When compared to results in England and Wales, the rise of Reform in Scotland appears a lot less dramatic. They garnered 16% of the constituency vote and 17% of the regional list vote as compared to 29% in the Senedd and 26% in the English local elections.
Indeed, if we grant for a moment that today’s Conservative Party is very nearly as far right as Reform anyway, their combined total of 29 seats in Holyrood is a decrease on the Tories’ 2021 performance when they won 31 seats. On the surface, it is tempting to think the rightward shift seen elsewhere in the UK has passed Scotland by.
As is often the case, that shallow analysis of the results is deceptive. Despite Scotland’s additional member system being more proportional than first past the post, it is still somewhat susceptible to the ‘spoiler effect’, which we see here between Reform and the Tories.
Looking at vote swing, the Tories’ losses of 10.1% and 11.7% on the constituency and regional list ballots respectively are more than compensated by Reform’s gains of 15.8% and 16.6%. In fact, even if we add Labour’s losses of 2.4% and 1.9% to those of the Tories, we still do not arrive at Reform’s gains in vote share.
It’s the “why”, not the “how”
Even assuming all defecting former Labour and Conservative voters lent their vote to Reform this time, some of those remaining gains must therefore have come from the SNP’s losses instead, unless they came entirely from 2021 non-voters. Clearly, Scottish politics cannot be reduced to the constitutional question alone.
This also proves Reform’s function as a protest vote, in which capacity it is beginning to replace the SNP and, to a lesser extent, the Scottish Greens.
Taken together, the SNP and Greens have long outperformed polling support for Scottish independence. When the SNP first supplanted Labour as the largest Holyrood party in 2007, they achieved 33% of the list vote despite support for Scottish independence hovering at only 24%. This discrepancy can only be explained as a protest against the failure of New Labour.
Their landslide majority in 2011 was at least in part a protest against the coalition’s drastic austerity measures, followed in 2016 and 2021 by protests against first the threat and then the reality of a Brexit which Scotland never asked for, breaking ‘The Vow’ made by anti-independence politicians across the spectrum in the 2014 referendum.
But all good things must come to an end and for voters fed up with the status quo, it is increasingly difficult to justify voting for parties like the SNP and Greens when they are partially responsible for that status quo, having been in government over all devolved areas (in the SNP’s case, for nearly two decades). Notwithstanding their self-satisfied rhetoric, Scotland’s public services are no less strained and crumbling than their English and Welsh counterparts.
While they continue to position themselves in clear opposition to the UK establishment represented by the Tories and Labour, they have become the Scottish establishment themselves. Voters seeking to cast a vote against both ‘establishments’ found themselves with only Reform and the Lib Dems (who also made gains) as viable options this time around.
Progressive Scotland – a half-truth
Just as the SNP and Greens’ past and present performance cannot be entirely divorced from their policies and their constitutional stance, it would be a mistake to dismiss the rise of Reform as pure protest rather than agreement. Scotland is not Utopia. We have home-grown racists and fascists just as virulent and dangerous as those south of the border and their perfidious rhetoric is only marginally less effective at preying on working-class anger.
According to YouGov polling undertaken in March, immigration is a top issue for 18% of Scottish voters as compared to 19% of English voters, a difference within the margin of error. Given that Scotland has taken on twice as many refugees per head as England, though, this could still be read as Scots being less sensitive to this than English voters.
The same polling shows that cost of living and the economy matter to 42% of Scots as compared to 35% in England. Yet the Greens, the major party with the most radical and progressive economic platform, made fewer percentage gains at Holyrood than in the English local elections. This would seem to indicate that their now-establishment status disqualifies them for a significant portion of angry voters.
That raises the question of how different these results might have looked had there been a viable anti-establishment option rooted in working-class communities putting forward a bold economic platform. Unfortunately, Your Party’s slow but steady collapse under its incompetent London leadership robbed us of the opportunity to find out.
The SNP will now be forming another minority government and will again have to rely at least partially on the Scottish Greens to support their austerity-lite programme. This will only further hurt their credibility with anti-establishment voters. Their gains, won at least in part on the coat-tails of Zack Polanski, are at serious risk of being undone in five years’ time.
Meanwhile, Reform will have every opportunity to continue posturing as the anti-establishment option and there is a very real prospect of their making further gains in 2031.
If we want to prevent that, it is imperative that righteously indignant working-class Scottish voters have a true alternative on the ballot paper come the next election. An alternative neither representing the ruling class in disguise, as Reform is, nor marred by complicity in the SNP’s managed decline.
Click here to read all the articles in our Taking on Reform series.
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