Scotland is ready for Reform | John MacLeod

Reform is on a Scottish roll. On Thursday, 11 September, still another Tory councillor, Gavin Ellis (Dunfermline North) defected to its ranks. 

Just three weeks later, another Fife councillor, Labour’s Julia McDougall, leapt to reel with the teal. Two weeks ago, too, hopped a disillusioned Conservative MSP, Graham Simpson.

Nigel Farage now has, in all, eighteen Scottish councillors, Mr Simpson and a sustained surge in the polls. The latest survey of Scottish Parliament voting-intentions — the election is next May — has Reform at 16 per cent, within a whisker of Labour (17 per cent) and on course for sixteen seats.

Professor Sir John Curtice, wise old owl of all things psephological, thinks Nigel Farage’s Caledonian rearguard could win as many as 21 seats, and conceivably edge it for second place, behind the Nationalists.

Early in June, after all, and in a 3-way fight, Reform’s Ross Lambie came within 1,500 votes of snatching Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse in a Scottish Parliament by-election. This came in a Scotland where, so far, Reform has yet to win an actual election, in a constituency where it had no organisation, detailed canvass-returns or anything one could dignify as a ground-game. 

In tandem, and in the likes of Falkirk, Dunfermline and Perth, recent weeks have seen mounting if largely peaceful protests, by very ordinary people, over the repurposing of hotels (at taxpayers’ expense) for asylum-seeker accommodation.

Feelings ran particularly high in Falkirk after the rape of a 15 year-old girl by Sadeq Nikzad, 29, an Afghani who had been lodged (with many others) at the town’s Cladhan Hotel. He has since been convicted, and sentenced to nine years in prison.

Nastier elements have sought to muscle in on such demonstrations and, of course, there have been counterprotests from Stand Up to Racism and their ilk, happy to damn working-class concerns by the lofty light of their luxury beliefs.

But those scenes of banners and chanting have eclipsed the much graver sense of crisis in Glasgow, home to most of Scotland’s asylum-seekers and refugees, with no requisitioned hotels and — as the law in Scotland stands — obliged to house every one of them.

Whatever be stirring in Scotland, our political establishment is seriously spooked

The city fathers are now facing a £90 million budget-gap for Glasgow in 2026 — £66 million of that on homelessness — as, amidst growing public concern, Scottish flags begin to flutter from more and more lampposts. 

 Conscience, increasingly, is at cross-purposes with capacity. Folk not bigoted, but bewildered.

Whatever be stirring in Scotland, our political establishment is seriously spooked. In April, the First Minister, John Swinney, threw a sententious Edinburgh political summit “to discuss the threat of the far Right.” Representatives from all the Holyrood parties were invited — but not, conspicuously, Reform. 

Some recent commentary has bordered on hysteria. “Go on the attack ruthlessly,” ranted Neil MacKay in The Herald on 29 August:

The SNP needs a rebuttal unit, not to fend off criticism of nationalism, but to call out lies spouted by the far-Right online and by mainstream English politicians aping extremist language.

Get dirty. That’s what these times demand. Forget any purity nonsense from the likes of Michelle Obama that ‘when they go low, we go high’. No, when they go low, go even lower. That doesn’t mean lying. It means if someone metaphorically pulls a knife, you pull a gun…

Given Charlie Kirk’s subsequent murder, a lamentable line — but reflecting the panicked sense, among leaders of Scots opinion, about stuff that wasn’t in the script. 

Beneath it all are deeper forces — and the growing estrangement from reality of much of Scotland’s political class. Especially, in the ranks of the Scottish National Party, the delirium of “Scottish Exceptionalism” — the idea that ours is a kinder, happier, more enlightened and tolerant land than the Beast Below.

On occasion it has become ridiculous. Addressing a massed Nationalist rally in Glasgow’s George Square, during the thin wintered light of the 2019 general election, Nicola Sturgeon spat that “Scotland is open, welcoming, diverse and inclusive … and no Tory is ever going to be allowed to change that.”

