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ANOTHER day, another falsehood from Reform UK to correct.
This time, like the last time, it was Thomas Kerr, the party’s deputy leader in Scotland, and some erroneous claims about Glasgow’s crime rates.
Not two weeks ago, I trawled through the latest Scottish crime data for 2025-26 to find out if Kerr’s description of Glasgow as “lawless” had any basis.
It will come as little surprise that the Reform MSP’s claims of a “rapid rise in violent crimes” and a “crime epidemic” simply were not borne out by the numbers .
Unperturbed by pesky things like reality, Kerr over the weekend claimed: “I've been saying for weeks – if not months – that Glasgow is lawless. Well, the facts now show it.”
He shared a video which said that the 2025-26 Scottish crime statistics showed Glasgow had “recorded the highest crime rate in the country, with 1431 crimes for every 10,000 people”.
That is simply not what the data says.
The official crime records, which you can check for yourself on the Scottish Government website, show that Glasgow had a rate of 849 crimes for every 10,000 people in 2025-26. The figure shared by Kerr was around 70% higher than the reality.
What’s more, the official figures actually show that Dundee – not Glasgow – had the unenviable record of the highest crime rate in the country with 929 per 10,000 people.
This matters because of the narratives that Kerr and his allies will spin from the incorrect figures.
“F'ing insane,” one account wrote while resharing the Reform MSP’s false post. “You can actually just see the correlation between fakeugees and the explosion in crime. Like the stats are insane, no longer visiting Glasgow this year.”
A second, sharing the same video as Kerr elsewhere, claimed that Glasgow was “also the rape capital of Britain”.
These claims are equally wrong.
Glasgow’s crime rate is actually down on 2016-17 (when it was 899 crimes per 10,000 people) and equivalent to the 850 per 10,000 recorded when net migration to the UK began to rise sharply in 2020-21. As net migration peaked at 944,000 in March 2023, Glasgow’s crime rate actually fell to around 800 per 10,000.
And Glasgow is not the “rape capital” of Scotland, let alone Britain. According to the official statistics, the city’s rate per 10,000 people was below that of areas like Clackmannanshire and Fife. The worst rate in all of Scotland was Shetland, none of which really fits Reform's anti-migration narrative.
All of these false claims about Glasgow have stemmed from the incorrect data pushed by Kerr in a wrong-headed attempt to claim he had been proven right.
We tracked the source of the data back through the Daily Record to research conducted by ProFM Group, and reached out to ask how they had got to their totals.
Ultimately, researchers there had added offences (which includes things such as speeding or not wearing a seat belt while driving) to the crime rate, creating artificially high figures. They were happy to correct the record once the discrepancy was highlighted, and their website now reflects the true stats.
The same could not be said of Reform UK.
Asked if Kerr would remove his post, issue a correction, or both, the party said that any issue with the figures “should be taken up with” the people who reported them.
As I’ve said, we did exactly that, and they were quick to correct the mistakes.
Would it be too much to ask that an MSP representing Scotland’s largest city does the same? Or should we expect Kerr to continue sharing disparaging and unverified claims about the people who elected him?
