For years now, we have been kidding ourselves that Scotland is not susceptible to the kind of far-right populism that Nigel Farage has been deploying so effectively south of the border. Last night’s by-election result in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse starkly illustrates that this isn’t the case. Labour scraped a narrow victory over the SNP, although both of their vote shares went down – but Reform taking more than a quarter of the vote is the headline result.
Short of Reform actually winning, this result is about as bad as it gets. It will act as a comfort blanket for the Labour Party, convincing Keir Starmer that lurching further to the right is the way forward, and giving positive reinforcement to the war he is waging against the working class through huge public spending cuts. Meanwhile, it massively emboldens Reform ahead of next year’s Holyrood election, and guarantees them even more media airtime.
Reform have found a foothold in Scotland, and they are quickly refining their messaging for campaigns north of the border. Rather than talking up immigration, their election material for Hamilton and the recent council by-elections in the spring have focused on issues like rising energy bills and Labour’s freezing of the winter fuel payment. Farage has even gone as far as to claim that Reform are now the “party of the working people.”
We should be in no doubt though – Reform is a party by billionaires, for billionaires. Farage, a former City trader, has attracted huge swathes of former Tory donors to Reform, amounting to the party taking millions from property developers, hedge fund managers, former Lehman Brothers bankers, and even the former number 1 donor to Liz Truss’ Tory leadership campaign. Farage promising the bare minimum, that Reform won’t starve children or freeze pensioners to death is hardly him flying the red flag.
By making these pivots, though, Farage is telling voters that he offers them genuine material change. This is territory that Labour and the SNP have vacated willingly, whether it was by retaining the benefit cap or ruling out wealth taxes. For a party that won a sandcastle landslide promising “change” just under a year ago, Labour seem baffled that they could be tanking in the polls, despite having changed nothing at all, beyond making things worse. As for the SNP, it is difficult to portray yourself as the party of change when you have been in government for 18 years. Where once the SNP were Scotland’s insurgent party, they are now firmly a pillar of the establishment.
All of this tells us that Scotland is in dire need of an alternative. The antidote to Reform’s growing popularity in left-behind communities is a political programme that makes a tangible difference to these places, and ensures they are no longer being left behind. Now more than ever, Scotland needs socialists to clearly articulate and fight for this programme. We need to show the people of Scotland the truth – that Farage and Reform don’t care about them, and never will.
Major parties act surprised by their rejection from communities that they have no real stake in nor attachment to. As Labour’s candidate effectively going into hiding during the campaign in Hamilton shows us, the major parties actually seem scared of having to engage with working-class communities. Socialists, by contrast, must be firmly rooted in the communities we organise in – only then will we be able to fight effectively for a socialist political programme.
In order to take on the far-right, we must build from the community grassroots up, and the left must lead by example. The SSY is collecting for food banks in Glasgow and Edinburgh and serving free food. In Stirling we’re campaigning in good poverty. And we’ve been planning even more community projects to do what Reform never has, and likely never will – build a movement that will actually make lives better. Join the fight for our communities. Join the SSY.
