Is Scotland ready for Reform? Voters are scrambling for a fresh start

Twelve years ago, Nigel Farage was chased from a pub on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile by a crowd of flag-waving Scottish nationalists. “You’re a racist, go home to England,” they roared outside the Cannon’s Gait. It was a warning, not just to him but to the populism he represented: Scotland would have none of it. 

A decade later and he’s back. Not in the capital, but in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, the site of today’s by-election and a place that in many ways no longer resembles the Scotland that jeered him in 2013. Here, in a ferociously working-class patch of South Lanarkshire, Reform UK is polling competitively. In a place where elections have long been two-horse races between the SNP and Labour, public opinion has angrily shifted. Frustrated by stagnating living standards, and ignored by Westminster and Holyrood alike, these down-at-heel suburbs are hunting for change. 

While the SNP is defending the constituency with a majority of around 4,500 votes after the passing of MSP Christina McKelvie, you might have tipped Labour to comfortably take the seat from a tired, scandal-struck party. But Labour seems to have vanished from the fight, its candidate, Davy Russell, dubbed “the invisible man” for refusing to debate. There was scant enthusiasm for him outside Labour HQ this week — only crude signs and a growing anger. “Migrants adored pensioners ignored”, read one, flapping desolately in the wind as trucks whizzed by. “Free Lucy Connolly”, proclaimed another. These are seen daily in Parliament Square and at anti-immigration protests across England. But here, just 10 miles from Glasgow, they could be banners for a Scottish revolution. As Davy avoids hustings and botches media appearances, the SNP and Reform feel like the only real choices.

“The Labour Party have completely sold us out — they absolutely hate the indigenous people of Hamilton,” one of the men securing the banners to the railings tells me, explaining he belonged to a group called Patriotic Alternative Scotland. While Labour had clearly spent money refurbishing its campaign headquarters, the rest of Hamilton town centre painted a dreary picture. Part of the main street had been dug up by construction workers, with heaps of concrete left blocking the pavement. Litter languished in the ditches, exposed pipes poking out.Many of the baronial crow-stepped gables that frame the main drag have been left to rot. The rest have been spoiled by Turkish barbers and vape shops, making the whole place an eyesore. 

None of this surprised me: I grew up 20 minutes away. But what did was what I heard next. The man from Patriotic Alternative spoke of a “white genocide” coming to Scotland — the sort of Trumpian rhetoric rarely heard in these parts. Scotland, after all, has far lower levels of immigration than England. But politics here is becoming increasingly racialised. The culture wars have left no place untouched. Another of the banners — “Scotland too white Anas?” — refers to Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar who, in an eerily similar speech to former first minister Humza Yousaf, bemoaned the “whiteness” of the Scottish establishment. It all points to an unexpected division, ready to be harnessed by Farage, who is already in trouble for a Facebook ad which claimed Sarwar was prioritising Scotland’s Pakistani community. 

That division echoed through the normally quiet streets of Hamilton, as an anti-Farage protest made itself heard. “Nigel Farage! We see you! You’re a racist through and through!” The socialist banners and keffiyehs were on show. I speak to a man called Sean Clerkin, a trade unionist. He had been screaming that Farage was a “crypto-fascist” and should “fuck off back to London”. Even so, Clerkin understands why some here might go for Reform. “The mainstream parties are neoliberal, only for the rich and the powerful,” he says. “People feel completely betrayed. So they’ll turn to Reform because it offers them rage, anger, blame.” Arguments break out, tensions rise, and the police close in. Each side screams that the other is full of liars. An older woman called Margaret tells me she’d never seen anything like this in her life for a by-election. “The [2014] referendum was horrible enough,” she says. “We cannae go back there.” 

In the end, the anti-Farage protest succeeds. The Reform UK leader changes his plans and instead goes for a walk around Larkhall with candidate Ross Lambie. A councillor, architect and farmer, Lambie has proven himself to be a competent communicator on the streets and online, something that’s helped his party scoop up working class support on what was formerly known as Red Clydeside.

As for Farage himself, I eventually track him down at a brick factory on the outskirts of the constituency. Three black Mercedes and bearded men with Barbour jackets mill about outside. 

I arrive just in time. As Farage is leaving, I ask him if he feels that Scottish politics had moved on from the anti-Englishness he was subjected to in 2013. “It’s really unpleasant,” he says. “I think it’s a small part of the nationalist movement, to be honest, but it is there, undeniably. What was amazing about being assaulted in the way that I was, was that Alex Salmond refused to apologise. If any of my people behaved like that I’d be ashamed. And yet they’re the ones that call me the nasty names.” And did he really think Anas Sarwar was a racist who would prioritise his own ethnic community? “I just think many in the Scottish political class are obsessed by race and gender,” he says. “I think we should just treat everybody the same.” 

