Reform’s Scottish leader, Lord Malcolm Offord, got humiliated after admitting to having six houses, six boats and five cars during an STV election debate yesterday. 

In an attempt to paint the Green Party as anti-success and anti-business, Offord said that he went to London 40 years ago, with £2,000 in debt and “full of ambition”.

He said that he “worked hard” and was successful, and that “Today, I own six houses, five cars and six boats”. Offord also said he has paid £45 million in tax through his business. 

He was then laughed at as he said: “I don’t say that to boast”.

Offord then asked the Scottish Green Party co-leader, Ross Greer, if the Greens would want more or less people like him in Scotland.

Greer fired back: “Fewer people like you. I’m glad you’ve finally admitted how many homes that you have, Lord Offord.”

Greer continued: “I think it’s worth at this point in the debate pointing out that there are three times as many holiday homes and empty properties in this country as there are homeless children. 

“You don’t need six homes, you don’t even need two homes, everybody just needs a home to live in.”

Greer said that to tackle the housing crisis, “super rich elite individuals” like Offord “should be giving up some of those homes” so that people without a home can have somewhere to live.

Offord looked down at the podium as Greer gave his answer, and then changed the subject when he was given the opportunity to respond to the Green MSP. 

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

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With less than two weeks to go until the 2026 Scottish Parliament election, when voters will elect 129 MSPs – 73 constituency and 56 regional – a growing body of polling is shaping expectations for both the electoral outcome and Scotland’s constitutional future.

Two polls released this week suggest that a majority of Scots could now favour independence. A Find Out Now survey of more than 1,000 respondents, commissioned by James Kelly of the pro-independence blog Scot Goes Pop, found that 53 percent would vote ‘Yes’ in a referendum when undecided voters are excluded. Including ‘don’t knows,’ support stands at 50 percent for independence and 44 percent for remaining in the UK.

The poll also indicates that the SNP is on course to dominate the constituency vote with 35 percent, well ahead of Reform UK on 16 percent. Scottish Labour follows on 14 percent, with the Scottish Greens at 12 percent, the Scottish Liberal Democrats on 10 percent, and the Scottish Conservatives on 9 percent.

On the regional list vote, the SNP is projected to win 27 percent, with the Greens in second place on 20 percent. Reform  follows on 17 percent, ahead of Labour on 12 percent, the Liberal Democrats, 11 percent, and the Conservatives, 10 percent.

These figures point to a potentially strong combined showing for pro-independence parties.

According to pollster James Kelly, nine out of fifteen polls conducted so far this year have found a majority in favour of independence.

The data also reveals a notable generational divide, that support for independence is strongest among people in their 30s, 68 percent ‘Yes’ to 27 percent ‘No,’ while opposition is highest among those aged 65 to 74, 69 percent ‘No’ to 26 percent ‘Yes.’

The polling suggests the Greens could achieve a record result, raising the possibility of a substantial pro-independence majority at Holyrood. However, the SNP alone is projected to fall short of an outright majority, potentially complicating the path to a second independence referendum.

A separate poll by Survation for Ballot Box Scotland places the SNP on 35 percent in constituency voting and 29 percent on the regional list, which would translate into around 57 seats. The Greens are projected to win a record 11 seats based on 11 percent of the list vote.

In that poll, Reform UK and Labour are tied on 20 percent in the constituency vote, followed by the Conservatives on 13 percent and Liberal Democrats on 10 percent. On the regional list, Reform leads on 19 percent, ahead of Labour, 17 percent, the Conservatives, 13 percent, and the Liberal Democrats, 8 percent.

The survey also asked voters which party they would least like to see in the next Scottish Government. Reform UK topped that measure at 34 percent, followed by the SNP on 17 percent and Labour on 14 percent.

The polls suggest that while no single party may secure a majority, the balance of the next Scottish Parliament could hinge on the combined strength of pro-independence parties.

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The leadership of Your Party in Scotland has resigned en masse and declared that the party is “over”.

The 12 members of the interim Scottish executive committee have accused Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s left-wing outfit of blocking Scottish activists from contesting the upcoming Holyrood elections.

