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Nigel Farage addressed the largest Reform UK rally so far in Scotland, however avoided engaging with local journalists afterwards. In his place, newly defected peer Malcolm Offord was left to responding to queries on claims of discriminatory behaviour and antisemitism linked to the party leader.

Welcoming a New Recruit

Farage introduced the ex-Tory lord and wealthy businessman at a packed event of about 700 attendees at a hotel conference centre near Falkirk. Offord, who served as a junior minister for Scotland in the previous administration and most recently served as the Scottish Tory party's chief financial officer, stated his plan to give up his peerage in order to become a candidate for Reform UK in next May’s Holyrood elections.

Farage said he was “delighted” to welcome the new member. He called the peer’s defection as “a courageous and significant move”.

Dodging the Press

Farage addressed the rally following a difficult period which saw him launch a tirade against the BBC for questioning him about an investigation into claimed discriminatory and remarks as a youth. However, Farage dodged 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.”

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

Insisting on Fitness

Offord insisted that Farage was “ethically suitable” to be the country's leader and rejected claims of coded political messaging. During his speech, the leader had reiterated on previous comments 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 condemned the initial comments as “racist”, and Keir Starmer called them “harmful and polarising”, Offord maintained that Farage 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 predominantly older, white male backers who each paid £6 to attend, highlights the party’s growing confidence ahead of the Scottish vote.

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 a recent parliamentary by-election. Following Scottish Labour's decline, Reform has regularly pushed it into third place in recent months, polling up to 22%.

Declaring that Reform UK membership in Scotland had quadrupled over the last twelve months to a running total of 12,000, a senior party official said he believed it could gain up to 20 MSPs in May, which would place Reform in “a powerful situation” in the Scottish Parliament.

Fighting Talk

A Reform councillor, a local representative for the party, elicited loud cheers as he referred to the leader as “the future PM of the UK”. He told supporters to “man the barricades as we “challenge the ruling class”, warning that “the coming campaign will be difficult”.

Despite not yet publishing a distinct policy platform for Scotland, representatives vowed the party 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 in the last year, confessing to supporters that in previous years he had been warned he “wouldn’t get 20 people in a room”.

Protests Nearby

As the event was taking place, not far away in Falkirk town centre, demonstrators with opposing views assembled for a now-regular weekly standoff outside a local hotel where asylum seekers are now housed.

A group coordinating protests stated they were motivated by a serious local crime. In an interview, First Minister John Swinney cautioned that the tactic of the far-right is to assign responsibility … to new arrivals and I think that is the source of a harmful narrative”.

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