Out with Reform as it dares to dream of Scottish by-election shock

Times

2 days ago

'When the campaign started, we thought we'd beat the Tories into third and put a bit of pressure on them,' says Ross Lambie, the architect who now dares imagine he might become Reform UK's first member of the Scottish parliament when voters in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse constituency cast their ballots in the most keenly watched Holyrood by-election in years.
'But after we started canvassing, we realised how super-angry the Labour voters were. They feel betrayed. The depth of anger took us by surprise, and they were also really open to Reform. Particularly now we're putting flesh on the bones of our policies, like scrapping the two-child cap and on the winter fuel allowance.'
On the streets of Larkhall, a staunchly Unionist working-class town where Glasgow Rangers FC is the established church, former Labour voters are easily found. Sir Keir Starmer is 'sending the country down the Swanee', says one man who claims to have already voted by post for Reform. 'I don't think any of them are fit to run the country,' says another woman, citing — like many voters here — Labour's benefit cuts and the abolition of winter fuel payments as evidence of the party's willingness to betray those it ostensibly exists to support.
The by-election, necessitated by the death of the popular sitting MSP Christina McKelvie, should notionally have been a straightforward contest between Labour and the SNP. McKelvie won the seat with 46 per cent of the vote and a majority of 4,582 in 2021. This is the kind of constituency upon which Labour's hopes of wresting power back from the SNP for the first time since 2007 depend. If Labour cannot win Hamilton, it cannot win Scotland. As such, the by-election is a vital test for the party's Scottish leader, Anas Sarwar.
The campaign's 'air war' has been dominated by Reform, most notably via the attention and controversy generated by an advertisement placed on Facebook and Instagram in which the party claimed that while it would always 'stand up' for the people of Hamilton, Larkhall, and Stonehouse, Sarwar would 'prioritise' Scotland's small Scots-Pakistani community. This was, at best, a misrepresentation of remarks Sarwar made at a dinner celebrating the greater presence of south Asian and ethnic minority politicians in Scottish public life.
The rumpus generated by what Labour and the SNP agree was an 'openly racist' pitch for nativist votes in a constituency that is almost entirely populated by white people has continued. When Farage declined to apologise for, let alone disavow, the ad, Sarwar labelled him a 'pathetic little man'.
Rather than pull the video, as opponents demanded, Farage played it at a press conference being broadcast live on TV. He went on to claim Sarwar had 'introduced sectarianism into Scottish politics' — a suggestion that suggested Reform's leader is not intimately acquainted with the history of Lanarkshire politics — and then released another attack ad, with implied questioning of whether the Scottish Labour leader, born in Glasgow to immigrants from Pakistan, shared British 'values'.
Following the Scottish cabinet meeting on Tuesday, senior ministers and special advisers held a special session to discuss how the SNP should approach the final ten days of campaigning. A source close to John Swinney, the first minister, acknowledged the 'risk' in 'talking up' the threat posed by Reform. Some ministers believe focusing on Reform lends Farage's party an unearned legitimacy.
SNP insiders believe three outcomes remain possible: a tolerably comfortable SNP victory, an uncomfortably close SNP win, and, less likely but still plausible, a stunning Reform victory. 'Three-way fights in a by-election with a new kid on the block have never been a thing in Scotland so it is difficult to call,' said one veteran SNP campaigner, 'especially when the electorate has deserted its old allegiances.' Even SNP sources allow, however, that voters unhappy with Labour's performance at a UK level are not necessarily enthused by the SNP's record in government in Scotland either.
However improbable, a Reform victory would arguably be the biggest shock in a Scottish by-election since Winnie Ewing won Hamilton for the SNP in 1967. That result marked the birth of the modern SNP and is the moment from which its long rise to prominence and power may be dated. Coincidentally, this week's Holyrood by-election covers some of the same territory as Ewing's Westminster triumph.
Reform's rise is remarkable. In 2021 the party's candidate won only 58 votes in the constituency; next week everyone agrees the party will win thousands. Opinion polls, meanwhile, suggest that on current trends the party could win about 18 seats in next year's Holyrood election. Any outcome on anything remotely like that scale would be understood as a thundering rebuke to a Scottish political consensus that has hitherto seen Reform as a party of cranks and losers and, still more significantly, as a purely English political phenomenon.
Wider — and perhaps grubbier — political considerations are also at play in Hamilton this week. Just as Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's closest aide, sees the upside in framing the next general election as a battle between Labour and Reform as a means by which Labour can destroy the Conservative party, so the SNP appreciates how useful Reform's rise is to their own ambitions.
Reform, which has pledged to bring fiscal restraint to local government, has now unveiled plans to reduce the generosity of council staff pension schemes south of the border. Richard Tice, the party's deputy leader, told The Telegraph that councils controlled by Reform would axe final salary schemes and stop offering the perks to new recruits. Staff on existing contracts would also be awarded lower annual pay rises to offset the costs of pension schemes.
A new poll for The Sunday Times reveals that support for Scottish independence has risen to 54 per cent, largely as a result of voters' disillusionment with Labour in government and the rise of Reform who, for all their current and recent success in Scotland, are still seen as unwelcome interlopers by many Scottish voters. Independence may be a largely hypothetical issue at present but SNP strategists believe the threat of 'prime minister Farage' can be used to concentrate Scottish minds.
Even so, the same poll finds that voters are unenthused by the SNP as it seeks a third decade in power in Edinburgh. Only 33 per cent of Scots are inclined to support the Nationalists, a far cry from the 48 per cent who backed the party at the Holyrood election in 2021.
Moreover, today's poll reveals that although Farage, who is due in the country on Monday, has an approval rating in Scotland of -25 he is significantly less unpopular than the prime minister whose rating is -39.
• Hamilton by-election result will set the mood for Holyrood 2026
Charlie the labrador joins the Hamilton campaign
JEFF J MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES
Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse is precisely the kind of seat Labour would need to win if the party is to have any chance of repeating its stunning successes at last year's general election. Coincidentally, much of the Holyrood constituency is represented at Westminster by McSweeney's wife, Imogen Walker.
Conversely, if Reform takes more votes from Unionist parties than from the SNP — and polling strongly suggests this will be the case — then the further fragmentation of the anti-SNP vote can only benefit the nationalists.
Senior Labour sources outwardly at least insist they are still 'neck and neck' with the SNP and 'there is not a chance we will finish third'. Some even see some advantage in the race-based controversies that have come to dominate the campaign. 'The absence of this sort of explicit racism in mainstream Scottish politics was, obviously, previously a good thing,' a senior Labour strategist claims. 'But if Reform are going to do it, it means Anas gets to respond to it strongly and to take Farage on.
'A lot of people who were maybe tempted by Reform as a protest vote are now thinking, 'That's racist and I don't want to have anything to do with that'.'