kirk. It was launched in December 2018 by Kirk and Candace Owens, and was greeted, as the BBC put it at the time, by a wave of online mockery. In 2021 a man named Nick Tenconi became its chief operating officer, and the group drifted from influencing student politics toward street protest. Kirk himself is dead — killed last year at a university event — leaving Turning Point as a brand considerably bigger than any one campus chapter.
Now think about the transaction here, because there is one. Imagine you run a fringe protest movement. What you sell is legitimacy: the claim that you are ordinary concerned citizens, students, taxpayers. What you may quietly want is muscle — people who are not frightened of a confrontation. And imagine you are an armed paramilitary organisation. What you have is muscle. What you want is a glossy front, a pipeline of respectable young faces, access to a movement that gets invited onto television. Each side has exactly what the other lacks. That is not an accusation of a formal arrangement; it is just an observation that the incentives line up, which is usually how these ties form long before anyone signs anything.
The core of Al Jazeera’s allegation is narrow: one UVF man, one set of ties, filmed and documented. Whether Turning Point UK knew who it was dealing with, or wanted to, is the question the investigation leaves hanging. Student politics has always had a recruitment funnel. The unsettling part is not knowing where this one ends.