Nigel Farage spoke to the largest the party's rally held in Scotland to date, but avoided engaging with the press corps afterwards. Instead, newly defected peer the former Conservative donor was left to responding to queries on allegations of racism and antisemitism linked to the party leader.
Welcoming a New Recruit
Farage introduced the former Conservative peer and millionaire donor at a packed event of roughly seven hundred attendees in a hotel venue near Falkirk. The businessman, who worked as a junior minister for Scotland in the previous administration and most recently served as treasurer of the Scottish Conservatives, announced his intention to give up his peerage in order to become a candidate for Reform UK in next May’s Holyrood elections.
Farage said he was “extremely pleased” to welcome Offord to the party. He described the switch as “a brave and historic act”.
Dodging the Press
The Reform leader addressed the rally following a difficult period which saw him launch a tirade against the BBC for questioning him regarding a report into alleged racist and antisemitic behaviour as a youth. However, Farage dodged a planned media briefing after Saturday’s event.
When asked why his new party’s leader was not available to address growing claims about his past behaviour, Offord said: “That is a question for him to answer.”
Pressed on if he thought Farage should apologise for his alleged remarks about Jewish students, Offord said: “I think that’s something he’ll need to consider with his own advisers.”
Insisting on Fitness
The peer maintained that Farage was “ethically suitable” to be the country's leader and denied he was employing coded political messaging. During his speech, the leader had reiterated on previous comments about the number of Glasgow schoolchildren who speak English as a second language 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 called them “toxic and divisive”, the defector argued that his new leader was “drawing attention to a real concern” that people are talking about on the doorstep”.
A Party on the Rise
The event, filled with an lively and passionate audience of predominantly older, white male backers who each paid £6 to attend, highlights Reform's increasing self-assurance ahead of the Scottish vote.
Although the Scottish National Party remains ahead, the party has made substantial progress in the past year, securing 26% of the vote in a recent parliamentary by-election. After the collapse in support for Scottish Labour, Reform has regularly pushed it into third place in recent months, with support reaching over a fifth.
Declaring that party membership north of the border had quadrupled in the past year to a running total of 12,000, the party chair, David Bull stated his belief it could win around twenty parliamentary seats in May, which would place Reform in “a very strong position” at Holyrood.
Campaign Rhetoric
Thomas Kerr, one of Reform’s 19 Scottish councillors, elicited loud cheers as he described Farage as “the future PM of the UK”. He told supporters to “man the barricades as we take on the political establishment”, cautioning that “the coming campaign will be difficult”.
Although the party has yet to produce a distinct policy platform for Scotland, speakers from the north-east pledged Reform would “take on the green blob and the net-zero grifters”.
Farage himself underlined his delight at Reform's rise as a significant player in the political scene in Scotland in the last year, admitting to the audience that in previous years he had been warned 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, anti-immigration and anti-racist protesters assembled for what have become regular weekly confrontations near a hotel used to accommodate asylum seekers.
The organisers of the demonstrations said it was galvanised by a serious local crime. In an interview, First Minister John Swinney warned that “what the far right do is to apportion the blame … to asylum seekers or migrants and I think that is the source of a harmful narrative”.
He also made a clear distinction extremist opinions and people with “legitimate points” about pressure on local services or community safety.