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Nigel Farage spoke to the largest Reform UK public meeting so far in Scotland, however avoided engaging with the press corps following the event. In his place, newly defected peer Malcolm Offord took on the task of responding to queries on allegations of racism and anti-Jewish sentiment surrounding the party leader.

A High-Profile Defection

The leader presented the former Conservative peer and millionaire donor during a packed event 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 was until recently the Scottish Tory party's chief financial officer, stated his plan to give up his peerage in order to become a candidate for the party in the upcoming Scottish parliament vote.

Farage said he was “extremely pleased” to welcome the new member. He called the peer’s defection as “a brave and historic act”.

Dodging the Press

The Reform leader spoke to the crowd following a difficult period which included him delivering a tirade against the BBC after they quizzed him about an investigation into alleged racist and remarks as a youth. However, Farage dodged a planned media briefing after Saturday’s event.

Questioned why Farage was not available to answer mounting allegations concerning his history, Offord said: “That is a question for him to answer.”

Challenged about whether he believed an apology was necessary for the comments he is said to have made about Jewish students, Offord said: “I think that’s something he’ll need to consider with his own advisers.”

Defending the Leader

Offord insisted that Farage was “morally fit” to be prime minister and denied he was employing dog-whistle politics. During his speech, the leader had reiterated on his remarks about the number of Glasgow schoolchildren who are not native English speakers by posing the question to the crowd: “Who authorised the complete transformation of Glasgow's demographics?”

While Scotland's First Minister criticised the initial comments as “discriminatory”, and Keir Starmer labeled 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 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.

While the Scottish National Party remains ahead, Reform UK has made substantial progress recently, 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, polling up to 22%.

Announcing 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 said he believed it could gain up to 20 MSPs in May, putting the party in “a very strong position” in the Scottish Parliament.

Fighting Talk

A Reform councillor, one of Reform’s 19 Scottish councillors, elicited loud cheers as he described Farage as “Britain’s next prime minister”. He told supporters to “man the barricades as we “challenge the ruling class”, 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 vowed the party would “confront climate activists and those profiting from green policies”.

Farage himself 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 he was once told he “wouldn’t get 20 people in a room”.

Protests Nearby

As the event was taking place, not far away in the heart of Falkirk, demonstrators with opposing views were gathering for what have become regular weekly confrontations outside a local hotel used to accommodate asylum seekers.

A group coordinating protests said it was galvanised by a criminal case involving an asylum seeker. 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 root of the poison”.

However, he differentiated between those who hold far-right views and people with “legitimate points” about pressure on local services or neighbourhood security.