Reform UK suspends Scottish candidate less than a day after announcing him
Reform UK has suspended one of its Scottish candidates after it emerged he had been struck off as a company director, and the party faces growing attacks for fielding candidates making Islamophobic remarks.Reform confirmed on Friday morning it had suspended Stuart Niven, its candidate for Dundee City West, after the Herald revealed he had been struck off after diverting tens of thousands of pounds of Covid grants into his personal account.Several hours after that admission, claims within Reform’s Scottish manifesto that it could save billions of pounds in Holyrood spending were dismissed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank, which described many of its pledges as “not fiscally credible” and “unserious at best”.Reform had faced a succession of attacks from across the political spectrum about the conduct of several candidates only hours after Nigel Farage unveiled the 73 Reform UK hopefuls standing for May’s Scottish parliament election.Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said the disclosures in several newspapers about their “divisive tweets” raised challenging questions about the party’s screening process, which Farage earlier this year claimed was now far more rigorous than before.
After Farage’s speech on Thursday, it emerged that Reform’s candidate for Fife North East, Linda Holt, had described Humza Yousaf, the UK’s first Muslim first minister, as “not British” and a “grandstanding Islamist moron” in social media posts.Reform’s candidate for Stirling, Rachael Wright, shared a petition that wrongly claimed a former private school in Perthshire was being “turned into migrant accommodation”.The school’s owners said that was “wholly unfounded”, but Reform asserted that the denial was a result of its intervention.Meanwhile, Senga Beresford, its candidate for Galloway and West Dumfries, endorsed social media posts by Tommy Robinson and Britain First, including tweets calling for mass deportations and a ban on burqas.Sarwar described Malcolm Offord, Reform’s Scottish leader, as “spineless” for defending their remarks.
Offord said they may have been intemperate but were “real”, and made before they became party candidates.He told BBC Radio Scotland those candidates’ remarks had come up in Reform’s screening processes, which required applicants to “give full disclosure”.He added: “We have brought in a whole range of candidates, 80% of whom are not politicians.They’re real people with real lives who said real things in a past life.“And what we got is a situation where, in all our lives in the past we’ve made comments that might sometimes be intemperate.
But the issue with this modern world we live in is everything is now written down and remembered.I just think we have to be more realistic about the fact that real people say real things.”In January, Farage was pressed by the Guardian on whether Reform’s vetting was robust enough in the wake of the conviction of Nathan Gill, his former Ukip ally and Welsh Reform leader, for accepting Russian bribes.“It has been piss poor in the past and it won’t be in the future,” he said then.“I promise you we are doing everything we can to make sure these candidates for the Scottish parliament are vetted, and are fit and proper people to put before the electorate.
”Sarwar said on Friday: “Reform is treating Scots with contempt by asking them to vote for this hopeless gaggle of Tory rejects and oddballs, and I have no doubt Scotland will send them packing.“The spineless Offord has only suspended one candidate and effectively given the green light to the fringe views of the rest of them.Reform Scotland do not have credible policies or credible candidates – they are not even in this race.”Offord was also pressed by the BBC’s interviewer on comments made during Reform’s rally on Thursday by Sarah Pochin, the Reform MP who won the Runcorn and Helsby byelection, that she wanted to appear on stage wearing a “Reform tartan burqa” but was told she could not.Asked about criticisms from John Swinney, the first minister, that those remarks were racist, Offord said they were “perfectly harmless” humour.
“I just don’t think the public are interested in this definition of racism,” he said.Regarding Reform’s manifesto pledges, David Phillips, the IFS’s devolved finances specialist, said the party had confused day-to-day spending with capital spending and failed to understand how Scotland’s finances worked, when it promised to fund a £2.3bn tax cut by cutting costs.“The ‘self-funding’ tax cuts are a mirage created by a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the current devolution settlement and incorrectly comparing cumulative and annual figures,” Phillips said.“This is not good enough.
