
William Weir Gilmour (1905–1998), was a Scottish politician who was associated with five different political parties; the Independent Labour Party, the New Party, the Scottish Democratic Fascist Party, the Labour and Co-operative party and the Liberal Party.
Biography[]
Weir Gilmour began his political activity in his native Lanarkshire as a member of the Independent Labour Party. Gilmour's first public candidacy came in the 1931 general election. He had joined the New Party, recently founded by Labour Party rebel Oswald Mosley. In 1933, Gilmour co-founded the Scottish Democratic Fascist Party (SDFP) with Major Hume Sleigh. The party sought to ban Irish migration to Scotland, expel Catholic religious orders from Scotland and repeal the Education (Scotland) Act 1918. The SDFP was at odds with Oswald Mosley's larger British Union of Fascists, particularly on the issue of Catholicism. Unlike the SDFP, the BUF accepted Catholics, and Catholics constituted a high percentage of the BUF membership, particularly in the north of England. In 1937 he was elected to the Peebles Town Council, of which he was a member for over 20 years. Gilmour spent time in a psychiatric hospital during 1956. In 1970, Gilmour was sentenced to two years in prison for child molestation.