Nigel Farage has addressed Reform UK’s largest rally in Scotland to date but refused to engage with local journalists – leaving the newly defected peer Malcolm Offord to field questions on allegations of racism and antisemitism.
Farage introduced the former Conservative peer and millionaire donor Offord at a sold-out rally of about 700 at a hotel conference centre near Falkirk.
The businessman, who served as a Scotland Office minister under the last government and until recently was 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 “delighted” to welcome Offord to the party. He called the peer’s defection “a brave and historic act”.
The Reform leader addressed the rally after a turbulent week which saw him launch a tirade against the BBC for questioning him about the Guardian’s investigation into alleged racist and antisemitic behaviour as a teenager towards fellow Dulwich college pupils.
But Farage dodged the expected press huddle after Saturday’s event. Asked why his new party’s leader was not available to answer mounting allegations about his past behaviour, Offord said: “You’ll need to ask him that question.”
Pressed on whether he believed Farage should apologise for his alleged remarks towards Jewish pupils, as a group of Holocaust survivors told the Guardian he ought to, Offord said: “I think that’s something he’ll need to consider with his own advisers.”
Offord insisted that Farage was “morally fit” to be prime minister and denied he was employing dog-whistle politics. During his speech Farage had doubled down on his remarks about the number of Glasgow schoolchildren who speak English as a second language by asking the rally: “Who voted for the wholesale change of the population of Glasgow?”.
Although the first minister, John Swinney, condemned Farage’s original remarks about the “cultural smashing” of Glasgow as “racist”, and Keir Starmer called them “toxic and divisive”, Offord maintained that Farage was “highlighting a factual issue that people are talking about on the doorstep”.
The event, attended by an energetic and enthused crowd of largely male, white and middle-aged supporters who each paid £6 to attend, highlights the party’s growing confidence before next May’s elections to the Scottish parliament.
Although the SNP continues to lead in the polls, Reform UK has gained significant ground in the past year, securing 26% of the vote in its first Holyrood byelection test in June. After the collapse in support for Scottish Labour since last year’s general election, Reform has regularly pushed it into third place in recent months, polling up to 22%.
Announcing that Reform UK membership in Scotland had quadrupled in the past year to a running total of 12,000, the party chair, David Bull, said he believed it could gain up to 20 MSPs in May, putting the party in “a very strong position” at Holyrood. Bull also announced, to whoops, that the party was having its own tartan made.
Thomas Kerr, one of Reform’s 19 Scottish councillors, prompted a roar of approval as he described Farage as “Britain’s next prime minister”. He told supporters to “man the barricades as we take on the political establishment”, warning that “the next five months will be tough”.
Although the party has yet to produce any Scotland-specific policies, speakers from the north-east pledged Reform would “take on the green blob and the net-zero grifters”.
Farage himself underlined his delight at the party’s emergence as a force in Scottish politics over the past 12 months, admitting to the audience that in previous years he had been warned he “wouldn’t get 20 people in a room”. A bagpiper led proceedings and there were splashes of turquoise branded shirts and scarves throughout the crowd. Wedding guests at a reception in one of the hotel complex’s other suites looked on in bemusement.
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As the event was taking place, a few miles west in the heart of Falkirk anti-immigration and anti-racist protesters were gathering for what have become regular weekly confrontations outside the Cladhan hotel, where asylum seekers are now housed.
Just after 10am, the Guardian spoke to a group of women who said the mood in the town had darkened since another resident of the Cladhan has appeared in court earlier this week charged with two sexual assaults.
“These are not one-off incidents and those are only the ones that make the papers. The mood in Falkirk is a mix between absolute sadness, shock, frustration that the authorities are not speaking up.”
They added that their local Reform UK councillor was the only local politician “not scared to speak the truth”.
The group coordinating protests against the Cladhan, Save our Futures & Our Kids Futures, said it was galvanised by the rape of a local teenager by an Afghan asylum seeker.
In an interview with the Guardian published on Saturday, Swinney warned that “what the far right do is to apportion the blame … to asylum seekers or migrants and I think that is the root of the poison that Farage and his cohorts are spreading within Scotland”.
He also made a clear distinction, however, between those who hold far-right views and people with “legitimate points” about pressure on local services or community safety, which he noted were not unique to areas where migrants were housed.
