“Storm clouds are gathering.” So warned Scotland’s first minister John Swinney as he called for a coordinated cross-party resistance—a Scottish cordon sanitaire, if you like—against the far right and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party in the run-up to next year’s Holyrood election.
There are those who think he had a cheek. In its 18 years in power, the SNP has hardly been a unifying force. A broad political consensus around tackling child poverty and achieving net zero cannot offset the divisions created by the party’s emphasis on independence and policies such as self-ID for trans people.
Arriving at an International Women’s Day event in March, former first minister Nicola Sturgeon was greeted by a crowd of placard-wielding protesters chanting “Shame on you”. Their anger captured some of the hostility the once-feted leader now attracts because of her role as architect of the polarising Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill, which was later blocked by Westminster—a hostility which was partly responsible for her decision a few days later to step down as an MSP.
Yet, despite the SNP’s toxicity, or perhaps because of it, Swinney’s February plea for politicians, trade unionists, church leaders and charity bosses to come together to fight extremism was a masterstroke. Not only did it allow the party to reprise one of its most successful ploys—a grandstanding that gratifies its supporters’ sense of moral superiority—it also laid a trap for Scottish Labour.
After almost two decades of SNP hegemony, the 2026 Holyrood elections will be make or break for Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar. “Either Anas becomes first minister next May, or he goes back to dentistry” as one blunt politician put it. But recent polls suggest Farage’s party could win up to 14 seats or 17 per cent of the constituency vote and 16 per cent of the list vote—putting it in third place, a few percentage points ahead of the Conservatives. What if Sarwar can only realise his ambition with the support, solicited or otherwise, of Reform MSPs?
The temptation to grab at his last chance of power would be strong. Yet any move to breach Swinney’s firewall could take a toll on Scottish Labour’s already faltering resurgence. And how would collaboration with Reform north of the border work when the time came for Keir Starmer to fight Farage on the UK stage?
It was Scottish Labour’s return from the wilderness that made the headlines during last year’s general election. At the Glasgow count, the faces of the SNP incumbents were ashen as, one by one, the city’s six constituencies turned from yellow to red. Across the country, Scottish Labour won 37 seats (a gain of 36) while its share of the vote rose by 16.7 percentage points to 35.3 per cent. Even then, though, psephologists were warning that Scottish Labour’s victory was based more on a desire to oust the Tories and give the middle finger to the SNP than on a renewed faith in the party: a prediction borne out by the fact that those polls from March suggested they had retained less than half of the voters they won in July. Meanwhile, the seeds of another revolution were germinating. Without any campaigning—without so much as a visit from its leader—Reform won 7 per cent of the Scottish vote. The party outpolled the Conservatives in each Glasgow constituency despite fielding some candidates so invisible that some people doubted their existence.
Reform feeds off some of the same anti-establishment sentiment that boosted support for the SNP in the run-up to the independence referendum
Since then, Reform’s Scottish presence has grown. Its membership now stands at around 9,400 (more than the Tories, the Scottish Greens or Alba) and 10 conservative councillors have defected to its ranks. Between July and March, it fielded candidates in 25 Scottish byelections, with an average vote share of 11.4 per cent (25.9 per cent in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire). But Reform has also performed well in Central Belt byelections, including West Lothian’s Broxburn, Uphall and Winchburgh ward, where it won 18.6 per cent in early March. Most of the party’s new votes are coming from Scottish Labour, though an SNP politician told me the anger he encounters on the doorsteps suggests his party has no grounds for complacency.
Ironically, Reform feeds off some of the same anti-establishment sentiment that boosted support for the SNP among those scunnered with mainstream politics in the run-up to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. A distrust of elites and an investment in conspiracy theories—defining characteristics of the US’s Maga movement—were already evident among cybernat “truthers” who believed the ballot was rigged. When the SNP failed to deliver either independence or change—when the party became part of the establishment it had promised to upend—those hardline supporters looked for other routes to disruption, such as Brexit, fringe indy movements including All Under One Banner, and, in early 2021, Alex Salmond’s newly launched Alba Party.
Most SNP members who defected to Alba did so because they were frustrated by the SNP’s failure to secure a second independence referendum and by the party’s perceived obsession with identity politics, which they felt was driven by its power-sharing agreement with the Scottish Greens from 2021 to 2024. In Salmond’s Alba though, independence was also soon sidelined, with the party’s gender critical position appearing to dominate its agenda.
