Meeting of the Parliament 24 June 2026 [Draft]
I would like to say that I am grateful to speak about the motion, but honestly I am just a bit bored. It is one that manages the considerable feat of somehow being simultaneously vague enough to mean nothing and specific enough to be so wrong. As the trans immigrant in the room—but, more importantly, as an educator—I almost feel that I have a moral or civic responsibility to speak about it.
As a writer, I believe in examining authorial intent. The motion’s likely author, Nigel Farage, is not in the room. Seeing as he is not here, I will settle for Malcolm Offord, the ex-Lord Offord of Garvel, who might take some time to adjust to the acoustics that do not come with upholstered red benches. He is the man who, during a cost of living crisis, told Scotland about his six homes, five cars and six boats, as though he was speaking at an estate inventory rather than at the political stump. I note that, for those in Inverclyde who refused to elect him and who cannot afford one home, let alone six, hobbies in the English Channel feel somewhat remote.
The motion—along with the standard, or lack thereof, that it sets—is simply sad. It calls for evidence-based policy that “commands broad confidence”, so let us apply that test. On net zero, the motion warns that environmental policies risk delivering net zero economic growth. That is a striking position from Malcolm Offord, who, in his maiden speech in the House of Lords, in January 2022, declared that
“COP 26 proves that our leadership still counts”,
as it shows that
“it is possible simultaneously to grow our economy while cutting our emissions.”
He said that the UK had
“the capital, the brains and the political will to meet the climate challenge.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 January 2022; Vol 817, c 273.]
During the election campaign, when he was challenged on those comments, he said that he was never “enthusiastic” about it and that he simply “read the lines” that he was given as a minister. He added, with infinite scientific precision, that
“The world heats up and cools down … so I don’t want to get into that argument about science.”
Members in this overheated and sweaty parliamentary chamber cannot afford to take that position. The world is heating up, and a man who disowns his own words the moment that they become inconvenient is not really a reliable guide to evidence-based policy.
On the immigration passage of the motion, the contradiction is just embarrassing and shows a degree of inefficiency and ineptitude that even the most hard-pressed migrant would not be guilty of. The motion begins by expressing concern about illegal immigration and calls for action to “reduce incentives” for illegal immigration. One line later, without a definition and without a distinction, the motion pivots to calling for “non-citizens” to be restricted from accessing social housing and Scottish welfare. Illegal immigrants and non-citizens are not the same people. They are not in the same legal category. They are not the same policy problem. Conflating them is not just an oversight; it is Reform’s entire political strategy.
The people who would be most affected by further restrictions would not only be those who arrived here illegally; they would be EU nationals with settled status, migrant NHS workers, care workers, teachers and skilled workers on a visa—the people whom, as Malcolm Offord’s own manifesto acknowledges, Scotland needs. No definition is offered. The motion just mentions “non-citizens”—a category so broad that it encompasses almost everyone in Scotland who was not born here, the overwhelming majority of whom are here entirely lawfully and are paying into the system from which they are being threatened with exclusion.
The motion talks about tackling illegal immigration. However, Reform’s proposals would actually affect legal and skilled migrants. It is not a policy for controlling borders; it is a policy for making Scotland hostile to foreign-born people in general, and members in this chamber should say so plainly.
On Malcolm Offord’s record on immigration, he says that he supports controlled immigration, but his own manifesto describes the Conservative years between 2021 and 2024 as the “Boriswave” of destructive mass immigration. He served as a minister throughout that entire period. He was appointed by Boris Johnson, reappointed by Liz Truss and reappointed by Rishi Sunak. If the “Boriswave” was a scandal, he was the minister who sailed on it—with all of his six boats, presumably.
On immigration statistics, when Malcolm Offord appeared on “Question Time” in December 2025, he claimed that only 1 million people came to the UK in the entire 20th century. The Ferret said that that was false. A few moments ago, he said that not a single turbine blade in Scotland was made in Scotland. That is false—23 per cent were made in Scotland.
Reform members say that they agree with controlled immigration, but they want me to be deported, apparently. They say that they want immigrants to work, but they do not want to give them the right to work. They say that they want to fix the care sector, but they want to cut health visas for skilled carers. They say that they want cohesion, but they will not support English as a second language courses for migrants.
On social cohesion, Malcolm Offord and his party cower in fear of trans people, who constitute 0.44 per cent of Scotland’s population. He made homophobic jokes about George Michael and his bereaved partner at a rugby club dinner while ignoring Reform’s Aberdeenshire by-election candidate who, reportedly, made social media posts about women’s jaws hurting two minutes into oral sex. That is shameful.
The motion calls for apprenticeships, literacy investment and diverse pathways into employment, but the Fraser of Allander Institute found that Reform’s tax proposals would turn Scotland’s income tax net position from a surplus to a deficit. There would be a recurring annual cost, not a one-off. No credible pathway is provided to fund better schools, better apprenticeships and better mental health services using those arithmetic acrobatics. Reform has no answers other than more task forces and bad economics.
The subtitle of the motion is “Five Years to 2031”. In 2014, Malcolm Offord founded a campaign called “Vote No Borders”, but he now campaigns to stop the boats. He championed net zero as a minister and then abandoned it as a leader. He talks about “non-citizens” when he means illegal immigrants and hopes that nobody reads the small print. He pledges his salary to a charity that he controls with his personal assistant with £12,000 in the bank. He boasted of having six homes on live television while standing in a constituency with a housing crisis. He even called his boat the Braveheart—after the story about Scottish independence—and he sailed it in the English Channel during an ongoing election campaign in Inverclyde. Hey—a man has to have hobbies.
Scotland does need reform, but many of Scotland’s MSPs, and many of Reform’s own MSPs, can do so much better than whatever this is. I will not be supporting the motion. I stand for a politics of care, not a whatever-it-is of Kerr.