Scunnered Scots and By-Elections

Iain Macwhirter has an interesting take on the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election - he seems to think that Reform are in with a chance of springing a big upset because people are so 'scunnered'.

I'll be surprised if this happens, but who knows - are voters angry enough to show their disgust at the way politics has been conducted in Scotland of late?

Why Scots are ready to hold their nose and vote for Reform

Nigel Farage is still deeply unpopular in Scotland but voters disillusioned by the three main parties appear increasingly convinced by his populist policies

By Iain Macwhirter -The Times


If Reform fails to win the Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse by-election on Thursday, it will not be for want of trying by the establishment parties. They have been giving Nigel Farage’s fringe party, which has only five MPs and even fewer policies, unprecedented publicity. The Reform candidate, councillor Ross Lambie, a defector from the Scottish Tories, is sounding chipper. “We can’t lose this week even if we don’t win,” he says tautologically.

The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, last week delivered what sounded like a campaign speech against Farage, as if this were a general election and Reform a prospective party of government. John Swinney has taken to declaring Hamilton as a “two-horse race” between the SNP and Reform, crediting the Faragists as a potential opposition in Scotland. No wonder the former leader of the actual Scottish Tory opposition, Douglas Ross, got himself thrown out of FMQs in despair.

So, when Farage arrives in Aberdeen on Monday he will be embarking on a kind of victory tour. A politician who is supposedly anathema to Scots will be basking in the attention he is getting from the political classes. “Look,” he’s saying. “I’m the new force in Scottish politics and you lot can’t help confirming it.” John Swinney’s comic-opera “summit against the far right” last month turned out to be the curtain-raiser for Farage’s in-your-face tour.

Aberdeen is an appropriate starting point too. It is the epicentre of Scottish deindustrialisation. All the parties, Tories included, are implicated in the mismanagement of the North Sea oil and gas industry. By banning exploration, when we still rely on fossil fuels for 75 per cent of overall energy use, and by imposing punitive taxation on oil and gas companies, governments in Holyrood and Westminster have connived in the destruction of one of Scotland’s few remaining sources of high-paying jobs.

The Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse is being seen as a two-horse race between Reform UK and the SNP - Photo IAIN MASTERTON/ALAMY

At least that is how Farage will put it. He will say we are mugs for importing oil and gas from America and Norway at high cost when we have our own resources in the North Sea. He will ridicule SNP plans to scrap a million gas boilers in Scotland for expensive heat pumps. And here is the thing: many Scottish voters agree.

The bien-pensant Scottish intelligentsia, if it still merits the term, is in despair at the very thought of working-class voters turning to a party they believe is composed of soft-shoe fascists. But the more Farage is accused of being a “climate change denier” or a “racist” by the Scottish Green Party, the more he likes it. Farage revels in being an environmental iconoclast and loves poking the left by condemning mass immigration.

The left’s instinct is to take to the streets this week as they did in 2013 when Farage, then the leader of Ukip, had to be rescued by police from an Edinburgh pub. But if they retain an ounce of sense, the organisers of Sunday’s “Stand Up To Racism” conference will cancel their plans to “drive Farage out of Scotland”. Times change. Voters change. The left is bereft of an answer to the Reform phenomenon, and the public are sick of superannuated student protesters noisily parading their dodgy virtue on the streets.

The Faragists deliberately provoked progressive Scotland by launching a social media race war against the Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, claiming he intends to “prioritise the Pakistani community”. After Sarwar accused them of racism, Reform doubled down. They started posting videos on social media of the Labour leader lamenting the fact that so many Scots in high places are “white … white … white”. The former first minister, Humza Yousaf, delivered a similar litany of racial complaint at the height of Black Lives Matter in 2020.

Why was Reform playing the race card? For publicity, obviously, but also because it appears to be doing them no harm in Lanarkshire. This does not mean Scots are turning racist, however. Many just feel that the Holyrood political class care more about minority groups and benefit claimants than they do about struggling working and middle-class families who have seen their livelihoods wither, their children turn to drugs, and old people freeze because of high fuel prices and the loss of the winter fuel payment.

Anas Sarwar, campaigning with the Labour candidate Davy Russell, has accused Nigel Farage of racism - Photo IAIN MASTERTON/ALAMY

It is no good condemning Farage’s “opportunism” in promising to restore the payment in full and scrap the two-child benefit cap while cutting taxes. Nor that Reform’s sums do not add up. Right now, none of the UK parties’ sums add up. Voters care little for finger-wagging politicians and columnists effectively chastising them for even contemplating voting for Reform. It leaves them cold.

They see how Starmer has himself taken to speaking the same language as Farage, talking about the UK becoming an “island of strangers” because of “the failed experiment in open borders”. They are not going to take any lectures on nativism from John Swinney. After all, the SNP was the original ethnic nationalist party.

Immigration has rarely been an issue in Scotland, largely because there has been so little of it. But there is a widespread feeling that the attentions and affections of the political classes are elsewhere. Reform is a repository of the collective resentment at the political class, who seem more interested in promoting transgender ideology, immigration and net zero than maintaining Scottish jobs, fixing the NHS and maintaining living standards.

However, I do not think that, come polling day, many Hamilton voters will actually vote for Reform. Most will express their discontent by not voting. Of course, anything could happen in a three-horse race on a low turnout. The by-election is conducted under first-past-the-post, which makes prediction a mug’s game.

The latest Norstat opinion poll in The Sunday Times suggests that support for Reform may have peaked and that, intriguingly, support for independence edges up to 58 per cent if Nigel Farage were to become prime minister. This may explain why Swinney is talking up their prospects.

The paradox of the Hamilton by-election is that Nigel Farage remains an unpopular figure in Scotland, even as his party is apparently registering unprecedented support. But that is not so strange, really. No one thinks Nigel Farage is going to be prime minister. Voters want to express their disgust at the way politics has been conducted in Scotland. It is a plague on all your houses — and if Farage is the plague-carrier, so be it.