Thomas Kerr: No stranger to controversy

A lot has changed since I last spoke to Thomas Kerr in February 2025. Having just defected to Reform UK from the Scottish Conservatives, the then 28-year-old was learning the ropes in his new party. Almost 18 months on, he’s now an MSP and deputy leader of the Scottish group of 17 Reform MSPs, which hopes to break the “cosy consensus” his party says exists between the other parties at Holyrood.

He’s just moved into his new office on the ground floor of the parliament. There’s a ‘Make Rangers Great Again’ hat sitting on a staffer’s desk outside his office, and a ‘drill, Scotland, drill’ poster. Inside his office, a TV is playing GB News – a channel Kerr tells me is on in every Reform MSP’s office. It’s quite recognisably a Reform MSP’s office, but there are also more personal notes around the room: potpourri, which he tells me was a gift from his partner, Aimee, along with pictures of his loved ones. 

Reflecting on a long election campaign, Kerr says he feels as if it began not long after our first encounter last year. “It feels like it went in stages, from when we first spoke, that’s where it started for me, getting everything ready for the party. Once the campaign properly began, it felt like we rattled through it. There were long days, and it was a very small team helping with all the leadership stuff, which made it much more intense than we expected. Aimee, my partner, was head of communications, so every day was constant politics, which was quite tiring, but we enjoyed it.” 

And there were clearly enjoyable moments for the party. Kerr picks out an afternoon campaigning on the fairground waltzers as one of them, an attempt to set themselves apart from the Conservatives’ campaign style. But there were tough moments as well, such as the resignation of Amanda Crawford as head of communications during the campaign, with a report from Channel 4 News suggesting she had “quit her role with the party, citing concerns she wasn’t being allowed to do her job properly,” along with a handful of candidates resigning. I ask what happened.  

“I honestly don’t know,” Kerr says. “There was a period where we were announcing our candidates, lists were coming out, and people were unhappy. Bluntly, people were pissed off that they didn’t get the positions they wanted and tossed their toys out of the pram, which happens in all parties.  

“But because we did it so late on it became this big issue, and I think the pressure of all that, along with what the campaign was like, I don’t think Amanda was quite enjoying it as much as she was expecting to, so she decided to step away, and that’s all that I know about it.” 

Kerr, who turned 30 this month, has experienced a great deal of change in his life recently. The first was his move from the Scottish Conservatives, which led to many old friendships ending. He has also had a change in his living situation, having split from his long-term partner. 

“We had known each other since we were very young; we were childhood sweethearts, and we tried to make it work, but we are very different people. Shannon is not political, and I am. We just sort of drifted apart, and when my son Joshua came along, we thought we’d try to make this work for his sake, but it didn’t work because of the pressure of my job and the stuff that I wanted to do.  

“Near the end of last year, we made the decision, both of us, that with my work increasing, I needed to focus on my job and my son. And to be fair to Shannon, I realised near the end of last year that she didn’t really have a partner anymore because whenever I had spare time I was being Joshua’s dad and not the partner I could be for her.” 

Now, less than two months on from the election, Kerr – one of the most well-known faces in Reform’s Scotland group – and his colleagues are still finding their feet here at Holyrood, with only one of the 17 having been an MSP before. They are having to learn quickly, with the party commanding the joint second-highest number of seats alongside Scottish Labour.  

“We’re still trying to figure out how to submit amendments, how to get speeches done with the short notice of statements. There’s the famous one with Shirley-Anne Somerville and her statement on the First Homes [Fund], where I took the opportunity to ask her about something completely different from the statement, and I think she was quite taken aback by it.  

“I said to [Tory MSP] Meghan Gallacher after it that that’s what I’m here to do. I can’t prep for a question off the back of something that I have not seen properly, a rushed-out gimmick, so I think all that stuff, the process of how this place works, we’re probably still trying to figure it out.”  

I ask Kerr if he has been able to find any balance in his life since the campaign and since being appointed to a senior role within his party. He’s honest and says it’s still a work in progress. He’s currently living with Aimee, who is no longer heading up communications for the party and has started a new role working with one of Kerr’s colleagues, Senga Beresford.  

“We’re still finding that balance, but I’m absolutely loving it. We’ll sit and write speeches, work on things for social media, but we’re starting to get there. We’re currently looking to buy our first house, which is exciting, and we were away at Cameron House recently for my birthday and did no politics whatsoever.” 

