Reform’s “racism”: From the SWP to the mainstream

FORTY YEARS AGO when I was at Oxford, the SWP, aka the Socialist Workers Party, were a thing. They sold The Socialist Worker on street corners, fly-posted about meetings and sought to infiltrate trade unions and social movements. They jumped on every topical left-wing bandwagon going. I read now that the British SWP during the 1980s was one of the largest revolutionary Trotskyist organisations in Western Europe. Yet at the time, even on the left, they were a bit of a joke.

It was a blast from the past when I discovered this week that the SWP is still going strong at the University of St Andrews. A group of students there is setting up a Reform UK student society and, so they can meet on university premises, they are seeking affiliation to the student union.

Lo and behold, an open letter was promptly published online expressing “our collective disgust” at the Reform students’ endeavour and a petition was launched to stop the union affiliating their society because

Reform councillors have publicly associated with known fascists from neo-Nazi groups, with anti-abortion groups from the U.S., and have been central to fearmongering around migrants and asylum seekers. Their narratives are underpinned by racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, sexism and transphobia.

The source turned out to be the St Andrews Socialist Society, a front for the SWP. The organisation is much smaller now than in its 1980s heyday. But the difference between then and now is that the SWP mindset is no longer an outlier: SWP attitudes have become culturally, and in much of our politics, fully mainstream. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the treatment of Reform UK – where in much of our media and political discourse it is axiomatic that Reform is racist, if not fascist.

So it was no surprise to find The Times columnist Kenny Farquharson yesterday labouring this theme in an entire column. After elaborating on the racist myth that Black men threatened white women after the abolition of slavery in the US, Farquharson accuses Reform’s Scottish leader, Malcolm Offord, of promulgating the same trope. The reason? In a well-reported and live-streamed speech last week, Offord talked about joining a group of parents who have come together to see their daughters home safely at night amid the growing number of young immigrant men who loiter on Glasgow’s streets. The women and girls don’t feel safe.

authorities in Scotland and the rest of the UK do not collect the data in sufficient detail

According to Farquharson, Offord is being racist because for his “concerns to have any justification, studies of sexual offences in the UK would have to show that immigrants are more likely than non-immigrants to commit sexual crimes … [and he] has provided no conclusive evidence to support this”.

This is disingenuous verging on denial.

There is no “conclusive evidence” because the authorities in both Scotland and the rest of the UK do not collect the data in sufficient detail, or if they do, they very often refuse to release it. A year ago I submitted Freedom of Information requests for breakdowns by crime and nationality and immigration status of people arrested, convicted and imprisoned in Scotland – and got nothing back.

Earlier this month, The Sun reported that Police Scotland refused to release data on police call-outs, crimes and arrests connected to asylum-seeker hotels in Scotland on the grounds that disclosure could “increase community tensions” and potentially put officers, hotel residents and the public at risk.

If the data in this case, and indeed other FOIs on immigrant/asylum-seeker crime, did not show increased rates of law-breaking compared to the general or non-immigrant population, there would surely be no problem in releasing it. To that extent, the Police Scotland strategy is self-defeating in that it confirms to many people their belief there is a problem and undermines trust in the police and government. It does, however, allow politicians and journalists with a vested interest in gaslighting the public to “win” the argument by declaring that there is no “conclusive evidence”.

In fact, Oxford University’s evidence-based Migration Observatory has found that foreign nationals are overrepresented among people cautioned or convicted for some crimes, including sexual offences, compared with their share of the population. But they have to caveat their findings because reliable estimates of the population of different nationalities in the UK are lacking.

A Centre for Migration Control analysis of police arrest data, reported in 2024-2025, found that foreign nationals were around 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for sexual offences than British citizens (165 vs 48 arrests per 100,000 population), while in some snapshots, 25–26 per cent of sexual-offence arrests or convictions involved foreign nationals, with migrants about 9–11per cent of the population. Again critics have objected that the study relies on arrest data rather than convictions and that recording of nationality is not consistent.

Police data in London (2018-2025) showed 38–40 per cent of people charged with sexual offences were foreign nationals, while migrants were less than a quarter of the population. Once again, the figures are qualified by applying only to a specific period and city, and reflecting factors like tourism, transient populations, or reporting practices.

Progressive-minded Sweden is one of the few European countries with detailed register studies linking country of birth to crime convictions. A 2025 register study (2000-2020) analysing 4,032 rape convictions found that the odds of rape conviction were higher for people with an immigrant background, even after adjusting for several factors. Investigative analysis of Swedish court cases also reported that 58 per cent of people convicted of rape had a “foreign background.”

Glaswegian girls and women are reporting increased levels of sexual harassment, threat and assault on the streets

So we come to Glasgow where 357 rape cases were recorded in 2024-2025 (year-to-date) compared with 254 the previous year, roughly a 40 per cent increase in reported rape cases in the period examined. Comparatively, rape and attempted rape increased by only 15 per cent across Scotland in the same period – Glasgow clearly stands out.

Politicians may be loath to link the unprecedented rise in sexual crime in Glasgow to its status as the UK’s asylum-seeker capital – with 3900–4000 currently in the city together with 119,000 foreign-born residents, making up 19 per cent of the population – but people who live and work in Glasgow with so-called “lived experience” are less reluctant.

It should not be necessary to repeat the obvious: asylum seekers, who are mainly young men, left in limbo with no work and nothing to do, very often from alien cultures that (to put it mildly) do not respect women, particularly white Western women, will pose a higher sexual risk to women than the average native Glaswegian male.

The fact is Glaswegian girls and women are reporting increased levels of sexual harassment, threat and assault on the streets, more often from foreign men than in the rest of Scotland, and the fear of this is precisely what has driven their parents to chaperone them at night. Forty-four years ago I spent five days alone in Paris on an interrail trip and I was relentlessly pursued by North African migrants.

Such “lived experience” may be written off as anecdotal, or even racist, but it is real. It is surprising that Kenny Farquharson does not see the parallels with the grooming – or rape – gangs scandal in England. These girls’ and parents’ reports were habitually dismissed and obscured by authorities at all levels who feared appearing racist. Indeed the racial and religious elements of these crimes have still not been fully laid out or officially recognised.

There is, of course, a class element in all this, just as it was working-class girls who were gaslit and betrayed by middle-class social workers, policemen and politicians in the rape gang scandal. You can see it when Kenny Farquharson takes Malcolm Offord to task for listening to taxi drivers:

Now, let me be clear here, I love taxi drivers. There is nothing I like better than a frank exchange of views with a taxi driver whose politics would make Mussolini blush. But I sure as hell don’t want to be governed by taxi drivers. Or, for that matter, by a politician who takes his moral cue from taxi drivers.

I run several taxi companies in St Andrews and taxi drivers, as the police know, are a prime source of information because they are out on the streets talking to customers 24/7. There is no one whose ear is closer to the ground.

Kenny Farquharson should spend less time sneering behind his keyboard and more time in the real world like Malcolm Offord, letting his SWP-like impulses collide with reality.