The committee members have said they will now set up a rival party. 

In a joint statement, the outgoing Scottish leadership committee said that Your Party in Scotland had not been given access to funding and mailing lists.

They said: “We have, after careful thought and consideration, taken the collective decision to resign our positions on [the interim Scottish executive committee], having found ourselves completely blocked when we attempted to carry out the clear mandate set for us by members from across Scotland.”

The group said that the move followed a UK-wide central executive committee (CEC) meeting, where Niall Christie, the Scotland representative, was allegedly prevented from putting forward measures to allow the Scottish party the ability to contact members.

His attempt to put forward a motion affirming the Scottish party’s independence also failed.

The group also condemned the party’s decision to remove thousands of Your Party members affiliated with other socialist organisations, including the Scottish Socialist Party.

Christie told Holyrood: “It has become clear the party has run out of road. This is in no small part down to the consistent disrespect shown to Scotland and Scottish members, with decisions about us being made without our input, and on our behalf.”

The statement added: “No serious attempt to unite the left can be done through purges of socialists or by disregarding entire nations and their representatives. It is clear that these are fatal blows to the Your Party project from which it cannot recover.”

“Despite this generational fumble of the left in Britain, the need for a new party on the left in Scotland couldn’t be more urgent, and it is our clear intention to continue working towards this.”

The statement also said that the group intends to keep building change, but will “do so outwith the constraints of the deeply flawed and dying Your Party”.

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

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It’s far from plain sailing for Nigel Farage, after a poll conducted on behalf of the Sunday Times showed that support for his party has plunged to its lowest level in over a year.

Ahead of the Scottish elections in five weeks time, a Norstat survey for the paper showed a substantial decline in backing for Nigel Farage’s party, compared with February, after it was hit by a number of scandals in Scotland, including the suspension of some of its candidates for past social media posts expressing bigoted and hateful views.

It’s a picture that’s been replicated across the country, with Reform also falling in the polls in England and Wales after being hit with a number of scandals.

According to polling expert Sir John Curtice, the drop in Reform’s support could benefit unionist parties, with voters peeling away from Reform to support Labour and the Tories as part of a tactical voting campaign to hurt the SNP.

The Sunday Times reports: “Backing for Reform has fallen back to 15 per cent in constituencies and on the regional list, both down four points compared with the last Norstat poll seven weeks ago.”

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

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Palma Oxley is a Researcher at the Fabian Society, working at the Fabian Housing
Centre

May’s elections will be seismic across the UK, but especially in Scotland. Housing is a key battleground issue that could help determine the outcome.

The Scottish election will take place two years since the Scottish Government declared a national housing emergency, presenting an opportunity either to reset Scottish housing policy or to entrench the mistakes of the past.

The housing emergency affects every Scottish community. Over 190,000 people have been pushed into poverty because their housing costs are so high, including 35,000 children. Nearly 250,000 people are on the social housing waiting list, with some families waiting up to a decade for a permanent home. The rise in housing costs has outstripped wage growth, with average house prices increasing by 47 per cent and average monthly private rents by 51 per cent between January 2015 and December 2025.

A recent report analysed these problems and proposed solutions for the next Scottish government. Housing the Future: How Scotland Can Build Homes Again, published by the Scottish Fabians and the Fabian Housing Centre, identifies one clear cause of the housing emergency: the failure to build enough homes. It is a failure which dates back almost two decades.

Back in 2007, the newly elected SNP government committed to increasing housebuilding in Scotland to 35,000 new homes a year by ‘the middle of the next decade’. Ministers said building around 10,000 extra homes a year was ‘achievable and necessary if [Scotland is to] reverse declining affordability’.

But instead of increasing housebuilding, the SNP government plunged the country into the worst housebuilding crisis since the Second World War. Nine of the 10 worst years for housebuilding since 1948 have occurred under their leadership. Between 2007-08 and 2024-25, Scotland experienced a 26 per cent reduction in the number of homes completed. Compared to their 2007 target, this sustained under-delivery has resulted in an estimated 250,000 ‘missing’ new homes in Scotland – roughly equivalent to a city the size of Edinburgh, or twice as large as Aberdeen.

