Farage in Scotland in 2013 The Scottish Parliament which came being in 1999, however much it may have been portrayed as an expression of national self-determination was in fact an effort to manage the fracturing of Britain that increasing de-industrialisation and neo-liberalism had brought about.
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For a while, the comparative buoyancy of the British economy allowed New Labour to act out Brown’s vision of Britain and Scotland enjoying the fruits of an open economy and globalisation. While most of the left will remember increased private ownership through measures like PFI at home, and war in the Middle East, Labour also had a positive programme: it introduced the minimum wage; it reduced unemployment; it expanded of the public sector.
However, that positive side of New Labour’s programme collapsed with the banking crisis of 2007/2008 where New Labour’s “light touch” regulation and tolerance of high indebtedness helped induce a crisis in the banking system. Rather than being understood as a crisis of the instability of global finance capitalism, the right was able to present it as a crisis of public expenditure, giving the Tory Lib/Dem coalition control of Westminster in 2010 that led to years of austerity.
It was this austerity which fuelled the three ‘anti neo-liberal rebellions’ of the mid 2010s - the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, the election of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 and the 2016 Brexit referendum. They were lightning rods for pent up frustration and yearning for a better Britain, or in Scotland 2014, where a wide range of youth, community and interest groups engaged in politics for the first time, for a better Scotland. And all three suffered from the same critical defect: they were not built on detailed strategies for progressive advance and lacked the socialist or even the radical social democratic base necessary to exploit what advances had been made through their mobilisations.
Consequently, as we now know, there have been ‘counter-revolutions’: in the SNP the increasingly dominant neo-liberal wing insisted on fiscal rectitude as the basis for a long-term strategy for independence as have the right of the Labour Party now ensconced in power in Westminster. The severity of Starmer’s Labour’s attack on the working class has allowed a partial recovery of the SNP, but crucially for our purposes, neither Party has sought to identify the real source of the crisis in Scotland – loss of control of our economy through globalisation, emasculated local government through neoliberal outsourcing and privatisation, and a purposefully designed weak Scottish Parliament whose major parties in any case refuse to acknowledge the real source of the problem and are no more inclined to take the radical measures necessary to address it.
Is it any wonder then, that from a working-class perspective, politics is perceived to benefit only those who practice it as a profession and not the working-class voters in whose name politicians hold power. This has opened the door to the ultra-right who seek to exploit this alienation to further weaken the capacity of the working class to address the real source of their distress – the inhuman exploitation of global capitalism. Instead, they point to the symptoms of the capitalist anarchy – immigration, poor public services, an anemic economy as the causes of the crisis, inflicted on the working class by an incompetent, woke political elite.
In the General Election of 2024 Reform, making exactly these arguments, got 7% of the vote in Scotland from a standing start with largely anonymous candidates. I wanted to assess whether they had sustained that position, not based on polling but how they have performed in real elections, and so I looked at the 9 Scottish local elections in 2025 starting with Colinton and Fairmilehead (City of Edinburgh Council) in January and finishing with Clydebank Waterfront (West Dunbartonshire) in May.
The results confirm what polling has also been showing. There is widespread alienation and disengagement evident in the low numbers of those turning out to vote, even accepting that bye-elections generally do have lower voter turnouts.
The mainstream parties are provoking a “scunnered” response. The conservatives have lost vote share; Labour have lost vote share; the SNP have lost vote share, in Clydebank for example, that reached 16.7%, higher than any loss Labour had experienced in bye-elections though they were close on some occasions. The SNP’s lead, therefore is dependent on starting from a higher base than their opponents, rather than increasing their percentage support. The Tory losses to Reform, are very serious indeed. In every single bye-election they were behind, often well behind, Reform with the exception of Colinton and Fairmilehead.
From a standing start Reform have won from 5.5% to 26.3% coming third in 6 of the bye-elections and 2nd in Clydebank, ironically an area where the local Trades Union Council is very active. But Clydebank is a case in point. Reform’s highest votes co-relate to the least wealthy of the constituencies contested, confirming research by Hope not Hate and Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute that supporters of right-wing, anti-Establishment parties are more likely to live in more deprived constituencies despite holding positions to the left of ultra-right parties like Reform, on many issues, for example, nationalisation and trade union rights.
