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The Reform UK figurehead spoke to the largest the party's rally so far in Scotland, but declined to speak with the press corps following the event. In his place, recently switched member of the House of Lords the former Conservative donor was left to responding to queries on claims of discriminatory behaviour and anti-Jewish sentiment linked to the party leader.

A High-Profile Defection

Farage introduced the ex-Tory lord and millionaire donor at a packed event of about 700 attendees at a hotel conference centre near Falkirk. Offord, who served as a Scotland Office minister in the previous administration and was until recently treasurer of the Scottish Conservatives, stated his plan to relinquish his seat in the Lords in order to become a candidate for Reform UK in the upcoming Scottish parliament vote.

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

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 antisemitic behaviour as a youth. But, the leader avoided a planned media briefing after Saturday’s event.

Questioned why his new party’s leader was not available to address growing claims concerning his history, Offord said: “That is a question for him to answer.”

Challenged about whether he believed Farage should apologise for his alleged remarks about Jewish students, Offord said: “That is a matter for him to deliberate on with his team.”

Defending the Leader

The peer maintained that Farage was “ethically suitable” to be the country's leader 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 are not native English speakers by posing the question to the crowd: “Who authorised the complete transformation of Glasgow's demographics?”

While the first minister, John Swinney condemned the initial comments as “discriminatory”, and the Labour leader called them “toxic and divisive”, the defector argued that his new leader was “drawing attention to a real concern” that people are talking about on the doorstep”.

Growing Confidence

The rally, filled with an lively and passionate audience of largely male, white and middle-aged supporters who bought tickets for the event, highlights the party’s growing confidence ahead of the Scottish vote.

Although the Scottish National Party remains ahead, Reform UK 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 lately, polling up to 22%.

Announcing that party membership north of the border had increased fourfold over the last twelve months to a running total of 12,000, a senior party official stated his belief it could win around twenty parliamentary seats in May, which would place Reform 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 referred to the leader as “Britain’s next prime minister”. He instructed the crowd to “man the barricades as we “challenge the ruling class”, warning that “the next five months will be tough”.

Despite not yet publishing a distinct policy platform for Scotland, speakers from the north-east pledged Reform would “confront climate activists and those profiting from green policies”.

Farage himself expressed his pleasure at Reform's rise as a significant player in Scottish politics in the last year, confessing to supporters that in previous years he had been warned he “couldn't fill a small venue”.

Protests Nearby

Meanwhile, a few miles west in the heart of Falkirk, demonstrators with opposing views were gathering for a now-regular weekly standoff near a hotel used to accommodate asylum seekers.

The organisers of the demonstrations said it was galvanised by a criminal case involving an asylum seeker. In an interview, Scotland's leader warned that the tactic of the far-right is to apportion the blame … to new arrivals and I think that is the source of a harmful narrative”.

However, he differentiated extremist opinions and people with “valid concerns” about strain on public services or neighbourhood security.