🔗 Share this article

The Reform UK figurehead spoke to the largest Reform UK public meeting held in Scotland to date, however avoided engaging with the press corps following the event. In his place, recently switched member of the House of Lords Malcolm Offord took on the task of field questions on allegations of racism and anti-Jewish sentiment linked to Farage.

Welcoming a New Recruit

The leader presented the ex-Tory lord and millionaire donor at a packed event of roughly seven hundred attendees in a hotel venue in central Scotland. The businessman, who worked as a junior minister for Scotland in the previous administration and most recently served as treasurer of the Scottish Conservatives, stated his plan to give up his peerage in order to stand for the party in next May’s Holyrood elections.

The leader stated he was “delighted” to welcome the new member. He described the switch as “a brave and historic act”.

Dodging the Press

The Reform leader addressed the rally after a turbulent week which included him delivering a fierce criticism of the broadcaster after they quizzed him regarding a report into claimed discriminatory and antisemitic behaviour from his teenage years. However, the leader avoided a planned media briefing after Saturday’s event.

Questioned why Farage was not available to address growing claims about his past behaviour, the new recruit responded: “That is a question for him to answer.”

Pressed on if he thought Farage should apologise for his alleged remarks towards Jewish pupils, Offord said: “I think that’s something he’ll need to consider with his own advisers.”

Defending the Leader

Offord insisted that the leader is “ethically suitable” to be prime minister and denied he was employing dog-whistle politics. While addressing supporters, Farage had doubled down on his remarks about the number of Glasgow schoolchildren who are not native English speakers by asking the rally: “Who authorised the complete transformation of Glasgow's demographics?”

While the first minister, John Swinney condemned Farage’s original remarks as “racist”, and Keir Starmer labeled them “toxic and divisive”, the defector argued that Farage was “highlighting a factual issue that “voters are discussing”.

Growing Confidence

The event, attended by an lively and passionate audience of predominantly older, white male backers who each paid £6 to attend, showcases the party’s growing confidence before next May’s elections.

Although the Scottish National Party remains ahead, the party has made substantial progress recently, achieving a quarter of the vote in its first Holyrood byelection test. Following Scottish Labour's decline, Reform has regularly pushed it into third place lately, with support reaching over a fifth.

Declaring that Reform UK membership in Scotland had quadrupled in the past year to 12,000 members, the party chair, David Bull said he believed it could gain up to 20 MSPs in May, which would place Reform in “a powerful situation” at Holyrood.

Campaign Rhetoric

Thomas Kerr, one of Reform’s 19 Scottish councillors, elicited loud cheers as he referred to the leader as “Britain’s next prime minister”. He instructed the crowd to “man the barricades as we take on the political establishment”, warning that “the coming campaign will be difficult”.

Although the party has yet to produce any Scotland-specific policies, representatives pledged Reform would “confront climate activists and those profiting from green policies”.

The leader personally underlined his delight at Reform's rise as a significant player in Scottish politics in the last year, confessing to supporters that he was once told he “wouldn’t get 20 people in a room”.

Local Context

As the event was taking place, a few miles west in the heart of Falkirk, demonstrators with opposing views were gathering for a now-regular weekly standoff near a hotel used to accommodate asylum seekers.

The organisers of the demonstrations stated they were motivated by a criminal case involving an asylum seeker. In an interview, Scotland's leader warned that the tactic of the far-right is to assign responsibility … to asylum seekers or migrants and I think that is the root of the poison”.

He also made a clear distinction between those who hold far-right views and people with “valid concerns” about pressure on local services or neighbourhood security.