In only two of the bye-elections did the left beyond Labour and the Greens mount a challenge. (I know describing Labour and the Greens as “Left” is contestable). Both were in Glasgow and at this stage, despite the SSPs creditable 7.2% in Glasgow Central, (TUSC got 2.6% in a tougher contest in Glasgow North East) there is no evidence that they are on the edge of electoral credibility, never mind an electoral challenge.
It may be that Scottish Labour believe that the SNP vote share loss may mean there is still a chance that they will have time to recover sufficiently to challenge for a majority in the Scottish Parliament in 2026. The problem here, according to Professor John Curtice is: “South of the Border [the Conservatives] lost about 30 per cent who voted for them last year, on top of the 25 per cent from 2019 who switched to Reform, whereas Labour south of the border are losing 10 per cent. North of the Border, Labour losses to Reform are about 50 per cent above the GB-wide figure.”
In other words, Scottish Labour are much more vulnerable to Reform than the SNP. Until now, Reform’s performance in Scotland has largely been in a media and activist vacuum. This time no-one can say they don’t know what Reform stands for. The attack advert on Anas Sarwar, described by Scottish Labour as “blatant racism” dispenses any mistaken notions, if anyone had any, that race is not a central political concern of Reform. But as electoral success beckons, the party is also trying to develop its populist appeal including a promise to end the two-child benefit cap and restore winter fuel payments.
Nevertheless, there is an obvious barrier to unbridled electoral success for Reform in Scotland – identity politics. While Reform presents itself as an ultra-unionist party walking in time to the drumbeat of the Orange parades now warming up for the marching season, it both attracts those who walk in step but distances itself from the 13% of the population who derive from Catholic, predominantly Irish backgrounds in mainly working-class communities. This population is not however, impermeable in its politics. Traditionally Scottish Catholics feared a separate Scottish state because it would, at best, marginalise them. Careful wooing by the SNP leadership and an argument on the left that an independent Scotland would hasten the break-up of Britain accelerating, from their perspective, an end to the partition of Ireland, helped change that attitude.
According to Ashcroft’s polling in 2014, 31% of non-Catholics backed independence compared to 57% of Catholics who voted for it. This shift no doubt helps explain the collapse of the Scottish Labour vote in 2015. Any thawing of that position since 2015, as witnessed in 2024 will have been re-frozen by Starmer’s anti working-class policies. Together with those Scots already won to the idea of independence for a range of other reasons this creates a formidable voting bloc, despite a SNP government utterly supine when faced with corporate power married to an almost comic ineptitude in delivery.
This confines Farage and his acolytes to fishing in the Unionist pool which is literally split right, left and centre, accepting the relative nature of all three terms. As the voting patterns in the bye-election results show, Reform cannot get much beyond 25%. That is, unfortunately, enough to win them around 15 seats on the regional list for the Scottish Parliament next year, a downside of PR that its advocates rarely explore.
The greatest threat Reform poses in Scotland, therefore, is not its capacity to win a majority of seats in elected chambers, it is the access that the electoral process lends, both campaigning for election and the voice you have in an elected chamber, to ‘mainstream’ far-right ideology. Reform is and increasingly will be in a position to normalise ideas, language and exclusivist behaviours that had to some extent at least, been confined to much more private spaces. To some extent they have achieved this already, not just through their own electoral activity but through making traditional centrist parties embrace radical right-wing policies for reasons of political expediency – stand up Keir Starmer.
In Scotland the independence movement is not immune from that contamination. ‘Nativism’ the idea that non-native people, institutions or ideas pose a threat to the native population or native culture, is hardly new to Scottish nationalism and while Alba, the Independence movement’s Blue Labour has signally failed to put pressure on the SNP, it would be dangerous to assume that the SNP members and supporters suffer any less from the effects of austerity and the political perversions that poverty and inequality bring about. Alba, incidentally only stood in three of the bye-elections listed with an average vote of just over 2% per seat.