If the political disenchantment in Hamilton shadows the sort of thing we’re seeing south of the border, that’s because there is a great unifier: poverty. Once astonishingly wealthy — first off slaves and sugar, then off building 20% of the world’s shipping tonnage — the Dear Green Place, as Glasgow is known, has had a torrid few decades. Deindustrialising at speed, it has struggled to transition to a service economy. The persistent poverty rate is the same as it was in 2010, while half of the top 20 areas in the UK with the highest proportion of working-age people claiming out-of-work sickness benefits are in or around the city. That’s partly the SNP’s fault, with its quixotic focus on trans rights and other culture war manias over basic services. But the numbers equally speak to a Labour Party, on both sides of the border, bereft of radical economic ideas in an age of neoliberalism.

In a town that’s lost its purpose, it is perhaps not surprising that Glasgow would become the epicentre of Scottish independence. Like Brexit for many voters in the red wall, the 2014 vote was seen as a chance for a fresh start and a clean break from post-industrial decline. Other than Dundee (post-jute, post-jam, post-journalism), Glasgow and the surrounding areas recorded the highest percentages of “yes” votes, though “no” still won in most councils. Yet given Britain actually left the European Union and Scotland remained part of the UK, both the legacies of Brexit and Scottish independence are defined by unfulfilled promises made by their parliamentary masters. In Hamilton and Larkhall, voters feel let down by both SNP and Labour — and into the gap slips Farage, tapping into the disillusionment with political elites of every stripe. 

For some, these failures have prompted apathy. Many I spoke to said they were never voting again. “They’re [politicians] aw just in it tae line their pockets,” says Jim, a 35-year-old plumber, with a nonchalant grin after a draw of a cigarette. A gale picks up and the rain begins beating down. “That Farage might be saying different ‘hings, but does he really care aboot people like me?”. Yet for all such despondency, the Glasgow suburbs have a fierce political tradition. Here, nationalism brushes up against some of the staunchest unionism in the country. In Hamilton but especially in nearby Larkhall, sectarianism is a way of life. Union Jacks flutter and many Orange walks start from here in the summer. The classically protestant football team, Rangers, is sacrosanct, and anything green is associated with “Old Firm” rivals Celtic. The Subway sandwich shop is painted black and it’s been known for green traffic lights to be vandalised. 

But now, political tribalism is displacing these former religious loyalties. A Rangers man once might have quipped that there would be “sair hearts in the Vatican” after a win — but today the divide cuts through politics: Palestine flags in Celtic Park; anti-woke banners at Ibrox. “It’s not about religion anymore,” explains David, a local marketing director. “Back then it was more fights and that. It’s political now. I’m Hamilton Accies [the local football team] so I’m no caring. But it’s Palestine and Kneecap and everything else now.” It has become custom and feeling.

In the past, the most spectacular site of sectarian tensions was the Old Firm derby — when, to quote Tom Gallagher’s The Uneasy Peace, “the crust of civilisation” almost seemed to vanish. These days, though, the antagonism in places like Hamilton has moved from the pitch to politics. Where Celtic fans revel in their progressive credentials, chanting for Palestine and attacking the legacy of the British Empire, their Rangers rivals hold up banners at games reading: “Keep woke foreign ideologies out. Defend Europe”. 

Still, caricatures fall short. As the man who hung up the Lucy Connolly banner tells me: “folk fae both teams support us”. I ask him if you could still infer someone’s politics from their footballing allegiance. “That would be insulting to the people of Glasgow,” he scoffs. Perhaps that explains why Reform is cutting a swathe through both sides of Glasgow’s traditional sectarian divide. Strongly pro-union, it attracts voters who might be disillusioned with Scottish nationalism and feel betrayed by the SNP. 

But, equally, Reform promotes a vivid anti-establishment tone alongside its pro-British, anti-immigration discourse. In other words, then, the tide Farage is riding here is arguably, quite simply, populist — against SNP’s technocracy, Labour’s silent centrism, and distant Westminster elites. While Glasgow’s Catholic-Protestant rivalry might have once served as a “tension-releasing valve,” as Gallagher once observed — today, economic hardship unites far more than identity divides.

And Reform is seeking to weaponise that economic frustration and cultural grievance. It wants to carve out a political message that can co-exist — possibly uneasily — beneath the Saltire and Union Jack both. Certainly, Farage’s economic message, delivered at an Aberdeen press conference earlier this week, that Reform would be committed to reversing deindustrialisation, easing net zero restraints and trying to reduce the highest energy prices in Europe would go down well in Hamilton, and not simply because it was once Scotland’s coal and steel capital. 

For many Scots of a certain age Farage and Tice will always be “sons of Thatcher” as Clerkin put it to me. But for a younger generation, Farage is no longer the arch-villain of progressive nightmares. Many don’t remember Thatcher. All they know is economic stagnation, rent they can’t afford, and a political class that has consistently failed to improve the lives of working people. “I’m scunnered wae the whole thing,” one local chef tells me. “What have I got to lose?” So many voters, on both sides of the border, are now asking themselves the same question.

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Max Mitchell is UnHerd’s Assistant Editor, Newsroom.

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