Reform UK is all but guaranteed to pick up a clutch of seats at Scotland’s election on Thursday. This has been expected since the 2024 UK general election, when the party attracted a non-trivial but ultimately inconsequential 7 per cent of votes north of the border. Now equipped with a leader, in the form of Malcolm Offord, and a policy platform for Scotland, it is on track to at least double this vote share at Holyrood and secure a substantial number of seats, polling suggests. Regardless of the final totals, its breakthrough will represent a watershed moment for the devolved parliament in Edinburgh.
For this reason, breathless headlines and histrionic punditry on the “scunnered” voters heading for Reform have followed the party for over a year, while Scottish progressives have pre-emptively mourned what they see as the loss of the nation’s moral compass. But the idea that Scotland is undergoing a decisive shift to the right is equally misguided, resting on the misconception that Scotland is a uniquely progressive society within the United Kingdom. This belief, reinforced through various referendums and election campaigns, has been known to academics for decades as part of “the Scottish myth”.
In fact, Scots’ underlying public policy attitudes and political values are only marginally different from those found in the rest of the UK. Scotland is exceptional only in its lateness to the party, or, rather, the party’s lateness to Scotland. For at least two decades, political parties in the mould of Reform UK—the “populist radical right”—have disrupted the gentle mores of electoral politics around the world, emerging as genuine competitors to the traditional governing coalitions of the centre-left and -right by combining anti-immigration, anti-woke and anti-elite appeals with an abrasive rhetorical style. Reform’s imminent success in Scotland is less a case of “why now?” than “why not earlier?”
The answer lies in the question about Scotland’s constitutional status. To date, the emergence of a populist-right challenger in Scotland has been impeded not by voter demand but by electoral supply. The country’s independence referendum in 2014 polarised the bulk of Scottish voters into identity-driven Yes and No camps which cut across the social cleavages that were already disrupting other European party systems. Unlike the Remain and Leave identities formed in response to the UK-wide Brexit referendum, voter attitudes to the constitutional question did not map neatly onto the key social and value divides animating the wider realignment. Independence was a lightning rod for anti-establishment attitudes, and the establishment that voters had in mind was typically an English, Westminster-based, capital-C Conservative one.
The Conservative party largely absorbed the (pro-union) populist vote at elections in Scotland following the independence and Brexit referendums. But as soon as it left office at Westminster, with its credibility at a low ebb, half of its coalition fled directly to rivals on the right. Reform is now offering Scots voters the full-fat version of what some have wanted for some time: an uncompromisingly right-wing, anti-immigration alternative to what is now a distinctly Scottish, Holyrood-based establishment.
It remains the case that many Reform voters in Scotland are choosing the party out of a sense of exasperation. In our most recent Scottish Election Study poll, 30 per cent indicated that their choice was down to exhaustion with all other options. If the party performs better than opinion polls currently suggest, it will be because a higher number of these disengaged, disenchanted Scots decide to turn out. But the bulk of people voting for Reform match the profile of populist-right supporters elsewhere in the UK and around the world: they are more likely to be older and male, less likely to hold a university degree, and are distinctly hostile to immigration and to political elites.
While still an avowedly pro-union party, Reform has attempted to navigate the tricky territorial waters by deploying mixed messaging on the possibility of a second Scottish independence referendum. Its Holyrood manifesto, remarkably, also criticises the SNP for “welcoming uncontrolled immigration from the rest of the UK”. While the party’s coalition is currently overwhelmingly anti-independence, according to our data, around a quarter of its supporters backed Yes in 2014, and Reform has not sought to copy the Scottish Conservatives’ ongoing union-first strategy. That approach makes sense because the independence question has become less important to voters in recent years. That fact, combined with the collapse of the Conservatives, opened space in the party system for a distinctive offer on the right.
All that said, Reform still carries familiar baggage. Widespread, generational antipathy to the Conservative party prevented the Tories from ever performing better than a distant second in Scotland, and this has transferred directly over to Reform. When asked on a scale of 0-10 how likely it is they would ever entertain voting for the party, around two-thirds of Scots place themselves at zero.
Though firmly in the minority north of the Tweed, those who like the cut of Nigel Farage’s jib will be casting a ballot for his party this week. This does not reflect changing political attitudes so much as changing priorities and an updated menu of electoral options.