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FCA investigates collapsed lender MFS amid £1.3bn mortgage scandal
The UK’s financial regulator has launched an investigation into Market Financial Solutions (MFS), the mortgage lender that collapsed last month amid allegations of fraud.The move follows the granting of a £1.3bn worldwide asset-freezing order on MFS founder Paresh Raja on Wednesday, as creditors successfully gained court orders in London and Dubai barring the tycoon from dissipating assets.On Friday, the Financial Conduct Authority said it had “opened an enforcement investigation” into the stricken mortgage lender, which borrowed £1.3bn from a string of financial companies and slumped into administration in February
UK borrowing costs hit highest since 2008 as markets expect up to three interest rate rises
UK government borrowing costs have reached their highest level since 2008, while financial markets now expect up to three interest rate rises this year as investors digest the impact of the Iran conflict.The yield, or interest rate, on 10-year borrowing was pushed to heights not seen since the global financial crisis, as investors dumped UK government bonds.The market move followed the Bank of England’s decision on Thursday to leave interest rates on hold at 3.75% and hint at a future increase. By Friday, markets were pricing in as many as three interest rate rises in 2026
Fire experts ‘kept awake’ over growing hazard of lithium-ion batteries
Lithium-ion batteries represent a new technological hazard that one fire science expert has said keeps him awake at night, as fire service chiefs warn the ubiquity of the batteries in everyday products is outpacing public understanding and safety regulations.The blaze that devastated a historic building in Glasgow and resulted in the closure of Central Station, Scotland’s largest rail interchange, is believed to have started in a shop selling vapes, which are powered by lithium-ion batteries. Glasgow’s Central Station has since reopened.The latest data reveals a sharp increase in battery-related fires across Scotland, while firefighters in London attend an e-bike or e-scooter fire every other day.Paul Christensen, a professor of pure and applied electrochemistry at the University of Newcastle, underlined that, while the probability of a fire from a lithium-ion battery is very low, the hazard is “very, very high, as we’ve seen with this fire in Glasgow”
Essex police pause facial recognition camera use after study finds racial bias
Essex police have paused the use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology after a study found cameras were significantly more likely to target black people than people of other ethnicities.The move to suspend use of the AI-enabled systems was revealed by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which regulates the use of the technology deployed so far by at least 13 police forces in London, south and north Wales, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Hampshire, Bedfordshire, Suffolk, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Surrey and Sussex.The ICO said Essex police had paused LFR deployments “after identifying potential accuracy and bias risks” and warned other forces to have mitigations in place. LFR systems are either mounted to fixed locations or deployed in vans. In January, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced the number of LFR vans would increase five-fold, with 50 available to every police force in England and Wales
World’s top-rated Flat horse to race in Dubai despite conflict in the Gulf
Calandagan, the world’s top-rated Flat horse in 2025, will fly to Dubai from Paris on Saturday to run in the Sheema Classic at Meydan next weekend, despite the continuing conflict in the Gulf region.The gelding’s owner, Aga Khan Studs, consulted staff already in Dubai before deciding to give the green light to Francis-Henri Graffard’s five-year-old, the winner of four Group One events last season including the Japan Cup in November.“We’ve been very happy with Calandagan,” Nemone Routh, the owner’s racing manager, said on Friday. “If we didn’t run in Dubai then we’d have been looking at races in the summer. He’s in great form and we already have a filly out there with staff
Hodgkinson shrugs off kit mishap to cruise into world indoor 800m semi-finals
No opponent has come close to knocking Keely Hodgkinson off her stride in 2026. But after breezing into the semi-finals of the world indoor championships, she revealed that her preparations had been interrupted by an airline, KLM, losing her kit for 48 hours on the flight to Poland.It led to the overwhelming favourite for 800m gold having to train in whatever she could beg or borrow – and getting a blister as a result. Not that it seemed to bother her as she cruised into Saturday’s semi-finals with a dominant victory in 2min 0.32sec
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