This fall in housebuilding is due to unambitious and counterproductive government policy. For example, Scotland’s National Planning Framework does not even make housebuilding an explicit priority in its overarching principles. The Framework is also unduly restrictive, allowing development only on a limited number of ‘plan allocated sites’. As a result, Scotland’s largest developers currently hold land with detailed planning consent for just 53,000 homes. In short, the Framework is better suited to preventing homes than to delivering them.

On top of this, the SNP government has cut £197 million out of the Affordable Housing Supply Programme since the beginning of this parliament, despite the rising cost of building. Within months of these cuts, the delivery of nearly 2,000 affordable homes had been stalled.

This poor performance has political consequences. YouGov found that 67 per cent of respondents believed that increasing the supply of housing in Scotland would have a very or fairly positive impact on the country. And the SNP has lost the trust of Scotland on the issue – when respondents were asked how much they trust the SNP and John Swinney to handle the issue of housing in Scotland, 58 per cent said either ‘not very much’ or ‘not at all’.

The forthcoming election must lead to a reset in housing policy. The next Scottish Government should commit to an all-tenure housing target of 350,000 homes completed by 2036, including at least 33,000 in 2030-31. 

But this time they must back this target up with effective policy. They should simplify planning decisions, build more homes where infrastructure already exists, and reform affordable and social housing funding by providing a five-year grant funding settlement for the Affordable Housing Supply Programme. They should establish More Homes Scotland by 2027 and give it the powers to increase housebuilding in every community. They should set out a reasonable ‘New Homes Standard’ that requires every new-build to be fit for the future and establish a ‘right to build’ to allow community groups to build affordable housing supply in rural, remote and island areas. These are just some of the proposals we set out in our report. 

Scotland’s housing emergency has held back living standards for almost two decades. The next government must change course.

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Reform’s leader in Scotland has claimed that people should ‘take less offence’ over Reform candidates’ bigoted social media posts after a number of candidates were found to have made racist and hateful remarks.

Malcom Offord made the remarks after posts were revealed by Senga Beresform, Reform’s candidate for Galloway and West Dumfries, calling for the deportation of British Muslims and endorsed far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

The National reports on another candidate too: “Linda Holt, the candidate for Fife North East, described former first minister Humza Yousaf as a “grandstanding Islamist moron” and said he was “not British”.

It comes after Reform published their Scottish election manifesto on Thursday, along with the party’s candidates. Within hours, bigoted social media posts by some of the candidates emerged.

Appearing on BBC Scotland’s Sunday Show, Offord said everyone had made “intemperate” remarks and suggested people should “take less offence”.

Offord tried to claim that Reform candidates would make mistakes as they weren’t ‘scripted’ yet you don’t have to be scripted to make sure you don’t post hateful and bigoted remarks!

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

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After Stratos’s blog post last week, I revisited Joshua Mitchell’s experiment asking an AI to simulate what using a screen reader actually feels like, not to replace proper testing, but to generate a transcript of the experience that could be shared with stakeholders who had never encountered one. The results were striking: skip links that went nowhere, navigation menus entirely unreachable by keyboard, and link text repeated identically ten times with no distinguishing context.

Stratos’s post asked whether AI is improving or impeding web accessibility, and ended with an open question to the community: are you already using AI in your accessibility workflows?

I’d just come back from DrupalCamp England, where I’d presented a talk called “Same Image, Different Story”, one I first gave at DrupalCamp Scotland, and will be taking to Drupal Dev Days later this year. It’s a talk I’m deliberately treating as a work in progress, updating it with new thinking and developments each time rather than delivering the same version twice.

And I think I might have part of an answer to Stratos’s question, though it’s more of a diagnosis than a solution, at least for now.

The problem hiding in plain sight

Harvard’s Digital Accessibility Services has a useful guide on writing alt text that includes a section called “Consider the Context.” It shows the same photograph of Hollis Hall used in two different articles. One is about students enjoying the spring weather, and the other is about the building’s famous residents, and it demonstrates that each use case demands entirely different alt text. Same image, different story.

