FIRST Minister John Swinney has responded to The National’s revelation that a top Reform UK activist with close ties to the party’s Scottish leadership joined far-right demonstrations in Glasgow and made deeply antisemitic comments.
Scottish Green co-leader Gillian Mackay raised this newspaper’s story on Grant Calder – who joined Reform UK MSP Thomas Kerr at the Scottish election count on May 8 and spoke in support of the racist violence in Glasgow on Tuesday night – at First Minister’s Questions on Thursday.
She said: “This is a time when our parliament must stand together to condemn racists and fascists who seek to divide our communities, and I am heartened by most of the responses we've seen so far this afternoon.
“Yet The National has revealed today that an active member of Reform UK who attended the election count in Glasgow alongside their deputy leader in Scotland, not only took part in the racist scenes on Buchanan Street, but boasted that he would do so again.
“Last year this man, who's clearly a friend of Reform UK's leadership, wrote, and I quote, ‘Jews are forcing us to swallow hordes of migrants, flooding land with the dregs of the world to dilute our Protestant stock and shatter the Union’.
“It makes me feel sick just quoting that.
“But as we've seen this afternoon, this is a party that's consistently branded New Scots as ‘strangers’, attacked Glaswegian schoolchildren who speak more than one language, and scapegoated and demonised our migrant communities.
“What does the First Minister have to say to those on the Reform benches who have fanned the flames of hate and actively welcomed racist and antisemitic members?”
Responding, Swinney said: “I have seen the comments to which Gillian Mackay refers, and I'm horrified by their contents.
“I think they are the worst of the communication in our society in the demonising of individuals, and as I have made clear … I deplore the way in which Reform is stirring up this division within our society.
“Their association with individuals that are creating that division and who are also involved, it appears from what I've read in the newspapers today, in the disorder that we have seen on the streets of our country is no place for democratic politicians to be associated with.
“I would say to Reform, they should establish the strongest possible distance from that rhetoric and from the behaviour of these individuals, or they will forever be known as the people that incited racial tension within our society in Scotland.”
Reform UK have remained silent on Calder’s links to senior figures within the party after multiple images showed him with Kerr, as well as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, depute leader Richard Tice, and MSP Kim Schmulian.
Further at FMQs, Mackay asked if the SNP Government would back Green proposals to change legislation around social media to make platforms easier to hold to account for the spread of hatred.
The Scottish Green co-leader said: “The violence this week has been stirred up by an online landscape which is designed to promote hate and by social media algorithms which deliver fascist propaganda into people's news feeds 24 hours a day.
“The world's richest man, Elon Musk, used his personally owned social media platform to share abhorrent content including quotes calling for millions and millions to be deported from the UK along with adverts for these protests.
“This is a direct threat to the safety of communities across our country and it cannot go unchallenged. Online regulation is largely reserved to Westminster, but there is one area this parliament does have control over.
“So will the First Minister work with the Scottish Greens to class social media platforms as publishers when the content they show you is the result of their algorithm rather than your choices as a user? That way we can finally start to take action on hateful and misleading online content.”
Swinney said: “I'm very happy to cooperate with the Scottish Green Party and other colleagues in Parliament who wish to tackle some of the online harm that is being propagated to individuals in our society.”
He added: “It is absolutely abhorrent and there needs to be the toughest regulatory regime in place, as Gillian Mackay says, the overwhelming majority of that is reserved to the United Kingdom Government, and we've had ongoing productive discussions with the UK Government as they wrestle with how to handle the expansion of social media and to have the correct regulatory environment in place.
“But if there are measures that we can take in this parliament, then I assure Gillian Mackay of the appetite and the enthusiasm of the government to make sure that we can take whatever steps are available to us to do exactly that.”
