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Reform UK has suspended one of its Scottish candidates after it emerged he had been struck off as a company director, and the party faces growing attacks for fielding candidates making Islamophobic remarks.
Reform confirmed on Friday morning it had suspended Stuart Niven, its candidate for Dundee City West, after the Herald revealed he had been struck off after diverting tens of thousands of pounds of Covid grants into his personal account.
Several hours after that admission, claims within Reform’s Scottish manifesto that it could save billions of pounds in Holyrood spending were dismissed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank, which described many of its pledges as “not fiscally credible” and “unserious at best”.
Reform had faced a succession of attacks from across the political spectrum about the conduct of several candidates only hours after Nigel Farage unveiled the 73 Reform UK hopefuls standing for May’s Scottish parliament election.
Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said the disclosures in several newspapers about their “divisive tweets” raised challenging questions about the party’s screening process, which Farage earlier this year claimed was now far more rigorous than before.
After Farage’s speech on Thursday, it emerged that Reform’s candidate for Fife North East, Linda Holt, had described Humza Yousaf, the UK’s first Muslim first minister, as “not British” and a “grandstanding Islamist moron” in social media posts.
Reform’s candidate for Stirling, Rachael Wright, shared a petition that wrongly claimed a former private school in Perthshire was being “turned into migrant accommodation”. The school’s owners said that was “wholly unfounded”, but Reform asserted that the denial was a result of its intervention.
Meanwhile, Senga Beresford, its candidate for Galloway and West Dumfries, endorsed social media posts by Tommy Robinson and Britain First, including tweets calling for mass deportations and a ban on burqas.
Sarwar described Malcolm Offord, Reform’s Scottish leader, as “spineless” for defending their remarks. Offord said they may have been intemperate but were “real”, and made before they became party candidates.
He told BBC Radio Scotland those candidates’ remarks had come up in Reform’s screening processes, which required applicants to “give full disclosure”. He added: “We have brought in a whole range of candidates, 80% of whom are not politicians. They’re real people with real lives who said real things in a past life.
“And what we got is a situation where, in all our lives in the past we’ve made comments that might sometimes be intemperate. But the issue with this modern world we live in is everything is now written down and remembered. I just think we have to be more realistic about the fact that real people say real things.”
In January, Farage was pressed by the Guardian on whether Reform’s vetting was robust enough in the wake of the conviction of Nathan Gill, his former Ukip ally and Welsh Reform leader, for accepting Russian bribes.
“It has been piss poor in the past and it won’t be in the future,” he said then. “I promise you we are doing everything we can to make sure these candidates for the Scottish parliament are vetted, and are fit and proper people to put before the electorate.”
Sarwar said on Friday: “Reform is treating Scots with contempt by asking them to vote for this hopeless gaggle of Tory rejects and oddballs, and I have no doubt Scotland will send them packing.
“The spineless Offord has only suspended one candidate and effectively given the green light to the fringe views of the rest of them. Reform Scotland do not have credible policies or credible candidates – they are not even in this race.”
Offord was also pressed by the BBC’s interviewer on comments made during Reform’s rally on Thursday by Sarah Pochin, the Reform MP who won the Runcorn and Helsby byelection, that she wanted to appear on stage wearing a “Reform tartan burqa” but was told she could not.
Asked about criticisms from John Swinney, the first minister, that those remarks were racist, Offord said they were “perfectly harmless” humour. “I just don’t think the public are interested in this definition of racism,” he said.
Regarding Reform’s manifesto pledges, David Phillips, the IFS’s devolved finances specialist, said the party had confused day-to-day spending with capital spending and failed to understand how Scotland’s finances worked, when it promised to fund a £2.3bn tax cut by cutting costs.
“The ‘self-funding’ tax cuts are a mirage created by a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the current devolution settlement and incorrectly comparing cumulative and annual figures,” Phillips said. “This is not good enough.”
