From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is The Story.
I'm Manveen Rana.
On a long summer evening a few weeks ago, in the center of Glasgow, something very peculiar was happening.
A group of men, scores of men, perhaps 50 or 60, lined up in files of four,
all dressed in black in the precinct of Glasgow Cathedral.
David Lisk has been reporting on Scotland for decades, and he'd never seen anything like it.
In so far as they did anything, one of their members, a woman, I think perhaps the only woman who was there,
carried a wreath, and on this wreath there was this kind of strange messaging, which was along the lines of we apologize.
And that wasn't the only baffling message written on the wreath. There was more.
You had this message, curiously in Italian, saying basically the ends justify the means.
And then this wreath gets laid at a monument to an entirely obscure 19th-century Lord Provost of Glasgow, James Lumsden,
somebody who, forgive me if he was a household name in his day, he certainly isn't now.
When the video of this protest emerged on social media, journalists were bewildered.
What were those words supposed to mean? Why this obscure Victorian figure?
But while the protest itself was shrouded in mystery, the grainy black and white footage was very familiar.
Rather like a newsreel from some kind of radical protest from the 1920s in Italy.
This was only the beginning.
In the weeks that followed, two more demonstrations of silent black-clad men took to the streets of Scotland.
So what is going on?
Why are these groups aping radical imagery?