It is therefore incumbent on the left, wherever they operate, party or no party, to work with the trade union and community movement to reverse austerity, resist demonising minority communities and offer a positive vision of what we could achieve if people and not profit were the driver of Scottish politics.
For a while, the comparative buoyancy of the British economy allowed New Labour to act out Brown’s vision of Britain and Scotland enjoying the fruits of an open economy and globalisation. While most of the left will remember increased private ownership through measures like PFI at home, and war in the Middle East, Labour also had a positive programme: it introduced the minimum wage; it reduced unemployment; it expanded of the public sector.
However, that positive side of New Labour’s programme collapsed with the banking crisis of 2007/2008 where New Labour’s “light touch” regulation and tolerance of high indebtedness helped induce a crisis in the banking system. Rather than being understood as a crisis of the instability of global finance capitalism, the right was able to present it as a crisis of public expenditure, giving the Tory Lib/Dem coalition control of Westminster in 2010 that led to years of austerity.
It was this austerity which fuelled the three ‘anti neo-liberal rebellions’ of the mid 2010s - the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, the election of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 and the 2016 Brexit referendum. They were lightning rods for pent up frustration and yearning for a better Britain, or in Scotland 2014, where a wide range of youth, community and interest groups engaged in politics for the first time, for a better Scotland. And all three suffered from the same critical defect: they were not built on detailed strategies for progressive advance and lacked the socialist or even the radical social democratic base necessary to exploit what advances had been made through their mobilisations.
Consequently, as we now know, there have been ‘counter-revolutions’: in the SNP the increasingly dominant neo-liberal wing insisted on fiscal rectitude as the basis for a long-term strategy for independence as have the right of the Labour Party now ensconced in power in Westminster. The severity of Starmer’s Labour’s attack on the working class has allowed a partial recovery of the SNP, but crucially for our purposes, neither Party has sought to identify the real source of the crisis in Scotland – loss of control of our economy through globalisation, emasculated local government through neoliberal outsourcing and privatisation, and a purposefully designed weak Scottish Parliament whose major parties in any case refuse to acknowledge the real source of the problem and are no more inclined to take the radical measures necessary to address it.
Is it any wonder then, that from a working-class perspective, politics is perceived to benefit only those who practice it as a profession and not the working-class voters in whose name politicians hold power. This has opened the door to the ultra-right who seek to exploit this alienation to further weaken the capacity of the working class to address the real source of their distress – the inhuman exploitation of global capitalism. Instead, they point to the symptoms of the capitalist anarchy – immigration, poor public services, an anemic economy as the causes of the crisis, inflicted on the working class by an incompetent, woke political elite.
In the General Election of 2024 Reform, making exactly these arguments, got 7% of the vote in Scotland from a standing start with largely anonymous candidates. I wanted to assess whether they had sustained that position, not based on polling but how they have performed in real elections, and so I looked at the 9 Scottish local elections in 2025 starting with Colinton and Fairmilehead (City of Edinburgh Council) in January and finishing with Clydebank Waterfront (West Dunbartonshire) in May.
The results confirm what polling has also been showing. There is widespread alienation and disengagement evident in the low numbers of those turning out to vote, even accepting that bye-elections generally do have lower voter turnouts.
The mainstream parties are provoking a “scunnered” response. The conservatives have lost vote share; Labour have lost vote share; the SNP have lost vote share, in Clydebank for example, that reached 16.7%, higher than any loss Labour had experienced in bye-elections though they were close on some occasions. The SNP’s lead, therefore is dependent on starting from a higher base than their opponents, rather than increasing their percentage support. The Tory losses to Reform, are very serious indeed. In every single bye-election they were behind, often well behind, Reform with the exception of Colinton and Fairmilehead.
From a standing start Reform have won from 5.5% to 26.3% coming third in 6 of the bye-elections and 2nd in Clydebank, ironically an area where the local Trades Union Council is very active. But Clydebank is a case in point. Reform’s highest votes co-relate to the least wealthy of the constituencies contested, confirming research by Hope not Hate and Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute that supporters of right-wing, anti-Establishment parties are more likely to live in more deprived constituencies despite holding positions to the left of ultra-right parties like Reform, on many issues, for example, nationalisation and trade union rights.
