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Nigel Farage announced the defection of a Conservative peer to Reform UK at a rally in the Scottish town of Falkirk on Saturday.
Lord Malcolm Offord, a Greenock-born former private equity partner who served as a minister of state for Scotland between 2021 and 2024 and campaigned against independence, said he would resign his peerage and campaign for election to the Scottish parliament in May.
Farage said it was a “brave” move that would have a “transformative effect” on Reform north of the border. “We need to build a Scottish agenda for Reform, and that is what I am motivated to do now,” he told reporters.
Offord is the first peer to switch to Reform. His defection comes as the party’s support grows north of the border, surging past Labour in several recent polls to become the main challenger to the ruling Scottish National party.
Offord declined to comment on recent media reports that Farage had made racist and antisemitic comments to fellow pupils at school, saying he was “morally fit” to become prime minister.
This week Sir Keir Starmer described Farage as a “toxic, divisive disgrace” after the Reform leader said the fact that one in three children in Glasgow spoke English as a second language was a “cultural smashing” of the city.
“All he wants to do is tear communities apart,” Starmer said. “He’s doing it to distract from the comments he has made in the past, which he can’t give a proper explanation for.”
Offord said Glasgow was a welcoming city that had successfully integrated ethnic communities, but Farage was highlighting the “speed of change” in immigration. “We need to have cohesive communities,” he said.
In the speech to about 700 supporters, Farage said he would set out a manifesto during the Scottish campaign based on “change and hope”.
He claimed that the SNP were prioritising illegal migrants for housing above families who have “worked and lived and paid into the system for generations”. “It is wrong and it must end,” he said.
Farage also claimed there had been three serious sexual assaults in the Falkirk area in the past week. Police Scotland said a 22-year man had been charged in connection with sexual offences relating to two incidents.
Protests about a migrant hotel in the city have flared in recent months, echoing similar demonstrations across the UK.
“If you allow young men who come from countries in which women aren’t even classed as second-class citizens [into the UK] . . . their attitude to women is completely different to ours, so the social effects of this are appalling,” he said.
Speaking at a hotel near the Grangemouth complex, where the closure of Scotland’s last oil refinery has caused alarm about energy policy, Farage blamed atheist politicians who had turned their back on “Judeo-Christian” roots in the “vain pursuit of net zero, believing somehow they will save the planet”.
Graham Simpson, an MSP who defected from the Conservatives to Reform UK in August, announced a series of policies for the Holyrood campaign.
He pledged that Reform would widen main roads, including the A9 in the Highlands, while merging and closing some of the 132 public bodies operating in Scotland, which he said would generate £1bn of savings over five years. Simpson also said the party would focus on supporting colleges and increasing housebuilding.
“We see a broken country and we want to fix it,” he said.