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Nigel Farage spoke to the largest Reform UK rally held in Scotland to date, but declined to speak with the press corps afterwards. In his place, recently switched member of the House of Lords the former Conservative donor took on the task of responding to queries on claims of discriminatory behaviour and antisemitism surrounding the party leader.

A High-Profile Defection

The leader presented the ex-Tory lord and wealthy businessman during a packed event of roughly seven hundred attendees in a hotel venue near Falkirk. Offord, who served as a Scotland Office minister under the last government and was until recently the Scottish Tory party's chief financial officer, stated his plan to give up his peerage in order to stand for Reform UK in the upcoming Scottish parliament vote.

Farage said he was “extremely pleased” to greet the new member. He called the peer’s defection as “a brave and historic act”.

Dodging the Press

Farage spoke to the crowd following a difficult period which included him delivering a tirade against the BBC after they quizzed him about an investigation into alleged racist and antisemitic behaviour from his teenage years. But, the leader avoided the expected press huddle after Saturday’s event.

When asked why his new party’s leader was not available to address growing claims concerning his history, Offord said: “You’ll need to ask him that question.”

Pressed on if he thought Farage should apologise for the comments he is said to have made about Jewish students, Offord said: “I think that’s something he’ll need to consider with his own advisers.”

Defending the Leader

Offord insisted that Farage was “morally fit” to be prime minister and rejected claims of dog-whistle politics. While addressing supporters, Farage had doubled down on previous comments 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 “toxic and divisive”, the defector argued that his new leader was “highlighting a factual issue that people are talking about on the doorstep”.

Growing Confidence

The rally, filled with an energetic and enthused crowd of predominantly older, white male backers who bought tickets for the event, highlights Reform's increasing self-assurance before next May’s elections.

While the Scottish National Party remains ahead, the party has made substantial progress in the past year, achieving a quarter of the vote in its first Holyrood byelection test. Following Scottish Labour's decline, the party has often relegated it to third in recent months, with support reaching over a fifth.

Announcing that party membership north of the border had quadrupled in the past year to 12,000 members, a senior party official said he believed it could gain up to 20 MSPs in May, which would place Reform in “a very strong position” at Holyrood.

Campaign Rhetoric

Thomas Kerr, a local representative for the party, prompted a roar of approval as he described Farage as “the future PM of the UK”. He instructed the crowd to “prepare for a fight” as we “challenge the ruling class”, warning that “the coming campaign will be difficult”.

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”.

The leader personally expressed his pleasure at the party’s emergence as a force in Scottish politics in the last year, admitting to the audience that in previous years he had been warned he “wouldn’t get 20 people in a room”.

Protests Nearby

Meanwhile, not far away in Falkirk town centre, demonstrators with opposing views were gathering for a now-regular weekly standoff outside a local 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, First Minister John Swinney warned that the tactic of the far-right 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.