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Nigel Farage addressed the largest Reform UK public meeting so far in Scotland, however avoided engaging with local journalists 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 the party leader.

A High-Profile Defection

The leader presented the former Conservative peer and wealthy businessman at a sold-out rally of roughly seven hundred attendees in a hotel venue in central Scotland. Offord, who served as a Scotland Office minister under the last government and was until recently treasurer of the Scottish Conservatives, announced his intention to give up his peerage in order to stand for Reform UK in next May’s Holyrood elections.

Farage said he was “extremely pleased” to greet Offord to the party. He described the switch as “a brave and historic act”.

Dodging the Press

Farage spoke to the crowd after a turbulent week which included him delivering a fierce criticism of the broadcaster after they quizzed him about an investigation into alleged racist and antisemitic behaviour from his teenage years. But, the leader avoided a planned media briefing after Saturday’s event.

Questioned why his new party’s leader did not make himself available to answer mounting allegations about his past behaviour, the new recruit responded: “You’ll need to ask him that question.”

Challenged about if he thought Farage should apologise for his alleged remarks towards Jewish pupils, Offord said: “That is a matter for him to deliberate on with his team.”

Insisting on Fitness

Offord insisted that Farage was “morally fit” to be prime minister and denied he was employing coded political messaging. During his speech, Farage had doubled down on previous comments about the number of Glasgow schoolchildren who are not native English speakers by asking the rally: “Who voted for the wholesale change of the population of Glasgow?”

While the first minister, John Swinney criticised the initial comments as “racist”, and Keir Starmer called them “toxic and divisive”, the defector argued that Farage was “highlighting a factual issue that people are talking about on the doorstep”.

Growing Confidence

The event, attended by an energetic and enthused crowd of largely male, white and middle-aged supporters who each paid £6 to attend, showcases the party’s growing confidence before next May’s elections.

Although the SNP continues to lead in the polls, Reform UK has gained significant ground in the past year, 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, polling up to 22%.

Declaring that party membership north of the border had increased fourfold over the last twelve months to a running total of 12,000, the party chair, David Bull said he believed it could win around twenty parliamentary seats in May, which would place Reform in “a powerful situation” at Holyrood.

Fighting Talk

Thomas Kerr, one of Reform’s 19 Scottish councillors, prompted a roar of approval 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”, cautioning that “the next five months will be tough”.

Although the party has yet to produce any Scotland-specific policies, representatives vowed the party would “take on the green blob and the net-zero grifters”.

Farage himself expressed his pleasure at the party’s emergence as a force in the political scene in Scotland in the last year, confessing to supporters that in previous years he had been warned he “couldn't fill a small venue”.

Protests Nearby

Meanwhile, not far away in the heart of Falkirk, anti-immigration and anti-racist protesters were gathering for what have become regular weekly confrontations 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. Speaking previously, Scotland's leader warned that the tactic of the far-right 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 “valid concerns” about pressure on local services or neighbourhood security.