Unity News Network (UNN) is a conspiracy theory website headed by David Clews, a former Conservative and Labour councillor in Renfrewshire, Scotland. 

Founded in 2018 by Clews and Carl Pearson, who was then UKIP’s Scottish youth leader, UNN built an audience by supporting the protest movement to free the anti-Muslim extremist Stephen Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) during his spell behind bars that year. The outlet’s following grew significantly after it began spreading conspiratorial content relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of writing, it has over 103,000 followers on Facebook, 100,000 on Twitter and 21,000 on Telegram. 

While Pearson is no longer involved in the project, under Clews UNN has adopted an increasingly extreme outlook. For example, the outlet has promoted the White Genocide conspiracy theory and described the West as being in the grip of “cultural Marxist degeneracy”. 

Clews has also established increasingly tight links to the UK’s extreme right, most notably speaking at the conferences of the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative (PA) in 2022 and 2023. Regular UNN writer Niall McCrae also addressed the PA conference in 2024.

Clews has hosted PA leaders on UNN streams, as well as James Costello, a repeat guest who was jailed in November 2023 for 19 hate crime offences. Other guests include the leader of the Homeland Party, Kenny Smith; the leader of the National Rebirth Party, Alek Yerbury; the former British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin; Steve Laws, a fascist so-called “migrant hunter” turned ethnonationalist influencer; and the “mosque buster” Gavin Boby. Clews has also himself appeared on PA-related streams and other fascist shows. 

It is therefore unsurprising to find that the UNN chat on Telegram has been swamped with extreme antisemitism, other forms of racism, support for Hitler and far-right content more broadly, which the admins attempt to conceal by regularly wiping the entire chat history. 

In the wake of his comments during riots in the summer of 2024, Clews told his followers that HOPE not hate and Searchlight were coordinating press “hit pieces” and building a criminal case against him. Fearing his arrest, he fled the country, begging for donations from abroad before returning home to address the Traditional Britain Group (TBG) conference in October.

In the summer of 2025, Clews encouraged UNN supporters to infiltrate Reform UK and “seek candidacy to become MPs, mayors, councillors, police ­commissioners, MSPs, researchers, party staffers”, despite having condemned the party for its “slavish support of Zionism” the year before. It is unclear whether any supporters took him up on the proposal.