It might have landed rather better had the First Minister’s features not been so contorted with hate. And rests upon what has become the besetting delusion of the SNP leadership. They seem genuinely and at every turn to believe they speak — and that infallibly — for the people of Scotland, when all they can speak for is the SNP.

Let’s unpick a few threads.

Undoubtedly underpinning Reform’s swelling Scottish fortunes is a hefty Euroscepticism. Scotland is not as Eurosceptic as England — but we are still, by Continental standards, a pretty Eurosceptic country.

38 per cent of Scots who turned out, on 23 June 2016, voted Leave. That’s over a million people — 1,018,322, to be precise. More than the 977,569 who would vote SNP in the general election a year later. (Which they won, with 35 seats out of 59.)

As UK In A Changing Europe number-crunched in 2018, there was some striking detail:

According to the British Election Study internet panel, around a third of those who voted SNP in 2015 voted to leave the EU.

 Equally, both that panel and the 2016 Scottish Social Attitudes survey found that 37-38% of those who voted for the SNP in the Scottish Parliament election held just weeks before the EU ballot went on to vote Leave…

 For a significant proportion of Nationalists — as they say in Glasgow, those whose heads don’t zip up at the back — see no point in wresting power back from London only to dump it humbly in the lap of Brussels.

This, really, has underpinned the sustained political difficulties that have beset the SNP since the June 2016 vote and, below the radar, it is a rich voting-seam from which Nigel Farage can profit.

There is another dimension: the effective collapse of the Scottish Conservatives. In that same recent poll of Scottish Parliament voting intentions, they tie with the Liberal Democrats — at 12 per cent — in fourth place.

 Given that the Lib Dems have several very safe constituencies, the Tories would actually come in fifth, eleven seats to fourteen — and largely by the mercy of top-up regional list seats in Scotland’s Byzantine electoral arrangements.

If Reform were to marmalise the constituency vote as much as current polling suggests, it is by no means impossible that the Conservatives will replicate their unhappy experience at the first 1999 Scottish Parliament election and win no constituencies at all.

In fact, the Scottish Conservatives are something of a misnomer because, historically — and, by that, one means the era of Gladstone and Disraeli — the Tories had little Scottish support to speak of.

 They were the party of the peerage, the lairds, gentlemen-farmers, parish ministers and (through Victorian times) the reviving Scottish Episcopal Church. What became the modern Scottish Tories was largely born from an 1886 split in the Liberal Party.

The Liberal Unionists — the reference, of course, was not to Scotland, but Ireland — never really caught on and, by 1906, were largely undone by the Tory row over free trade. But the Unionists thrived, classless but aspirational, in Scotland.

 Indeed, as late as 1964 the Tories fought in Scotland as the “Scottish Unionists”. They coughed up two Prime Ministers — Andrew Bonar Law and Sir Alec Douglas-Home — and, till the SNP matched the feat in 2015, were (in 1955) the only party in postwar electoral history to win an absolute majority (50.7 per cent) of the Scottish popular vote.

A pedant might point out that, by a 1931 quirk, six of their 36 MPs had stood as “National Liberals” — including John Maclay, subsequently Secretary of State for Scotland under Harold Macmillan — but they were, functionally, Tory.

In Noel Skelton, too — Unionist MP for Perth and East Perthshire till his untimely death in 1935 — they produced one of the most influential Conservative thinkers: it was Skelton, not Anthony Eden, who coined the phrase, “property-owning democracy.”

 The fat 1955 Tory vote, significantly, coincided with the high-water mark of the Church of Scotland — its membership peaked, in 1957, at 1.32 million people — and both have declined since and in striking parallel.

Margaret Thatcher has often been blamed for modern Scottish Tory woes, but that is not borne out in the evidence. They won roughly the same share of Scotland’s poll, and seats, in the last general election held before her apotheosis (October 1974) and the first after it (1992).