Long before Salmond died, Alba was riddled with infighting. Without his heft, the party began to implode. Some members were forced out; others left of their own accord. During a bitter leadership contest, the party’s general secretary Chris McEleny was sacked for gross misconduct. Both candidates—acting leader Kenny MacAskill and Ash Regan, the party’s only MSP—laid claim to Salmond’s posthumous support. McEleny accused MacAskill of bullying and harassment, and continued in his ultimately unsuccessful bid to become deputy leader.
For Salmond, Alba was first and foremost a revenge project; he spent most of his time attacking Sturgeon, whom he accused of orchestrating a plot to bring him down. But others saw it as a means of putting pressure on their former party. The SNP is no closer to securing a second referendum than it was in 2021, but a confluence of events—the ditching of the coalition with the Greens, the resignation of Sturgeon’s successor Humza Yousaf, the election of the socially conservative Kate Forbes as deputy first minister—has meant a shift in emphasis away from its progressive policies, robbing Alba of its one of its two raisons d’être. After MacAskill’s election as Alba leader in late March, the party is unable to unify, and seems destined to stagger through next year’s election before fading into oblivion.
Despite its Trumpist tendencies, Alba wasn’t built to surf the global tide of populism. “If you look at the growth of insurgent parties around the world, they are pretty much all based on three things: anti-immigration, anti-net zero and ‘anti-wokery’,” says Andy Maciver, co-founder of the PR consultancy Message Matters. “The only one of these Alba has is ‘anti-wokery’.” Scottish nationalism is generally accepted as more inclusive than its English counterpart—a recent social attitudes survey showed that two-thirds of those who would vote Yes in another independence referendum agreed someone could become Scottish if they “make an effort” (compared with 52 per cent of No voters) and 55 per cent of people in England think it is important to have been born in Britain to be truly British, while 49 per cent of people in Scotland think the same. The Yes campaign has always been pro-immigration (although other social attitudes surveys suggested there is no shortage of racism north of the border either).
Reform has all three strands and is anti-independence. Thus, it provides a unique repository for protest voting on the right and on the unionist side of the constitutional divide. It understands its audience, too, homing in on local culture war flashpoints such as the Thistle—Glasgow’s newly opened Safer Drugs Consumption Facility—fears over cuts to oil and gas, and the ban on alcohol at football matches.
In February, the most high-profile Scottish defector to Reform, former Glasgow City Council Tory group leader Thomas Kerr, posted a video in which he linked the Thistle to needles in the car park of a nearby Morrisons supermarket (though the Thistle site was in fact chosen because of its proximity to pre-existing injection sites, of which the carpark was one).
Kerr also wrongly claimed a former care home was to be turned into housing for asylum seekers, and suggested women were too scared to walk Glasgow’s streets for fear of foreign predators. His rhetoric is already influencing his rivals’ behaviour. Scottish Conservative Shadow Minister for Drugs, Alcohol and Women’s Health, Annie Wells, posted an almost identical video from the same Morrisons carpark shortly after.
Reform also looks set to capitalise on Scotland’s invidious position as focal point of the UK’s conflict over gender ideology. Though the SNP’s GRR Bill was never enacted, critics accuse public bodies of “institutional capture”, by which they mean that, seeing the direction of travel, they pre-emptively implemented policies that allowed self-ID and the erosion of women-only spaces.
This contention is at the heart of an ongoing and high-profile employment tribunal in which NHS nurse Sandie Peggie is claiming unlawful harassment under the Equality Act 2010 after having to share a changing room with a trans doctor at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy. On a recent visit north of the border, Farage’s deputy Richard Tice described the case as “obscene”. There may be more such cases to follow.
Swinney’s call for cross-party cooperation to counter Reform is not without its downsides. Labelling it a threat risks elevating and emboldening it, something that has not been lost on Kerr who has already accused the SNP of running scared and of being anti-democratic.
Nor is it clear if Reform’s growth will be sustained or will begin to dwindle, as those who thought they craved chaos now witness the reality of it playing out in the US.