It’s a compelling illustration of best practice and is the cornerstone of my talk. That single example, two articles, one image, two completely different appropriate descriptions, captures the problem more precisely than any technical explanation I could give. But it also quietly exposes an architectural gap: most content management systems, including Drupal, the platform that powers the University of Edinburgh’s EdWeb 2, don’t give editors anywhere to act on that guidance. The image gets a single alt text field. One description, stored once, is applied everywhere the image is used. An article about student life. A seasonal blog post. A facilities page. The same text, regardless of which detail is editorially significant in each context.

This isn’t a quirk of how one editor set things up. It’s a fundamental constraint of how Drupal’s media architecture works. And the consequences reach further than you might expect.

The anti-pattern that reveals the problem

When Drupal introduced the Media Library, it was framed as a shared asset pool designed to encourage image reuse and reduce duplication, and the intent was good. Upload once, use everywhere. But what we’ve observed in practice is editors quietly working around it: uploading the same image multiple times under different filenames, just so they can have different alt text, or set a different focal point, for different editorial contexts.

The platform designed to reduce duplication is inadvertently encouraging it. That’s a significant signal. When users consistently work around a feature, it usually means the feature doesn’t match how they actually need to work.

Where does AI fit into this?

Stratos’s post noted that AI-generated alt text is improving, but inconsistent, and the W3C’s own work on machine learning accessibility is honest about the gap. A bar chart described as simply “a graph with coloured bars” versus one that explains the data in full is the difference between access and exclusion.

There are already Drupal community contributions that tackle this, and they’re genuinely promising. AI may be able to offer a better first draft of alt text to editors to update manually, especially under time pressure.

But here’s the thing that my talk kept circling back to: even if AI could generate better alt text, Drupal has nowhere contextual to put it.

If the media architecture only supports one alt text value per image, then it doesn’t matter how good the AI generation is. The result still gets flattened to a single description, applied in every context, whether it’s appropriate or not. You haven’t solved the accessibility problem; you’ve just automated the production of the wrong answer, faster.

There’s a further constraint worth naming, too: current AI alt text tools work from the image alone. They don’t read the surrounding page content, the article headline, the body copy, or the editorial context, so they have no way of knowing whether the focus should be the students, the architecture, or the changing seasons. The next step in making this genuinely useful is finding ways to pass that subject matter to the AI, so it can generate alt text that’s not just accurate, but relevant to the specific editorial context it’s being placed in.

A practical step we could take today

There’s something worth drawing from Joshua Mitchell’s experiment here. He didn’t ask AI to fix the screen reader experience; he asked it to describe it, making an abstract problem visible and actionable.

We could apply the same thinking to alt text validation. Rather than waiting for the architecture to catch up, AI could be pointed at an existing page and asked to interrogate it: does this alt text accurately describe the image? Does it make sense in the context of this article? Is it serving the reader, or just technically present?

That’s a use case that’s achievable right now, without any changes to how Drupal stores media. And given that EdWeb serves over 600 subsites with around 1,500 editors, the ability to audit contextual appropriateness at scale, rather than relying on individual editors to self-assess, could make a meaningful difference.

The question I’m sitting with

The more interesting challenge, and the one I’m actively exploring at the University, isn’t “can AI write good alt text?” It’s “can we build an architecture where AI can write the right alt text for a specific editorial context, and can the CMS preserve and serve that appropriately?”

That feels like a genuinely solvable problem. The Drupal community is already moving in the right direction with contributions that allow editors to override media properties per-use rather than per-asset. Pair that with AI-assisted generation, editorial context passed as subject matter, and human review, and you start to have something that could meaningfully improve accessibility at scale, across a platform serving over 160 environments and more than 600 subsites, as EdWeb does.

This is part of a broader piece of work I’m developing at the University around AI editorial assistance, focused not on generating content, but on helping editors make better decisions: style guide compliance, accessibility checking, and contextual awareness. It’s early days, but the alt text problem feels like a good place to start.

To borrow Stratos’s framing: keeping the human in the middle means making sure the human has the right tools to make contextually appropriate decisions, not just faster ones. I’ll be updating this thinking as the talk evolves, and as the work here at Edinburgh develops. If anyone else in the Higher Education community is thinking about this, I’d love to compare notes.