He shows me his fox cuff links, engraved on the back with “in the hen house”, a nod to a phrase Kerr has been using since being elected to Holyrood. And it’s hard to argue that he has not been the centre of attention during some of the items of business, most notably during a session of First Minister’s Questions earlier this month.  

It stemmed from a horrendous knife attack in Belfast on Stephen Ogilvie, a man in his 40s. Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese national who was previously granted refugee status and given five years’ leave to remain, has been charged with attempted murder. 

The day after the attack, violence broke out in the streets of Belfast and Glasgow. In Glasgow, three men were arrested and charged after officers attended a march through the city centre. Assistant Chief Constable Alan Waddell said people were “attacked because of the colour of their skin”. A further two arrests were made in Greenock on the following day, where three police officers were injured at a protest outside a hotel used to house asylum seekers. 

First Minister John Swinney accused Reform of inciting racial hatred after the two nights of disorder, and focused on comments by Kerr, who told reporters that people should “go out there” to protest – though he said this should not involve vandalism, racism or violence. 

Speaking the day before Swinney’s comments, Kerr says: “If you do not react to the issues that the public are telling you to react to, if you just continue to put your fingers in your ears, then you can’t be surprised when, particularly working-class communities turn round and say ‘fuck you’, and I think that’s what’s happening to a lot of people right across this country who are at a stage in life where they have expressed their opinion. Nearly 400,000 people voted for Reform in the election, and we are continuously telling politicians that over two million people didn’t vote, people who are sick and fed up with the political establishment. Yet John Swinney stands up in parliament and pretends he has a massive mandate. Well, he doesn’t. His vote went down [compared to the 2021 Scottish Parliament election].  

“So you either react to the public, or you deal with the consequences. I think what you’re seeing on the streets of Glasgow and other places is people frustrated and angry. It should never resort to violence, it should never resort to racism, but people are trying to find a way of expressing their anger and frustration with the political establishment.” 

Kerr has been called a racist and fascist by many since joining Reform. I ask him how he responds to those claims.

“It undermines the words when you use them in the way my political opponents use them against people like Malcolm [Offord] and me,” he says. “I’m not a fascist, I’m not a racist. There is nothing controversial about saying I don’t support open borders, or that I want a managed migration system, there is nothing controversial about saying that, or that those who come here illegally should be deported. There shouldn’t be anything controversial or racist about saying any of that, and when you describe it as racist or you make analogies of the 1930s to compare that to me, Malcolm and Nigel [Farage], you undermine your own political argument, because actually the public just switch off from it and I think people are becoming numb now to the use of ‘far-right’, ‘racist’, and ‘fascist’.” 

He adds: “The risk here when you undermine democratically elected politicians, the work that we are doing, and the issues that we raise by shouting ‘shame’ and saying you shouldn’t talk about it, you give credence to those people who are genuinely of the far-right, and trying to exploit it, trying to stir up hatred and division in our communities.” 

Kerr often uses the word “strangers” to describe people who have “entered the country illegally”. I want to know if he sees the comparison that many make between his use of it and the use by Enoch Powell in the infamous 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.  

The use of the word by Kerr, and by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is one I admit I am uncomfortable with. I ask him why he is comfortable with it and if he acknowledges the connotations to Powell’s speech.  

“No, it has connotations to Keir Starmer. It was Keir Starmer who said we don’t want to live on an island of strangers. We are using the language that they are asking us to use. The reason I say ‘strangers’ is not meant in a derogatory way. When I grew up in Cranhill, for example, I grew up in poverty, one of the most deprived areas in Scotland. It was very tough, but you knew who your neighbours were, and everybody looked out for each other.

The issue that you are finding particularly in working-class communities now is that they don’t know who their neighbours are because people aren’t integrating properly, and they feel as if they are living with strangers, and that’s the argument that I try to use. It’s not to be derogatory to people who have come here legally or illegally, it’s about trying to say let’s integrate properly, let’s make our society work.” 

The conversation moves onto the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak and comments made by Nigel Farage in the wake of the conviction of his killer, Vickrum Digwa. The Reform leader claimed there is “two-tier policing” in the UK. He said during Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this month: “It is now clear that we are living under two-tier policing. The instructions that are given to police officers by police bosses are clear and written down in ink. It says you must treat different ethnic groups in different ways.” 