So much depends on unpredictable events. Take Scottish Labour’s post general election crash. A recent Ipsos poll recorded the lowest favourability rating for Sarwar since its polling series began in October 2022. Unable to detach himself from the UK-wide party, his popularity has slumped in tandem with Starmer’s, as voters react to the scrapping of the winter fuel payments, the perceived betrayal of the Waspi women and the hiking of employers’ National Insurance contributions. Starmer’s stock briefly rose as he rallied European leaders to back Ukraine, then dropped again as he said increased defence spending should be funded by cuts to welfare.
The SNP, too, is prey to the vagaries of the political weather. Trust in the Scottish government’s performance has fallen to its lowest recorded level, and Operation Branchform—the police investigation into possible fundraising fraud—continues to cast its shadow despite Sturgeon herself being cleared. But, in Holyrood elections, the SNP trades on the “branch office” perception of the Scottish Conservatives and Scottish Labour, claiming it is best placed to serve people’s interests. Polls predict it will lose seats next year, but remain the biggest party. It is as yet impossible to tell what impact the standing down of a succession of party stalwarts—Sturgeon, Yousaf, Shona Robison, Fiona Hyslop—will have. On the one hand it represents a haemorrhaging of expertise; on the other, it might be seen as a welcome changing of the guard.
History suggests running towards far-right parties merely legitimises their policies
As for Reform’s chances, much depends on how much energy and resources it is willing to invest. It may choose to focus on the Senedd, where some polls suggest it could become the largest party. But it could also capitalise on Scotland’s voting system whereby voters select a constituency MSP (based on first past the post) and a regional or list MSP (based on proportional representation). The more constituency MSPs a party wins, the fewer it is likely to gain on the list. Reform could therefore claim that voting Scottish Labour in the constituency and Reform on the list would maximise the chances of a unionist majority. “For years, the UK has internalised the idea of Scotland as some kind of lefty liberal Aaron Sorkin fever dream,” Mark McGeoghegan, a Glasgow University researcher on the politics of self-determination tells me. “Even if they only did as well as the Lib Dems and the Greens, [Reform] would be able to say: ‘If we can win seats there, we can win them anywhere.’”
Either way, it would be foolhardy to ignore the threat Reform poses. So far Labour’s game plan has been to ape Reform (and Trump’s) rhetoric on immigration and cuts, to the extent that Starmer co-opted the “chainsaw” metaphor Elon Musk used to promote Trump’s cost-cutting efforts. But history suggests running towards far-right parties merely legitimises their policies. A better tactic might be to improve the lives of those whose struggle to survive make them most susceptible to Farage’s siren call.
In meantime, Swinney’s call to ostracise Reform feels right strategically. It also presents an interesting and previously unthinkable scenario: a coalition between the SNP and Scottish Labour. Though neither party will discuss it openly pre-election, the idea is gathering traction in some quarters. The more you reflect on it, the more sense it makes. The relationship between the SNP and the Greens is a busted flush. The SNP and Scottish Labour are so ideologically aligned that voters switch back and forth between the two. The parties’ mutual antipathy is rooted in their wooing of the same demographic, and in Labour’s opposition to independence, but, asked former SNP MP and defence spokesman Stewart McDonald: “Are our politics so tribal that, in the event of a messy election result [where neither party has a working majority], the two dominant centre-left parties couldn’t work together to create a firewall against the far right, and prevent the Scottish Parliament collapsing into chaos? If they are, then no wonder Reform is on the up.”
Depending on the results, McDonald suggests Swinney and Sarwar could take turns as first minister, or Swinney could be first minister with Sarwar as his deputy.
Political commentator Kenny Farquharson has also been pushing the idea of an SNP-Scottish Labour pact. “It is becoming increasingly clear that it would be morally unsustainable [for Sarwar] to take power on the back of Reform votes,” he said. “So is the best option a grand coalition like Germany’s or Ireland’s? Or should Labour agree a trade-off—a commission on what would trigger another independence referendum, for example—so Sarwar could become first minister with SNP backing?”
Any such scenario would depend on Sarwar asking and Swinney saying yes, neither of which is a given. But with the world convulsed by the revolution of the right, Scotland’s established political parties will soon be forced to move beyond a politics defined by the same constitutional conflicts, and unite against this common threat. In January, a Survation poll found a coalition between the SNP and Scottish Labour was preferred over one between the SNP and the Greens or Labour and the Conservatives, suggesting the electorate is ahead of the parties. Of course, much may change between now and May 2026. Still, it is strange to think the rise of the far right might be what it takes to finally bridge the country’s nationalist/unionist divide.