Jamie Stone is the Liberal Democrat MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross and the chair of the House of Commons Petitions Committee.

Dear Old Ireland…

When I was growing up on the shores of the Dornoch Firth in the Scottish Highlands, I had hardly even heard of the place – although I might have heard of a leprechaun.

At uni, I met a nice girl who told me that she came from the Emerald Isle. I remember trying to charm her and, in my ignorance, I confused Belfast with Ulster, blissfully unaware that one was a city and the other was a province. I thought I’d blown my shot – and I may not have given it a second thought, but for the fact that one day I married that very same girl. That started a twice yearly visit to her home, the county of Armagh, bang on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It was a voyage of discovery, one that continues all these years on.

One thing I discovered was that my grandmother – who my mother had always assured me came from a reputable Scottish family – was in fact of Irish descent. This lineage included an ancestor who had once been a doctor in Dublin (his nickname was ‘stirabout Gus’ – a reference to the fact that in the late 18th century he prescribed porridge ‘stirabout’ as the cure for all ailments). Why had the Irish blood in my veins been so unacknowledged? I’m still yet to find out.

In more recent times, as our children got bigger, we as a family have stayed with my kind sister-in-law and her husband in a small holiday home in the remote northwest of County Donegal in Éire. To be precise, on the Fanad Peninsula overlooking Lough Swilly. A more remote and romantic part of Ireland it would be hard to find.

Now me being me, when I’m in Ireland, it is only really right and proper that I drink one or two pints of Guinness. And so it is that one evening I found myself in the Lighthouse Tavern, just where the Falad Peninsula punches northwards into the wild Atlantic. One evening as I raised my pint, one of my nephews and nieces took a picture of me with my brother-in-law sitting beside me in the bar. More of that picture anon.

Only a year later in 2017, I was surprised to find myself elected to the House of Commons. It would be fair to say that the House of Commons was equally as surprised to get me. I learnt that they had been rather badly caught and hadn’t had time to prepare a security pass for me in the event of my being elected. Apparently a mad scramble ensued to find my picture and prepare a pass in the knowledge that I could well be on the next train south from Inverness.

As I write this, I look at my security pass. It is that same picture of me in the Donegal pub which they had found online – albeit, with my brother-in-law, the optics and the darts trophies all cropped out. Over the ensuing years, I have been greatly touched to learn that the pub now takes a close interest in what I say and do in Westminster. Beyond this, most of the people in that remote part of Ireland had heard of the late Charles Kennedy and had taken some pleasure over the years in noting his success and ascent in UK politics.

That is the point about what I write in this piece. Little known to me as a child, but the fact is that the connections between the Irish Celt and the Highland Celt – between Gaelic in Ireland and Gaelic in the Highlands is not just strong but goes back way beyond living memory.

So as I sit here in my office on St Patrick’s day, I am reminded that a wee part of Ireland is with me whenever I stand and speak in the Chamber. I celebrate today with a proud personal commitment and also on behalf of my wife and three children – who all have strong Irish blood in them.

Happy St Patrick’s Day!

Image credit: UK Parliament – Creative Commons

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Reform’s leader in Scotland has admitted that disgraceful adverts questioning Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar’s loyalty to the country, which were condemned as racist, were a mistake.

Scottish Labour MP Kirst McNeill appeared on BBC Scotland during a question and answer session alongside Malcolm Offord, leader of Reform UK Scotland.

McNeill asked if Offord would finally like to condemn the ‘absolutely revolting, rancid Reform adverts that were put out about Anas Sarwar, questioning his loyalty to Scotland.

“Do you condemn them?”, she asked.

Reform’s social media advert  featuring Anas Sarwar was slammed last year as “blatantly racist”.

The online video posted ahead of a by-election in South Lanarkshire featured text which says: “Anas Sarwar has said he will prioritise the Pakistani community”.

Offord replied: “So there was a mistake made with that.”

We wonder if Farage will also have the backbone to not only admit it was a mistake but to apologise?

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

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