I ask Kerr, despite a recent report from the UK Government, which found offenders from Black and other ethnic groups faced increased odds of being sent to prison compared to white offenders, contradicting Farage’s assertion, if he believes we have two-tier policing in Scotland. He thinks it does exist here.  

“I think if you are a white, working-class young man, you are treated very differently by police. And it’s not the police’s fault; it’s because of the justice system. And I do think that exists right through the whole country, and I think we have to have an honest and open debate about that.” 

When I ask about those statistics relating to the increased chance of Black and other ethnic groups facing incarceration, Kerr adds: “I accept that there were issues in the past, people, particularly from ethnic minorities who have been penalised and attacked, I absolutely accept that but I think we have gone too far one way, and I think we’ll start to see that over the next few years that it has been the case that we do not treat people fairly. I don’t care about the colour of someone’s skin, if you break the law, you should be treated with the full force of the law, and I do think if you go to working-class communities, policing feels very different to other areas.” 

It’s well known around the parliament that relations between the other parties and Reform are limited. Reform was the only party that the first minister said he would not work with to pass laws.

Kerr calls himself the parliament’s “black sheep”, adding Swinney, Anas Sarwar, and Russell Findlay “can’t stand” him – something he’s not losing sleep over. But having heard through a Reform UK source that Kerr has had cordial encounters around the parliament with Green MSP Iris Duane, who is Holyrood’s first trans member, whilst being snubbed by other Green members, I ask him about this.   

“I think people have a misconception because I am vocal [and] can be in people’s faces politically, and I’m loud on controversial issues, but I am also a genuinely, I’d like to think, nice person, who will speak to anybody. I’ve spoken to Iris a couple of times. We’re not friends, we won’t be sitting at the bar having a drink together, but we say hi to each other, and we’re pleasant with each other. But Patrick Harvie, for example, will not say hello. Every morning, I walk by him and say, ‘Good morning, Patrick,’ and he ignores me – that’s up to him. To me, we disagree politically, but we are colleagues. We need to find a way of trying to do what we can to work together.” 

I ask Kerr what he wants to change in this parliament. Housing and tackling drug use are two issues at the top of his agenda. On housing, bringing back the local connection rule – which allows a person to apply for social housing only if they live in the area, work in the area, or have family ties to it – is top of his list. He says: “I don’t doubt why the SNP got rid of the rule, I think they did it because it’s a laudable argument to make that people should be able to apply for a house wherever, but it’s had unintended consequences, and we need to accept that’s been the case and I have spoken to people who are not Reform members, Glasgow City Council officers, for example, who are very left-wing and will tell you that what’s happened is that refugees are coming to places like Glasgow, declaring that they are homeless, and we now have a statutory obligation to put them into accommodation because that’s their local place at that point.” 

Kerr is also considering reintroducing Douglas Ross’s right to recovery bill, which aimed to establish the legal right to treatment for addiction for anyone in Scotland who is addicted to alcohol or drugs. The bill was ultimately voted down by the SNP and the Greens in the last session. It’s something Kerr wants to see revisited in this session. 

“I’m seriously thinking about doing something around that. I’m going to take the summer to think about it properly. I’ll speak to [drugs campaigner] Annemarie Ward and Douglas Ross. Addiction is something I’m really passionate about, and I just think the system is so badly tailored towards managing addiction rather than fixing it. And obviously, my background with my parents is something I’m really passionate about.”

Kerr has previously spoken about his parents’ drug addiction, and as a result, living with his grandparents for most of his primary school years.

“Whether I take it forward, or I encourage someone else to do it, because I know I can be controversial, and I think the problem that Douglas had in the last parliament was because it was his bill, a lot of people didn’t want to sign up to it, and I don’t want to be a blockage to getting this done.” 

We have covered a lot of the criticisms from Kerr’s opponents and some members of the public. I end the conversation by asking what he thinks is a fair criticism of him.  

“The thing that gets under my skin slightly is when they use the phrase ‘grifter’ to describe me as having gone from different parties. And I have. I went from the Labour Party to the Tories to Reform. My argument is that I didn’t politically change my beliefs; those political parties shifted so dramatically, and I moved along with the electorate. So it’s a fair criticism that I have ended up in a third political party – I was involved with the Labour Party when I was 10 years old, so I don’t think you can hold me accountable for that part – but it’s probably fair to say I’ve shifted politically in terms of my party, but my beliefs and principles haven’t changed.”