11 hours ago

Iona Young Reform UK has suspended one of its candidates for May's Holyrood election less than a day after they were announced.

Questions had been raised about Dundee City West candidate Stuart Niven, after newspapers reported that he was disqualified as a company director.

The party said he had been suspended pending an investigation into allegations around his financial conduct. Reform's Scotland leader Malcolm Offord earlier told BBC Radio Scotland Breakfast that the party had "spent a lot of time on vetting" candidates. The Herald newspaper reported Mr Niven had been banned from acting as a company director for seven years after diverting thousands of pounds from a taxpayer-backed Covid loan into his personal account.

Niven is understood to have been a director at Britannia Maritime Security - a Glasgow-based firm providing security to the shipping industry.

A Reform UK spokesperson said: "We take allegations like this very seriously, and a full investigation is underway. "

Reform's candidates were revealed on Thursday at the party's Holyrood manifesto launch.

Offord also told BBC Radio Scotland that he was aware of controversial comments made on social media by some candidates.

He said: "We are not stopping people from standing for Reform just because they might have said something fruity in the past".

The Daily Record reported that Senga Beresford, Reform candidate for Galloway and West Dumfries, supported Tommy Robinson in his effort to hold a huge "patriotic rally" in London in 2024 and called for Muslims to be deported.

Lord Offord said it was "done in a former life before she was a member of Reform.

"We have to not take offence at every moment in time. " The Courier reported that Stirling candidate Rachael Wright, from Auchterarder, spread rumours about asylum seekers moving into a former school in Perthshire. It also said Fife North East Linda Holt called former First Minister Humza Yousaf a "grandstanding Islamist moron" and said "he's not British".

Offord said: "We have brought in 80% of candidates who are not politicians, they are real people with real lives who said real things in a past life.

"This was said before she was a candidate and she wasn't even a member of the party at this time.

"We have all made comments in the past but the problem with this modern world is everything is written down and remembered.

"We need to be more realistic about the fact real people say real things.

Now she is a candidate she will be held to higher standards. "

Offord promised that if his party won the Holyrood election in May, the "first thing" to do would be to "cut income tax" The former Conservative peer said it would take 10 years - the equivalent of two parliamentary terms - to implement manifesto pledges designed to "turbocharge the economy in Scotland. "

Meanwhile, appearing later on a BBC Radio Scotland phone-in, Offord was challenged on plans for introducing new nuclear power.

He said he believed that dealing with radioactive waste was now a smaller problem than it used to be.

Voters will go to the polls on 7 May to elect 129 members of the Scottish Parliament.

Current polling has Reform UK on around 20% of the vote ahead of the election in May, which could see it become the second-largest party at the Scottish Parliament.

There is a bit of a difference between the Dundee West candidate and the broader questions about online comments by others.

In the former case, Reform has moved quickly to suspend the candidate pending investigation - but Malcolm Offord is doubling down when it comes to the "fruity" things some others have said in the past.

So this kind of row over contentious comments is likely to be a pretty familiar one over the seven weeks building up to the election

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