Jim Dowson

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Jim Dowson (1964–) is a right-wing British political campaigner and former Calvinist minister. Based in Ballygowan, Northern Ireland, he also led an anti-abortion campaign, the UK Life League.

Dowson has been involved with a number of right-wing groups, most notably the British National Party from 2007 to 2010; as an active fundraiser for the party he earned a reputation as "the person who owned the BNP". Other groups that he has been affiliated with include an anti-abortion outfit called the UK LifeLeague. Despite his connection to the racist BNP, Dowson seems to be less interested (though not entirely uninterested) in racial politics and more involved with the kind of right-wing religious campaigning associated more with the United States than with Britain.

In 2010 Shelley Rose, a former BNP candidate, publicly claimed that Dowson had lured her into a hotel room and groped her. Dowson denied this accusation and claimed that Rose was trying to smear him for being a party hardliner, as opposed to "people like Nick Griffin who want to open the party to Asians and other groups". Dowson left the BNP shortly afterwards.

In May 2011 Dowson and his colleague Paul Golding announced the establishment of Britain First. The group focuses more on religion, being strongly pro-Christian, anti-Islam and anti-abortion. Britain First has spawned a couple of appendages: its political wing the National People's Party and the English National Resistance (not to be confused with the openly white nationalist group of the same name), a protest group co-founded by representatives of the English Defence League, the English Democrats and the South East Alliance. However, in 2014, Dowson left Britain First as he was completely shocked to find that BF was full of "racists and extremists" (*gasp*), adding that "going into their mosques and stirring them up and provoking them is political madness and a bit rude". Well, you know what they say about a stopped clock...

Dowson is a homophobe and appears to believe that gays should be executed. When somebody quoted Leviticus 20:15 (the infamous verse prescribing the death penalty for homosexuality) on his Facebook page, his response was "Indeed so and Amen!"