In only two of the bye-elections did the left beyond Labour and the Greens mount a challenge. (I know describing Labour and the Greens as “Left” is contestable). Both were in Glasgow and at this stage, despite the SSPs creditable 7.2% in Glasgow Central, (TUSC got 2.6% in a tougher contest in Glasgow North East) there is no evidence that they are on the edge of electoral credibility, never mind an electoral challenge.
It may be that Scottish Labour believe that the SNP vote share loss may mean there is still a chance that they will have time to recover sufficiently to challenge for a majority in the Scottish Parliament in 2026. The problem here, according to Professor John Curtice is: “South of the Border [the Conservatives] lost about 30 per cent who voted for them last year, on top of the 25 per cent from 2019 who switched to Reform, whereas Labour south of the border are losing 10 per cent. North of the Border, Labour losses to Reform are about 50 per cent above the GB-wide figure.”
In other words, Scottish Labour are much more vulnerable to Reform than the SNP. Until now, Reform’s performance in Scotland has largely been in a media and activist vacuum. This time no-one can say they don’t know what Reform stands for. The attack advert on Anas Sarwar, described by Scottish Labour as “blatant racism” dispenses any mistaken notions, if anyone had any, that race is not a central political concern of Reform. But as electoral success beckons, the party is also trying to develop its populist appeal including a promise to end the two-child benefit cap and restore winter fuel payments.
Nevertheless, there is an obvious barrier to unbridled electoral success for Reform in Scotland – identity politics. While Reform presents itself as an ultra-unionist party walking in time to the drumbeat of the Orange parades now warming up for the marching season, it both attracts those who walk in step but distances itself from the 13% of the population who derive from Catholic, predominantly Irish backgrounds in mainly working-class communities. This population is not however, impermeable in its politics. Traditionally Scottish Catholics feared a separate Scottish state because it would, at best, marginalise them. Careful wooing by the SNP leadership and an argument on the left that an independent Scotland would hasten the break-up of Britain accelerating, from their perspective, an end to the partition of Ireland, helped change that attitude.
According to Ashcroft’s polling in 2014, 31% of non-Catholics backed independence compared to 57% of Catholics who voted for it. This shift no doubt helps explain the collapse of the Scottish Labour vote in 2015. Any thawing of that position since 2015, as witnessed in 2024 will have been re-frozen by Starmer’s anti working-class policies. Together with those Scots already won to the idea of independence for a range of other reasons this creates a formidable voting bloc, despite a SNP government utterly supine when faced with corporate power married to an almost comic ineptitude in delivery.
This confines Farage and his acolytes to fishing in the Unionist pool which is literally split right, left and centre, accepting the relative nature of all three terms. As the voting patterns in the bye-election results show, Reform cannot get much beyond 25%. That is, unfortunately, enough to win them around 15 seats on the regional list for the Scottish Parliament next year, a downside of PR that its advocates rarely explore.
The greatest threat Reform poses in Scotland, therefore, is not its capacity to win a majority of seats in elected chambers, it is the access that the electoral process lends, both campaigning for election and the voice you have in an elected chamber, to ‘mainstream’ far-right ideology. Reform is and increasingly will be in a position to normalise ideas, language and exclusivist behaviours that had to some extent at least, been confined to much more private spaces. To some extent they have achieved this already, not just through their own electoral activity but through making traditional centrist parties embrace radical right-wing policies for reasons of political expediency – stand up Keir Starmer.
In Scotland the independence movement is not immune from that contamination. ‘Nativism’ the idea that non-native people, institutions or ideas pose a threat to the native population or native culture, is hardly new to Scottish nationalism and while Alba, the Independence movement’s Blue Labour has signally failed to put pressure on the SNP, it would be dangerous to assume that the SNP members and supporters suffer any less from the effects of austerity and the political perversions that poverty and inequality bring about. Alba, incidentally only stood in three of the bye-elections listed with an average vote of just over 2% per seat.
It is therefore incumbent on the left, wherever they operate, party or no party, to work with the trade union and community movement to reverse austerity, resist demonising minority communities and offer a positive vision of what we could achieve if people and not profit were the driver of Scottish politics.
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