🔗 Share this article Reform UK Leader Speaks at Movement's Biggest Scottish Rally Amid Scrutiny and High-Profile Switch Nigel Farage spoke to the biggest the party's rally held in Scotland to date, but declined to speak with the press corps following the event. In his place, newly defected peer the former Conservative donor took on the task of field questions on allegations of racism and anti-Jewish sentiment surrounding Farage. Welcoming a New Recruit The leader presented the ex-Tory lord and millionaire donor during a sold-out rally of about 700 supporters at a hotel conference centre in central Scotland. Offord, who served as a junior minister for Scotland in the previous administration and was until recently the Scottish Tory party's chief financial officer, stated his plan to relinquish his seat in the Lords in order to stand 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 included him delivering a tirade against the BBC after they quizzed him about an investigation into claimed discriminatory and antisemitic behaviour from his teenage years. However, Farage dodged a planned media briefing after Saturday’s event. When asked why Farage did not make himself available to address growing claims concerning his history, Offord said: “You’ll need to ask him that question.” Pressed on if he thought an apology was necessary 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.” Defending the Leader The peer maintained that Farage was “ethically suitable” to be the country's leader and denied he was employing coded political messaging. During his speech, Farage had doubled down on his remarks about the number of Glasgow schoolchildren who speak English as a second language by asking the rally: “Who authorised the complete transformation of Glasgow's demographics?” While the first minister, John Swinney criticised Farage’s original remarks as “racist”, and Keir Starmer called them “toxic and divisive”, Offord maintained that Farage 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 predominantly older, white male backers who bought tickets for the event, showcases the party’s growing confidence ahead of the Scottish vote. While the SNP continues to lead in the polls, the party has gained significant ground in the past year, achieving a quarter of the vote in its first Holyrood byelection test. After the collapse in support for Scottish Labour, the party has often relegated it to third lately, polling up to 22%. Announcing that Reform UK membership in Scotland had increased fourfold in the past year to 12,000 members, a senior party official said he believed it could win around twenty parliamentary seats in May, which would place Reform in “a very strong position” at Holyrood. Campaign Rhetoric Thomas Kerr, 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 take on the political establishment”, warning that “the coming campaign will be difficult”. Although the party has yet to produce any Scotland-specific policies, 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 the political scene in Scotland over the past 12 months, admitting to the audience that he was once told he “couldn't fill a small venue”. Protests Nearby Meanwhile, not far away in the heart of Falkirk, demonstrators with opposing views assembled for a now-regular weekly standoff outside a local hotel used to accommodate asylum seekers. The organisers of the demonstrations stated they were motivated by a criminal case involving an asylum seeker. Speaking previously, 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”. He also made a clear distinction between those who hold far-right views and people with “legitimate points” about pressure on local services or neighbourhood security.