Buried beneath Labour joy and SNP dismay in last week’s general election results, a particular number caught my eye: Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party won 7 per cent of the Scottish vote.
This was despite no Scottish campaign to speak of, with candidates utterly unknown to the Scottish public, no Scottish leader and no Scottish policies. Farage never set foot in Scotland in the course of the six-week campaign.
And yet Reform won almost twice as many votes as the Scottish Greens. Farage’s party was only 2.7 percentage points behind the Scottish Liberal Democrats and only 5.7 percentage points behind the Scottish Tories.
Across the whole of Scotland, Reform won 167,979 votes. That was fully 14 times the tally managed by Alex Salmond’s Alba party. Such a showing, if replicated in the regional list vote at the next Scottish parliament elections in 2026, will deliver a small, kenspeckle gang of Reform MSPs.
Nigel Farage’s party is heading for Holyrood. And Scottish politics has not yet begun to get its head around the likely consequences.
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Sure, Reform’s share of the vote north of the border was less than half of the 14.3 per cent the party managed across the whole of the UK, with its total of four million votes. But if 7 per cent is what Farage can do in Scotland without lifting a finger, or lifting a single pint, what could he do if he actually put some work in?
This, I suggest, is a key question as we look to the next Holyrood contest in two years’ time, not least because a Reform insurgency could break two taboos in Scottish politics.
The first is the very existence of Holyrood. In opinion polls, about one in five Scots consistently say they would be happy to see the Scottish parliament abolished. This is what I call a political orphan: a viewpoint with considerable public support but no backing from any of the main parties.
At present most of these voters favour the Tories, a party that opposed devolution in the 1990s but has since embraced Holyrood, and which actually delivered new powers to the Edinburgh parliament in 2016.
Farage, the godfather of Brexit, has previous when it comes to ill-considered constitutional gambits. If he decided to stand on a platform of sacking all 129 MSPs and reinstating direct rule from Westminster, he would find a ready audience.
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The second possible line of attack for Farage would be a deeply regressive step for Scottish society as a whole. I am talking about a direct appeal in Scotland to Protestant supporters of staunch Northern Irish unionism.
Four months ago, Reform UK signed an electoral pact with a fringe Northern Irish party called Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), which regards the Democratic Unionist Party as lily-livered sellouts.
TUV’s general election manifesto rejected the Windsor framework and declared: “Westminster is no longer sovereign over this part of the kingdom, because of the appalling surrender of powers to a foreign parliament.”
A joint memorandum of understanding between Reform and the TUV said: “Going forward, Reform UK and TUV will collaborate in joint political ventures with a view to advancing our shared vision of strengthening the links and political integration of all parts of the United Kingdom. An inclusive rather than disparate United Kingdom is our goal.”
It is a long time since any political party made a nakedly deliberate pitch for the hardline Protestant vote in Scotland. Is that about to change?
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We Scots like to think of ourselves as a reasonable people, and we have tended to look at the rise of the right in England and elsewhere with a self-congratulatory sense of satisfaction that it could never happen here.
In the 2014 European parliament elections, though, Ukip won 10.5 per cent of the Scottish vote, making its leader north of the border, David Coburn, one of Scotland’s six MEPs. Reform is just getting started. Anyone who thinks Scots are immune to the blandishments of the radical right is fooling themselves.
Farage’s rise comes at a watershed moment for the centre-right of Scottish politics. A leadership contest is already under way to see who will lead the Scottish Conservatives after the resignation of Douglas Ross.
If Farage were not already a factor in those deliberations, he is now. Do the Scottish Tories stand idly by while the UK party ponders pacts with Reform to “unite the right”, as Lord Frost urged on Tuesday? Or does the Scottish wing finally cut itself free from a dysfunctional UK party and choose an autonomous future?
Autonomous or not, Scottish Conservatism has to decide whether to move right and squeeze the Reform vote or move to the centre and risk surrendering even more right-wingers to Farage. Each and every contender for Ross’s job needs to have a convincing answer to these questions.
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The next Holyrood election is shaping up to be a seven-way contest for parliamentary seats: Labour, the SNP, Tories, Lib Dems, Reform, Greens and Alba are all in contention. This will transform the fight for regional list votes in particular. The outcomes are impossible to predict.
Buckle up. Farage is heading our way.
