As a Londoner with Scottish roots, I too liked to think of the Scots as different from the English. But the facts are against me.
The Scots are fond of imagining that they are more compassionate and more left-wing than the English, but the evidence of social surveys is that their attitudes to crime, immigration, public services and taxation are broadly the same.
Whenever I am in Scotland I have been told that “Nigel Farage could never be popular here”; that he is a caricature of an English nationalist; and besides, we voted to stay in the European Union.
Except that, even in Scotland, 38 per cent voted to leave. And polling for next year’s Scottish parliament election shows Reform going up while Labour is going down. The two most recent polls had Reform and Labour neck and neck on 18-19 per cent.
The Scottish parliament by-election in Hamilton today is the big test of the Reform surge in Scotland. The seat was held by the Scottish National Party until the death from cancer of Christina McKelvie at the age of 57. Labour should win here. The SNP has lost support since the last Scottish parliament elections in 2021, and if the result today were to reflect Scotland-wide opinion polls, Labour would win, despite its loss of support since Keir Starmer formed a UK government in London.
But this is a by-election, in which protest voting is magnified and “a plague on all your establishment houses” is often the dominant sentiment among those citizens motivated to turn out at all. Labour is now the London establishment, and the winter fuel payment cut is just as unpopular here as anywhere else.
When Jack Davey, an enterprising blogger, interviewed a pensioner in the constituency she said Labour “took me money” and, asked which party she was going to vote for, said: “The Scottish one.”
But the SNP is the Edinburgh establishment, in power in Scotland for decades and with little to show for it. Hence the expectation that Ross Lambie, the Reform candidate, could come a strong second – and might even win.
If he does, it will be as significant a victory as Sarah Pochin’s six-vote triumph in the Runcorn by-election last month. The symbolism of a strong Reform performance here will send a message directly to the heart of Downing Street, because this is Morgan McSweeney’s backyard. Imogen Walker, the wife of the prime minister’s chief of staff, is the MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley, which covers part of the Scottish parliament constituency.
But the Reform surge also matters because of its effect on hard electoral arithmetic. In the short term, it means that the SNP is likely to hold on to government in Scotland because the opposition is split. If Reform gains more ground, it could even be the official opposition in the Scottish parliament after next year’s elections.
This week’s defection of Jamie McGuire, a young Labour councillor in Renfrewshire, to Reform could have been a one-off, or it might be a sign that the tectonic plates are shifting.
In the longer term, it adds to the threat to Labour at the next general election. A big chunk of Starmer’s majority comes from the 37 seats that Labour holds in Scotland. Another comes from the 27 Labour seats in Wales, where Farage has long been expecting to do well in next year’s Senedd elections.
Whatever happens in today’s by-election, Labour’s comforting assumption that Scotland and Wales are somehow immune to Farage’s appeal will be dented. Reform is eating up the party’s working-class base across the whole of Great Britain. The voters of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse will show today that they have more in common with the voters of Runcorn and Helsby than the romantics of Scottish exceptionalism ever thought possible.
