AS THE long campaign for the Holyrood election on May 7 began last week, a political tremor has been running through Scotland: electoral politics as we have known them for decades are transforming before our eyes.
Decried from all sides as a flash in the pan, as no more than a protest movement, as the last refuge for closet fascists at worst, ReformUK in Scotland has solidified into a professional party rooted in Scotland, with quietly growing support among voters.
The latest YouGov poll for the Scottish election has Reform surging ahead of Labour with a five-point lead. Twenty per cent of voters plan to vote for Reform on both the constituency and the regional list. No longer “neck and neck” with Labour, Reform is now positioning itself as the challenger to the SNP at Holyrood.
How did this happen? With Reform consistently riding so high in the rest of the UK, it would be utterly implausible if it wasn’t doing well here. Despite the dearly held conviction of nationalists, Scotland is not radically different from England in its social attitudes, and its politics are intimately bound up with Westminster politics.
Scottish Labour and the Scottish Tories may try their hardest to insist the Holyrood election is about devolved issues, not Westminster politics, but the electorate isn’t buying it. Both parties remain — negatively — in hock to their mother parties in London. As the unprecedented swing from Labour to Reform in the Glenrothes by-election showed, Anas Sarwar cannot escape the impact of Keir Starmer’s record-breaking unpopularity. If Britain is broken, as the majority believe, then Conservative and Labour governments are to blame — and just as in England, voters in Scotland do not trust their Scottish counterparts to fix the mess. A leopard, after all, does not change its spots just because it lives north of Hadrian’s Wall.
I was struck by the futility of Tory and Labour electioneering efforts at last week’s First Minister’s Questions. Both Russell Findlay and Anas Sarwar made a very good fist of attacking the SNP — Findlay on out-of-control welfare spending and Sarwar on the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital scandal. Swinney’s performance was abysmal, the last gasp of an exhausted government. His responses reminded me of a needle stuck on a record that everyone stopped listening to long ago.
But neither Scottish Labour nor the Tories stood to benefit much from their leaders’ mauling of the First Minister. Highlighting the SNP’s disastrous record is not driving voters towards Labour or the Conservatives — who are irredeemably damaged goods in voters’ eyes. He may not (yet) be in the chamber at Holyrood, but Malcolm Offord, Reform’s Scottish leader, was the ghost at the FMQ feast. He scarcely needs to say a word. He doesn’t even need to articulate that he would open the lid on the QEUH scandal and prosecute wrongdoers, or that he would get welfare spending under control. The more Findlay and Sarwar attack the SNP, the more they energise anti-SNP voters and the more they unwittingly drive them towards Reform.
In a landmark speech to launch Reform’s Holyrood campaign, Malcolm Offord did something neither Labour nor Conservative (nor LibDem, come to that) leaders could do: he launched a vision of Scotland as the most prosperous part of the UK with a major policy announcement — not just to reduce taxes to English levels, but to undercut their rates by 3p by the end of the parliament. By contrast, the Scottish Conservatives can only promise parity in taxation, and this is also all Scottish Labour could do, were it so inclined, without politically damaging their mother parties.
Unlike the two traditional unionist parties, Offord could deliberately make his pitch to nationalists — or as he put it, rational nationalists. His argument echoes that increasingly heard from those disillusioned by 18 years of SNP government. There has been zero progress towards independence and not much more in making Scotland a happier or wealthier place, and only diehard SNP supporters believe another five years of SNP government will shift the dial on either of these fronts.
Rather than using Scotland’s relative decline to bang the grievance drum — the favoured approach of the SNP to keep the independence flame burning — Offord suggests putting the constitutional question aside for two parliamentary terms while reversing that decline. That would give nationalists a stronger economic argument for independence (arguably they lost the referendum because of the lack of it, and they have conspicuously failed to develop an economic case since), even though that would not, Offord was keen to stress, necessarily swing unionists to vote for secession.
It is not only disaffected Tory and Labour voters who are attracted to Reform — and a small but significant proportion of those who have never voted before — but also SNP voters who are sick and tired of being marched up and down the independence hill.
Last week Stephen Flynn stood in front of a billboard with the slogan “Gone in a hundred days” emblazoned across a picture of Keir Starmer, and declared “a fresh start with independence”. Both claims are hyperbole: an SNP win at Holyrood does not remove a UK prime minister (only Labour MPs or a general election can do that), nor does it license a second independence referendum (only the UK government can do that). When even the SNP’s flagship campaign message is built on implausible promises and tired theatrics, it is no surprise that voters are beginning to look elsewhere.
In the same week, Holyrood Magazine reported veteran SNP politician Jim Sillars noting that nationalists were drifting towards Reform, while Stuart Campbell, the editor of the influential Wings Over Scotland website, told The Sunday Times:
“I hear from quite a lot of indy supporters who are quietly going to vote Reform this year, not because they think they’ll fix anything, but as a necessary step to getting the SNP out of the way so that we can start to move forward on independence again.”
Campbell is so excited about the rise of Reform to break the SNP stranglehold over Holyrood that he is even constructing scenarios where they win the election.
The YouGov poll’s figures for SNP votes were collectively the worst for the party since 2017. On 34 per cent of the constituency vote, the SNP is down 14 points since the 2021 Holyrood election, and on 29 per cent of the list vote, down 11 points. This would be its lowest share of the regional vote since 2003 (also when John Swinney was leader), before it was in power.
While Reform polled second among 2014 Yes voters, the party was overwhelmingly dominant (42 per cent) among Scottish voters who backed Brexit in 2016. Since a million Scots voted for Brexit, including one third of 2014 Yes voters, this is hardly surprising.
In terms of voters’ priorities, the top three were the economy (48 per cent), health (44 per cent) and immigration (36 per cent), with independence way down the list at 12 per cent. Even among 2024 SNP voters, the constitution was behind the economy and health, and virtually level with leaving the EU.
What all this points to is a fundamental realignment in Scottish politics. While independence has been the be-all and end-all of political debate for 20 years, the constitutional question is losing its valency for voters who have other, more immediate concerns. Reform UK is the only party so far to have recognised this.
Most of the media are still behind the curve, as they showed at the press conference for Offord’s speech where journalists obsessed over constitutional issues. While the reporting tried to sensationalise these issues, it went nowhere, beyond inspiring social media posts by prominent Tory MSPs that Reform was soft on nationalism — which also gained very meagre traction online. A striking exception last week was the Holyrood Sources podcast where Andy MacIver and Geoff Aberdein, who up to now had been distinctly sniffy about Reform, greeted Offord’s tax-cutting agenda with enthusiasm, noting how people they came across now quietly admitted to supporting Reform.
I saw this alignment play out on Saturday in Cowdenbeath High Street in Fife. Cowdenbeath is a former coal mining town and for decades it has counted as an area of multiple deprivation. Formerly Labour, the SNP has dominated for years.
Reform had put up a street stall to launch its election campaign in Fife. Activists were astounded by the response — passing cars hooted in support, winding down windows to take leaflets, and passers-by happily accepted leaflets and stopped to chat. There was virtually no abuse.
The turnaround from thirteen years ago, when Nigel Farage had to be rescued by a police van after protesters stopped his taxi leaving the Canons’ Gait pub on the Royal Mile, could not have been more dramatic. Scotland’s politics, like its voters, are clearly on the move — and the old certainties are starting to crumble.
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Photo of the scene at Canons’ gait in 2013 courtesy of Sky News
