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Nigel Farage addressed the biggest Reform UK rally held in Scotland to date, however avoided engaging with local journalists following the event. Instead, recently switched member of the House of Lords the former Conservative donor was left to field questions on allegations of racism and anti-Jewish sentiment linked to the party leader.

Welcoming a New Recruit

Farage introduced the ex-Tory lord and millionaire donor during a packed event of roughly seven hundred supporters in a hotel venue near Falkirk. Offord, who served as a junior minister for Scotland in the previous administration and was until recently treasurer of the Scottish Conservatives, announced his intention to relinquish his seat in the Lords in order to become a candidate for the party in next May’s Holyrood elections.

Farage said he was “delighted” to welcome the new member. 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 tirade against the BBC after they quizzed him regarding a report into claimed discriminatory and remarks from his teenage years. However, the leader avoided a planned media briefing after Saturday’s event.

When asked why his new party’s leader did not make himself available to address growing claims about his past behaviour, Offord said: “You’ll need to ask him that question.”

Challenged about if he thought an apology was necessary for his alleged remarks about Jewish students, Offord said: “That is a matter for him to deliberate on with his team.”

Defending the Leader

Offord insisted that Farage was “morally fit” to be the country's leader and denied he was employing dog-whistle politics. While addressing supporters, Farage had doubled down on his remarks about the number of Glasgow schoolchildren 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 criticised Farage’s original remarks as “racist”, and the Labour leader called them “harmful and polarising”, Offord maintained that Farage was “drawing attention to a real concern” that “voters are discussing”.

Growing Confidence

The rally, filled with an energetic and enthused crowd of predominantly older, white male backers who each paid £6 to attend, highlights the party’s growing confidence before next May’s elections.

While the SNP continues to lead in the polls, Reform UK has made substantial progress in the past year, achieving a quarter 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, with support reaching over a fifth.

Declaring that Reform UK membership in Scotland had increased fourfold in the past year to 12,000 members, the party chair, David Bull 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 described Farage as “Britain’s next prime minister”. He told supporters to “man the barricades as we “challenge the ruling class”, warning 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 underlined his delight at the party’s emergence as a force in the political scene in Scotland over the past 12 months, 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 Falkirk town centre, anti-immigration and anti-racist protesters assembled for a now-regular weekly standoff near a hotel where asylum seekers are now housed.

The organisers of the demonstrations stated they were motivated by a serious local crime. In an interview, Scotland's leader warned that “what the far right do is to assign responsibility … to asylum seekers or migrants and I think that is the source of a harmful narrative”.

However, he differentiated between those who hold far-right views and people with “valid concerns” about pressure on local services or community safety.