Deeper and more abiding damage was wrought by Edward Heath and they have not, since 1979, elected an MP in Glasgow. In recent years, too, the Scottish Tories have struggled with poor leadership, a want of foot-soldiers, a want of ideas and a want of talent.

Ted Brocklebank, distinguished journalist and TV producer, sat as a Conservative MSP from 2003 to 2011. When I asked him, in November 2013, why he had stood down, he grimaced. He had, he said, simply grown weary of working alongside people so stupid.

Nor was Ruth Davidson quite the political magician many have since made out. As Toby Young once properly observed, Davidson — who led the Scottish Tories from 2011 to 2019 — could, really, have belonged to any political party, and until late in the 2014 independence referendum campaign visibly struggled in the job.

Her glory came because a surge in SNP fortune coincided with a spell of the limpest Labour command — Jeremy Corbyn never seemed exercised over the Union; a run of duds led Scottish Labour — and many panicked voters, especially older folk, flocked to the Scottish Tory standard in a bid to save Britain.

They did extraordinarily well in 2016 and 2017 — even as recently as last year’s Dishy Rishi extinction-event, five Scottish Tory MPs survived, which was five more than in 1997 — but the emergency has gone. 

 Independence is no longer an issue of priority, one way or the other, to most Scots and, indeed — though tell it not in Gath — it is not, these days, a priority for the SNP leadership.

 Neither of Davidson’s successors — the well-meaning Jackson Carlaw or the bovine Douglas Ross — could match her flair: the latest in command, sometime journalist Russell Findlay, cuts a forlorn figure amidst ongoing desertions and wider indifference. (Simpson apart, two other MSPs quit the Scottish Tories this year.)

 So that has opened up further electoral space for Reform. In still another development, in recent months Scottish Labour has endured an extraordinary succession of squalid scandals.

By mid-August, five Labour councillors had been suspended for “inappropriate conduct”. David Graham, from Fife, was jailed for 27 months after the sexual abuse of a vulnerable teenage girl. Andrew Duffy-Lawson of North Lanarkshire was suspended in July over allegations of sexually inappropriate messaging. In April, Frank McAveety, a former leader of Glasgow City Council — and, indeed, a former MSP and Scottish Executive minister — was arrested and charged with fraud offences. (He denies all wrongdoing.) Philip Braat, Glasgow, was also suspended after pleading guilty to a charge of stalking in May.

Last December, the leader of Edinburgh City Council was suspended — and then resigned — amid allegations he had sent sexually explicit messages to Ukrainian refugees. He has since been cleared by the police of any criminality. Earlier this month a court date was set for Labour MSP Colin Smyth, charged with the possession of indecent images of children, and under ongoing investigation for allegedly secreting a camera into a Scottish Parliament toilet. (Like Mr McAveety, Mr Smyth denies all wrongdoing.)

The People’s Party? It’s the 120 Days of Sodom. Then, on Friday 5 September, as Sir Keir Starmer desperately reshuffled the Cabinet in the wake of Angela Rayner’s disgrace, Ian Murray, Secretary of State for Scotland was sacked.

That job is not just Scotland’s man in the Cabinet, but the Union’s man in Scotland. It matters: the late administration’s Secretary of State, Alister Jack, effectively ended Nicola Sturgeon’s career.

Murray, Labour MP for Edinburgh South since 2010 (and, for half that service, the only Labour MP in Scotland) is highly respected: it is no secret he is furious, and that the anger is widely shared. Especially as his replacement, Douglas Alexander, has commanded the Scotland Office before, for an undistinguished year between 2006 and 2007. It was on his watch that the SNP came to power, after an extraordinary (and protracted) vote count with slips of such confusing design that there were over 100,000 spoiled ballots.

Yet more reason for Scots to contemplate a protest vote

That was a lot of effectively disenfranchised people: Alexander refused to take any responsibility for the debacle and has never apologised. An, um, courageous pick for the job, Prime Minister.

