Reform UK gains its first peer after Conservative party defection

Nigel Farage has addressed Reform UK’s largest rally in Scotland to date but refused to engage with local journalists – leaving newly defected peer Malcolm Offord to field questions about ongoing allegations about past racism and anti-semetism.Farage introduced former Conservative peer and millionaire donor Offord at a sold-out rally of around 700 at a hotel conference centre near Falkirk.The businessman who served as a Scotland Office minister under the last government and until recently was treasurer of the Scottish Conservatives, announced his intention to give up his peerage in order to stand for Reform UK in next May’s Holyrood elections.Farage said he was “delighted” to welcome Offord to the party. He called the peer’s defection “a brave and historic act”.Farage addressed the rally after a turbulent week which saw him launch a tirade against the BBC for questioning him about the ongoing Guardian investigation into allegations about his racist and anti-semetic behaviour as a teenager towards fellow Dulwich school pupils.But Farage dodged the expected press huddle following Saturday’s event. Asked why his new party’s leader was not available to answer mounting allegations about his past behaviour, Offord said: “You’ll need to ask him that question”.Pressed on whether he believed Farage should apologise for his alleged remarks towards Jewish pupils, as a group of Holocaust survivors told the Guardian he ought to, Offord said: “I think that’s something he’ll need to consider with his own advisors.”But he insisted that Farage was “morally fit” to be prime minister and denied he was employing dogwhistle politics after Farage doubled down on his remarks about Glasgow schoolchildren - one in three of whom speak English as a second language – asking the rally “who voted for the wholesale change of the population of Glasgow?”.Although first minister John Swinney condemned the original remarks – that this amounted to the “cultural smashing” of Glasgow – 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”.The event, attended by an energetic and enthused crowd of largely male, white and middle-aged supporters who each paid £6 to attend, highlights the party’s growing confidence ahead of next May’s elections to the Scottish parliament.Although the SNP continues to lead in the polls for next May’s Holyrood elections, Reform UK has gained significant ground in the past year, securing 26% of the vote in its first Holyrood byelection test in June. Following the collapse in support for Scottish Labour since last year’s general election, Reform has regularly pushed Scottish Labour into third places in recent months, polling up to 22%.Announcing that Reform UK membership in Scotland has quadrupled in the past year to a running total of 12,000, party Chairman David Bull said he believed the party could gain up to 20 MSPs next May, putting the party in “a very strong position” at Holyrood. Bull also announced, to whoops, that the party was having it’s own tartan made.Thomas Kerr, one of Reform’s 19 Scottish councillors, prompted roar of approval as he described Farage as “Britain’s next prime minister”. He told supporters to “man the barricades as we take on the political establishment”, warning that “the next five months will be tough”.Although the party has yet to produce any Scotland-specific policies, speakers from the north east pledged Reform 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 over the large year, admitting to the audience that in previous years he’d been warned he “wouldn’t get 20 people in a room.” A bagpiper led proceedings and there were splashes of turquoise branded shirts and scarves throughout the crowd. Wedding guests at a reception in one of the hotel complex’s other suites looked on in bemusement.As the event was taking place, a few miles west in the heart of Falkirk anti-immigration and anti-racist protesters were gathering for what have become regular weekly confrontations outside the Cladhan Hotel where asylum seekers are currently housed.Just after 10am, the Guardian spoke to a group of women who said that the mood in the town had darkened since another resident of the Cladhan has appeared in court earlier this week charged with two sexual assaults.“These are not one-off incidents and those are only the ones that make the papers. The mood in Falkirk is a mix between absolute sadness, shock, frustration that the authorities are not speaking up”.They added that their local Reform UK councillor was the only local politician “not scared to speak the truth”.The group coordinating protests against the Cladhan, Save our Futures and Our Kids’ Futures, say they were galvanised by the rape of a local teenager by an Afghan asylum seeker.In an interview with the Guardian today, 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 that Farage and his cohorts are spreading within Scotland”.He also made a clear distinction, however, between those who hold far-right views and people with “legitimate points” about pressure on local services or community safety, which he noted were not unique to areas where migrants were housed.