Reform didn't win – but it's on the cusp of a breakthrough in Scotland

Telegraph

6 days ago

A month ago, Reform UK's triumph in the English local elections all but killed off the two-party system in Westminster. On Thursday night, it did the same in Holyrood.
'There's a new party in Scotland,' declared Ross Lambie, Reform's candidate in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election. He may not have won, but he did send the strongest signal.
Though Labour prised the constituency from the SNP – only the third time a seat has changed hands in the admittedly brief history of Scottish parliamentary by-elections – it was far from a resounding victory.
Davy Russell's margin of just 602 votes puts him in the second-most precarious position of all current MSPs, with just 11 months to go until a guaranteed re-election battle.
From a standing start six weeks ago, Reform's Mr Lambie took 26.1 per cent of the vote, while all other major parties – including Labour – suffered a fall in their share.
Reform now looks on course to pick up double-digit seats in next year's Scottish Parliament elections, and could pose a real threat in the 2029 general election.
The Tories, meanwhile, fell to a lowly fourth place, with just 6 per cent.
Having received well over four times as many votes, Reform now reigns supreme on the Right in Scotland as Labour and the SNP, each blighted by being in power, tussle for the Left.
The SNP's shock 16.8 point crash in vote share (despite a number of polls favouring the party for the win) was a disaster for John Swinney, the First Minister.
His first electoral contest as leader resulted in the worst-ever by-election swing against the SNP and the second-worst for any party since devolution in 1999. Reform ended up just 869 votes behind, putting the top three parties within less than 1,500 votes of each other.
'Scotland is now a three-way marginal,' declared Richard Tice, Reform's deputy leader, leaving many seats vulnerable to a Reform insurgency. Less than half of constituencies in 2021 were won with a majority of the vote. But only 73 of the Scottish Parliament's 129 seats are awarded in this way.
The combination of first past the post in individual constituencies with regionally elected party list members, according to the proportion of votes received, could actually be even more of a boon to Reform.
Few politicians have been hampered by Westminster's electoral system as much as Nigel Farage. Even his successful 2024 general election campaign proved the most distorted in history, his party receiving 14.3 per cent of the vote yet just 0.8 per cent of the seats.
Holyrood tends to produce far less skewed results.
Looking at the percentage of 'unearned' seats in elections since devolution shows – calculated by adding up the difference between each party's vote share and their seat share and dividing by two (what psephologists call a Loosemore-Hanby index) – they tend to in fact be roughly twice as faithful to the will of the people.
This bodes well for Reform in the Scottish Parliament elections next May. Given the party's current overall polling average of around 16 per cent, it could be on course for between 12 and 20 seats.
More sophisticated analysis from Ballot Box Scotland suggests that, as of May 30, Reform could pick up 15 seats.
None of these, however, represents an outright constituency win, but rather the allocation based on a 15.4 per cent share of the regional vote.
Reform's predicted haul matches that of the Tories and is only a few behind Labour, on 21.
Reflecting on the by-election result, Prof Sir John Curtice, a polling expert, said the Conservatives were 'being eaten for lunch, breakfast and dinner' by Reform.
While the SNP would win the most seats on 59, that falls from the 64 in 2021 and slips further from the 65 required for a majority, giving challengers' voices even more prominence.
While Scots often vote differently between general elections and their parliamentary elections, their distaste for the Labour Government's policies speaks volumes.
Labour capitalised on the SNP's financing scandal to take 35.3 per cent of the vote last July – a greater share than its 34.4 in England.
While the SNP salvaged 30 per cent in second, Reform came fifth with just 7 per cent, less than half its 15.3 per cent take south of the border.
This underlies the fact that Scotland is not naturally fertile ground for Mr Farage – 62 per cent of Scots voted Remain in 2016's Brexit referendum, more than any other UK region.
The party neither won nor came second in any of Scotland's 57 Westminster constituencies. Its highest vote share was Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (14.6 per cent), but that was still only enough to put it third after the SNP (35.2 per cent) and the Conservatives (32.8 per cent).
But attitudes are shifting. Immigration was the issue Scottish adults felt Labour was handling the least well, with 74 per cent of respondents answering 'badly' to just 13 per cent 'well' when polled on June 1.
In YouGov's latest temperature take of politicians' net favourability – the share of Scots viewing them positively minus those with a negative impression – Mr Farage came in at -44.
That may sound dire, but it makes him more popular than Sir Keir Starmer (-52) and Kemi Badenoch (-50).
That's a 10-point improvement since last July for the Reform leader, compared to a 38-point decline for the Prime Minister.
More recent MRP polling – multilevel regression and post-stratification polls that combine a large survey sample with local demographic and historic support – hints that this could yield political results.
According to The Telegraph's election predictor, Labour's seat tally in Scotland would plummet from 37 to three, leaving it with just Glasgow North East, Midlothian and Edinburgh South.
While Reform still falls short of breaking through in any single seat, its overall vote share increases to 12.8 per cent. It now comes second in six seats and third in 22, with the average margin to the victor shrinking from 36.2 points behind to 24.9.
The Telegraph's poll tracker shows that Reform has soared over the past two months.
The party overtook Labour for second place at the start of April, surging from 16.7 per cent to 23.9 per cent as of the start of June.
The Tories, meanwhile, having won 12.7 per cent of the Scottish vote last summer, are languishing on 8.2 per cent of voting intention in fifth place.
With the party effectively 'disappearing down a plughole', Reform has seized the reins of the UK Right by taking the lead in the nation most historically antipathetic to its values.