Yet more reason for Scots to contemplate a protest vote. This has all happened on top of finding ourselves in what has become, and with astonishing speed, an extraordinarily illiberal country. SNP ministers have criminalised the singing of certain football chants and sectarian songs, enacted a law that could have you arrested for expressing the wrong sort of opinion in the privacy of your own home, banned smacking, briefly contemplated a ban on woodburning stoves in newbuild homes, and even thought aloud — for the protection of wee birdies — about banning cats. 

At the same time, politicians have committed themselves to absurdities. In her obsession with trans rights, Nicola Sturgeon perished in bluster and pronouns, wholly unable to admit that Adam Graham, a convicted rapist, sent to chokey as Isla Bryson, was actually a man. “The individual concerned is a rapist,” flared Sturgeon, as her political credibility evaporated.

Then, with the SNP leadership up for grabs, there was the disturbing spectacle of how Kate Forbes — the ablest, by a mile, on their front bench — was monstered by the Scottish Greens, other SNP ministers and their useful idiots in the Scottish press for holding moral views that, barely two decades back, would have been wholly unremarkable.

 By the time they were done, the smart and personable Forbes, a member of the Free Church of Scotland — founded in 1843 in a surge of anti-landlord radicalism — had been painted like the sort of crazy Pentecostal in the Appalachians who dances with rattlesnakes.

The whole truth of how his Nationalist colleagues, and indeed elements in the deep State, destroyed the late Alex Salmond has yet to emerge. (He eventually won a civil action against the Scottish Government, and was acquitted of all criminal charges.)

Still richer pickings for Reform in a Scotland where folk are increasingly sick of being told what they can or cannot say, of being told what they are allowed to think — a sense of a ruling elite who, having made a Horlicks of our schools, hospitals, roads and ferries, give not a hoot about the poor and prefer to major in the minor.

We cannot ignore, Kevin McKenna argued days out from the Hamilton by-election, “the ugly, class-baiting tendencies of the SNP in recent years in which they routinely attack working class communities for not speaking properly, for drinking too much; for eating unhealthy food, for being unfit parents; for exhibiting irresponsible attitudes to refuse-collection; for their callousness in the face of Scotland’s drugs death crisis…”

 “Find something else to moan about,’” Mr Swinney snarled at a Labour MSP who had tried to question him about child homelessness. He had later to apologise.

There is a final irony. Could a vaguely centre-Right, populist and strongly Eurosceptic party really break through in Scottish politics?

 Well, yes: one already has. In 1955 the Scottish National Party was on the lunatic-fringe. It put up the odd candidate in D C Thomson Scotland and had a few councillors. Then, in by-elections and that, and in growing professionalism, it began to grow. Since Winnie Ewing’s 1967 by-election triumph — in Hamilton, as it happens — the SNP has had continuous Westminster representation.

It was vocally opposed to what was then just the Common Market: of the eleven SNP MPs elected in 1974, all but three sat for constituencies with a significant fishing industry. But that and the Union apart, there was no ideological coherence. MPs ranged from avowed socialists to sometime Tory candidates with a certain regard for Enoch Powell. The SNP generally dodged third-rail issues — in 1970, it refused to take any stand on Northern Ireland, or Rhodesia — and, as recently as the 1983 general election, wanted us out of Europe.

 What has haunted the SNP for decades is that, historically, its support has been cyclical — and, 1974 apart, till 2007 its booms never coincided with first-order elections. The elections of 1970 and 1979 saw particularly frightful reverses.

 Its fortunes may yet slump once more, as implacably as for two decades they have broadly flooded. 

 Yes, Reform, as the Nationalists now nervously eye it, may yet prove to be a bubble. A last burp of nativism: as Ralf Dahrendorf in 1981 observed of the SDP, “promising us a better yesterday”.

Or, for the Nationalists, the oncoming storm; for an awakened Scottish people, the surging and irresistible tide, taking for its own the untold political ground so generously vacated by these Nationalists — and the parties of the Union.