JIM SPENCE: SNP arrogance has fuelled rise of Nigel Farage's Reform north of the border

The Courier

2 days ago

The rise of Reform appears to be unstoppable on both sides of the Tweed.
Their rapid elevation under the leadership of beer drinking, chain smoking, garrulously entertaining Nigel Farage seemed to an out-of-touch political class in Scotland as an English phenomenon.
How wrong they were.
And the SNP, which arrogantly thought the country was resistant to Farage's appeal, can pat itself on the back for assisting his rise in popularity.
When folk lose their fear they gain their courage, and growing numbers have lost their fear of being called racists, bigots, transphobes, right wing, and every other empty insult thrown at them by a political class which has ignored their concerns, while growing ever more comfortable on the public purse.
The SNP has run Scotland as a fiefdom for 14 years since winning power under Alex Salmond in 2011.
Salmond understood the need to work with others and allay the genuine fears and concerns of those who were frightened of independence.
There is, of course, no longer any fear of independence, since under Sturgeon's leadership the very idea was quietly stored away only to be brought out and used to fire the blood of the natives in times of emergency.
The SNP knowing that independence was unsellable to sufficient numbers of the electorate settled, however, on what seemed to be an inspired solution.
They could bang on about it whenever the need presented itself, secure in valour's station that they appeared to have an inbuilt domination of Holyrood in perpetuity.
This was the best of both worlds – freeing them from the very difficult task of delivering Scotland from Westminster while, at the same time, running the show in Edinburgh like a Colonial Raj – dictating to the natives on their latest woke wheezes while under no pressure to deliver or govern efficiently.
With no real opposition from a disjointed and disorganised Labour Party they could continue to reign unopposed despite their farrago of failures and broken promises.
From the ferries fiasco to the broken promises to dual the A9 to the madness of incarcerating male rapists in women's prisons, Holyrood seemed to guarantee perpetual power to a party comprised of pointless politicians.
Nicola Sturgeon's bitter legacy is to have blown all of that to smithereens by ignoring the concerns of those who had the temerity to challenge and question her dictatorial views.
Ideological obsessions and the appearance of malfeasance levelled at the SNP have badly tarnished the party, and its once seemingly irresistible rise in the polls has slithered to a halt.
I wrote here last July that Reform had broken the mould and proved that Scotland wasn't immune to Farage's charms, and the polls are proving that to be true.
A host of political commentators who appear to make a living from missing trends like the rise of Farage and Reform are finally catching up with the reality on the ground.
The Scottish electorate isn't in truth that much different from the rest of the UK.
Working folk here, as in the rest of the UK, have watched their standards of living drop and their cost-of-living increase.
They've sat silently seething as the political class indulged itself with net-zero nonsense, trans-rights tantrums, pronouns panic and ignoring immigration issues.
The public were discussing these things in hushed tones in living rooms and elsewhere, fearful of being labelled bigots by supposed progressives, but now they're giving a fingered salute to those politicians and throwing their votes behind a party claiming to be on their side.
Whether Reform is any different in practice remains to be seen.
But I suspect that much of the support for them comes from an incandescent impulse to stick it to the other parties for their duplicity and inaction, and the SNP won't be immune from that revolution.