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IN the first First Minister’s Questions of the new Holyrood session, Reform UK’s Scottish leader Malcolm Offord could not even finish his first sentence without uttering a falsehood.
“It has just emerged that, last year, the Labour-run City of Edinburgh Council froze all social housing applications from homeless Scots,” Offord said in his opening salvo. “Their applications were shelved while the council’s housing stock was provided instead, as a priority, to asylum applicants.”
None of what Offord said is true. Scottish councils do not even house asylum applicants, the Home Office does.
But the more pressing thing to highlight is that no one had even claimed that Edinburgh Council had frozen “all social housing applications from homeless Scots”.
Did Offord simply make it up?
A more generous interpretation is that he failed to accurately reflect a Telegraph story from August 26 which had, in fact, reported the exact opposite of what he said. Applications from homeless people were being prioritised, it said, not paused.
Reading for comprehension and then retelling is primary school stuff. Offord failed.
But he wasn’t done.
The Reform MSP went on to claim that the “Scottish National Party’s cynical abandonment of the local connection rule” had allowed “asylum applicants to jump the queue” for social housing. Again, this is wildly inaccurate.
The “local connection rule” – which has become a core issue for Offord despite his apparent inability to understand it – said that Scottish councils could under certain circumstances send a homeless person applying for social housing to another Scottish council area where they had stronger ties.
It has precisely nothing to do with “asylum applicants” – who, again, are housed by the Home Office, not local councils.
All this before Offord even finished his first paragraph.
Before the day was out, he would falsely claim Mark Bonnar (the actor out of Line of Duty) had made a BBC Disclosure documentary about Glasgow, falsely claim that Bonnar had taken leave from work due to backlash to that documentary, and then falsely – and bizarrely – suggest that the majority of Scotland is unemployed.
But the most worrying thing is not that Offord got his facts wrong. It is not how effortlessly or how often he seemed to do it – or how unphased Reform are about correcting any of the falsehoods.
The most worrying thing was how unbothered any of the Scottish media were about it all.
This is the leader of the (joint) second biggest group at Holyrood misleading parliament. That is supposed to be a serious charge. At worst, a resigning matter. It appeared in no newspapers but this one.
A generous interpretation is that Offord telling falsehoods is not considered news anymore.
A less generous interpretation is that media outlets didn’t want to damage a party they are aligned with, in some cases, or open themselves up to allegations of anti-Reform bias in others.
The BBC did report on the exchange – and John Swinney accusing Offord of spreading “disinformation” – but sanitised what the Reform MSP had actually said to remove his fabrications.
“Malcolm Offord asks John Swinney about social housing applications for homeless Scots and says refugees who were asylum seekers, are ‘jumping the queue’,” the BBC reported.
That is not what Offord said. And it is not the role of the BBC, or any other outlet, to edit Offord’s statements to parliament until they make a bit of sense.
He had weeks to prepare his opening gambit, so why not accurately report what he came up with?
It was reminiscent of accusations of the media “sane-washing” the ramblings of US president Donald Trump.
And Reform’s strategy, like Trump’s, is hardly a mystery. It relies on “flooding the zone with shit”, to quote the US president’s former political strategist Steve Bannon. Basically, spout endless claims that are inflammatory and memorable – and don’t worry if they’re true.
The job of the media is equally straightforward: report the facts.
Ignoring Reform UK spouting falsehoods or treating it as normal allows it to become so. And when misleading statements in Parliament pass without scrutiny, there is no incentive to stop making them. In fact, it only encourages making more.
