The leader of Reform UK in Scotland has declared his intention to become First Minister – promising to cut taxes, slash the size of government and put local people first on housing.
Speaking on the Scotland Tonight: Meet the Leaders series, Malcolm Offord said he had “the vision and the capability” to lead Scotland, despite polling that puts his party well behind the SNP.
He refused to be drawn on whether he would back Scottish Labour’s Anas Sarwar as First Minister if it came to blocking John Swinney from holding the role, saying his campaign was “thinking only about winning” and that post-election deals were not something he was entertaining.
The interview came as Reform UK Scotland attempts to build on what Offord described as “rapid momentum”, with the party now claiming to be in second place in 54 of Scotland’s 73 constituencies.
He pointed to the party’s rise from 0.2% of the vote two years ago to around 20% in current polling as evidence that a political earthquake was possible on May 7 – even as he acknowledged that no pollsters or pundits were currently predicting his party would win any constituencies outright.
The economy
Reform is proposing to cut taxes by £2bn a year, which Offord argued would grow the economy and ultimately bring in more revenue.
“We have to incentivise people in the economy,” he said. “Right now, they’re being overtaxed and over-regulated. The ones that are told they’ve got the broadest shoulders, they’re shrugging their shoulders and saying, ‘why bother?'”
When told the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) had said the tax cuts would not pay for themselves and would likely require reductions to frontline services, Offord said he accepted some of the IFS’s points but not all of them.
“To put that in context, the Scottish budget at Holyrood is £72bn. This is only 3%. Any business can cut their cost by 5% without cutting frontline services, so we think 3% is entirely achievable.”
On the projected £5bn shortfall in Scotland’s finances, he said: “These are the choices that are being made by this administration. They don’t have a good track record of spending money. They don’t have a good track record of getting a return on capital.”
The quangos
Offord said Reform UK Scotland would look to overhaul Scotland’s 132 quangos, which he said cost £6.5bn and overlapped significantly with the 29,000-strong Scottish civil service.
“There’s 23,000 people working in the quangos and 29,000 people working in the civil service, they need to be merged into one,” he said. “There’s a democratic deficit because you need accountability to ministers, not through quangos.”
When pressed on which quangos would go, including bodies like Scottish Water, which employs 4,000 people, Offord said he would approach it with “a fresh pair of eyes.”
He acknowledged that around a quarter would ultimately be removed, adding: “Where they are legitimate, they can remain, but we’ll find a lot of waste there.”
He accepted that his party had not yet carried out a full assessment of all 132 bodies, saying: “We’re on the outside looking in. We’re not in government yet.”
Housing and asylum
On housing, Offord argued that pressure from asylum seekers had worsened Scotland’s housing emergency.
“Glasgow is housing 9,337 homeless people, of whom 64% have literally just arrived from outside our shores and that is putting pressure on the services for our local people.
“We have a very strong tradition in Scotland where we queue up for things in an orderly fashion and we don’t jump the queue.”
Education
Offord said Scotland’s schools had gone “from outstanding to average in 20 years” and pointed to attendance figures that he said show one in three of Scotland’s 700,000 pupils are not regularly in school.
He said headteachers needed greater autonomy to hire staff on a long-term basis, adding that Reform’s proposed tax cuts would help young teachers currently stuck in supply work by removing cliff edges in the tax system.
The campaign so far
Offord was also asked about a homophobic joke he made at a rugby club dinner eight years ago.
He said: “That was something that I apologised for eight years ago. It was in a private event, I was a private individual, I wasn’t in politics. I made amends then and the people then were happy, so we can move on from that.”
On whether the difficult start to the campaign raised questions about his suitability for politics, he said: “80% of our candidates have not been politicians before.
“These are people who are fed up with the status quo and want things to change. We’re real people who’ve had real lives, have said real things, and at the end of the day it’s not scripted, so there will be some bumps in the road.”
Reform UK Scotland is fielding all 73 candidates for the May 7 election.
Scotland Tonight: Meet the Leaders continues next Thursday, April 9.
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