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Nigel Farage spoke to the largest Reform UK rally 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 was left to field questions on claims of discriminatory behaviour and antisemitism surrounding Farage.

Welcoming a New Recruit

Farage introduced the ex-Tory lord and millionaire donor during a sold-out rally of about 700 attendees in a hotel venue near Falkirk. The businessman, who worked as a Scotland Office minister 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 stand for Reform UK in the upcoming Scottish parliament vote.

Farage said he was “delighted” to welcome Offord to the party. He called the peer’s defection as “a brave and historic act”.

Dodging the Press

Farage spoke to the crowd after a turbulent week which saw him launch a fierce criticism of the broadcaster for questioning him regarding a report into claimed discriminatory and antisemitic behaviour as a youth. However, Farage dodged a planned media briefing after Saturday’s event.

When asked 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.”

Challenged about whether he believed Farage should apologise for the comments he is said to have made 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 the country's leader and rejected claims of dog-whistle politics. While addressing supporters, the leader had reiterated on previous comments about pupils in Glasgow who are not native English speakers by posing the question to the crowd: “Who voted for the wholesale change of the population of Glasgow?”

While Scotland's First Minister condemned the initial comments as “discriminatory”, and Keir Starmer called them “harmful and polarising”, Offord maintained that his new leader was “highlighting a factual issue that people are talking about on the doorstep”.

A Party on the Rise

The rally, filled with an lively and passionate audience of largely male, white and middle-aged supporters who each paid £6 to attend, highlights Reform's increasing self-assurance ahead of the Scottish vote.

While the SNP continues to lead in the polls, the party has made substantial progress in the past year, securing 26% of the vote in its first Holyrood byelection test. Following Scottish Labour's decline, Reform has regularly pushed it into third place in recent months, polling up to 22%.

Announcing that Reform UK membership in Scotland had increased fourfold in the past year to 12,000 members, 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.

Fighting Talk

Thomas Kerr, one of Reform’s 19 Scottish councillors, prompted a roar of approval as he referred to the leader as “the future PM of the UK”. He instructed the crowd to “man the barricades as we take on the political establishment”, warning that “the next five months will be tough”.

Despite not yet publishing any Scotland-specific policies, speakers from the north-east pledged Reform would “take on the green blob and the net-zero grifters”.

The leader personally expressed his pleasure at Reform's rise as a significant player in the political scene in Scotland in the last year, confessing to supporters 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 a now-regular weekly standoff near a hotel used to accommodate asylum seekers.

A group coordinating protests stated they were motivated by a serious local crime. In an interview, First Minister John Swinney 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”.

However, he differentiated extremist opinions and people with “legitimate points” about pressure on local services or community safety.