James Dowson (born 1964 or 1965)[1] is a British far-right political activist, Christian nationalist and Ulster loyalist, active in Northern Ireland.
Dowson presents Templar Report on Purged TV every Sunday to Friday which has Nick Griffin, the former BNP and National Front leader, as a regular guest.
[5] He was for a time a member of the Orange Order and was associated with a controversial flute band accused of glorifying loyalist murderer Michael Stone during parades.
[6] Dowson subsequently fell out with the Orange Order after he was forced to leave the movement, even taking part in protests against it where he denounced the group as being filled with "atheists and boozers".
[9] Matt Collins, a former member of the National Front, who now monitors the far-right with anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate said of Jim Dowson in an interview with Channel 4 News in 2014: Jim Dowson has raised money for extreme right-wing, anti-abortion or anti-gay groups, has protested outside abortion clinics, and made a living from heaping misery on people in desperate circumstances.
[11]Dowson joined the British National Party at an unspecified date and became a leading figure within the group, rising to take charge of the BNP's financial affairs.
[20] He subsequently claimed that he left the party to Frazer and Rab McKee after a few months and bemoaned the failure of the group to make any impact on local politics.
Dowson relocated to Budapest, Hungary, and has been observed in several eastern European countries with his latest venture, Knights Templar International (KTI), along with the former BNP leader Nick Griffin and a Hungarian anti-abortion campaigner Imre Teglasy.
[21] Dowson's last sighting, according to the Daily Mirror, was on the Turkey–Bulgaria border with the KTI supplying equipment to a vigilante paramilitary group, the Shipka Bulgarian National Movement, to hunt down asylum seekers.
The move came as part of a wider crackdown by the Ministry of Interior on far-right individuals from across Europe using the country as their base, after Horst Mahler had been arrested trying to escape charges of Holocaust denial in Germany by entering Hungary.
Dowson described his strategy as spreading "devastating anti-Clinton, pro-Trump memes and sound bites into sections of the population too disillusioned with politics to have taken any notice of conventional campaigning".
[29] Whilst attending a far-right conference in Budapest in March 2017, Dowson announced his support for Scottish independence, despite his earlier unionist stances.
It has been noted that the Síol website is almost identical to sites that belong to Dowson, such as that of the British Freedom Movement and Knights Templar International, selling variations of the same merchandise.
[33] In January 2022, it hosted an online petition to deport the murderer of the Offaly teacher Ashling Murphy, who was allegedly killed by a non-Irish national.