Nigel Farage spoke to the biggest the party's rally held in Scotland to date, however declined to speak with the press corps following the event. Instead, newly defected member of the House of Lords Malcolm Offord took on the task of field questions on claims of discriminatory behaviour and anti-Jewish sentiment surrounding Farage.
Welcoming a New Recruit
The leader presented the former Conservative peer and wealthy businessman during a sold-out rally of about 700 attendees in a hotel venue in central Scotland. Offord, who served as a junior minister for Scotland under the last government and most recently served as the Scottish Tory party's chief financial officer, stated his plan to give up his peerage in order to stand for Reform UK in the upcoming Scottish parliament vote.
The leader stated he was “extremely pleased” to welcome Offord to the party. He called the peer’s defection as “a courageous and significant move”.
Dodging the Press
The Reform leader spoke to the crowd following a difficult period which included him delivering a fierce criticism of the broadcaster after they quizzed him regarding a report into claimed discriminatory and antisemitic behaviour as a youth. But, the leader avoided a planned media briefing after Saturday’s event.
Questioned why his new party’s leader was not available to address growing claims about his past behaviour, the new recruit responded: “You’ll need to ask him that question.”
Pressed on whether he believed Farage should apologise for his alleged remarks about Jewish students, he stated: “That is a matter for him to deliberate on with his team.”
Insisting on Fitness
The peer maintained that the leader is “morally fit” to be prime minister and denied he was employing coded political messaging. While addressing supporters, the leader had reiterated on previous comments about pupils in Glasgow 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 the initial comments as “discriminatory”, and Keir Starmer called them “harmful and polarising”, the defector argued that his new leader was “drawing attention to a real concern” that “voters are discussing”.
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, showcases the party’s growing confidence ahead of the Scottish vote.
Although the Scottish National Party remains ahead, Reform UK has made substantial progress in the past year, achieving a quarter of the vote in a recent parliamentary by-election. Following Scottish Labour's decline, 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 over the last twelve months 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 powerful situation” in the Scottish Parliament.
Campaign Rhetoric
Thomas Kerr, a local representative for the party, 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”.
Despite not yet publishing 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 expressed his pleasure at Reform's rise as a significant player in Scottish politics over the past 12 months, admitting to the audience that he was once told he “couldn't fill a small venue”.
Protests Nearby
Meanwhile, not far away in the heart of Falkirk, demonstrators with opposing views were gathering for a now-regular weekly standoff outside a local hotel used to accommodate asylum seekers.
The organisers of the demonstrations said it was galvanised by a criminal case involving an asylum seeker. In an interview, Scotland's leader cautioned that “what the far right do is to assign responsibility … to asylum seekers or migrants and I think that is the source of a harmful narrative”.
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.
