Fighting the Far Right, Reform and Scotland

John Swinney’s summit to ‘stop the far right’ had all of the energy of a burst balloon. Having been passed through the civil service it had lost any energy it might have once had. It was, no doubt, full of good intentions, and, as Swinney said: “Today is the start of the process, not the end of the process.”

But it did not have the sense of seriousness it required. Was this about fighting fascism and the far-right in Scottish society as first billed? In which case you’d call together anti-fascist organisations and researchers and community organisers, not Alex Cole-Hamilton. If this was about stopping the rise of Reform, well Swinney and the other parties will need to fight them at the ballot box.

Outside the event a man in a Union Jack t-shirt held a sign saying “Asylum Frauds out” while others held one saying “Mass Deportations Now”. Reform UK’s vetting process is notoriously lax, and the party attracts candidates and supporters from across the far-right. In Scotland this has a particular context, such as Craig Campbell (see On Faragism, Gigafactory’s and Independence). We also saw the recent car crash of Reform in Scotland Reform’s Richard Tice, where Tice was exposed as knowing nothing about his own candidates.

While the media frequently frame Reform’s rise as inexorable and inevitable, it is neither. BBC Scotland’s coverage of the Swinney summit was extraordinarily biased and seemed to suggest that excluding Reform from the event was some kind of terrible cancel culture and repeated verbatim the opposition line that ‘the Nationalists’ (this is the Scottish media talking about Scottish politicians) were responsible for the rise of the far-right.

The narrative about Farage’s party is that they are the ‘party of the people’, speaking up for the disenfranchised and the dispossessed, and that their electoral success is pre-determined. But a quick look at the forces driving Reform, and the dark money behind them, suggests this is a nonsense. As Peter Geogehan has written in Prospect magazine (‘Who Funds Reform?‘):

“Two-thirds of Reform’s donations in 2024 came from millionaires and multimillionaires, according to the New York Times. More than half of its donations were from people with homes in low-tax jurisdictions or with offshore business interests; 40 per cent came from those who have questioned climate change or have investments in fossil fuels.”

These are not the ‘left behind’ or White Van man, these are the Tory party funders shifting their cash to Reform UK and buying influence. Geogehan writes:

“As Reform’s supporter numbers have increased, so has the party’s bank balance. In 2023, Reform raised £155,000 in donations. Last year, the party took in £4.75m. A third of that total came from people who have previously given to the Conservatives”.

These are people like Richard Smith, who owns the infamous townhouse on Tufton Street that houses a group of secretly-funded right-wing think-tanks. Others include Christopher Harborne. the cryptocurrency investor who gave an unprecedented £10m to the Brexit Party in the lead-up to the 2019 general election; Fitriani Hay, the biggest donor to Liz Truss’s 2022 Tory leadership campaign; hedge fund manager Crispin Odey, who in March was banned from working in the UK financial services industry and fined £1.8m by the Financial Conduct Authority; and Nick Candy, a former member of the exclusive “Leader’s Group” of top Conservative funders, wh aims to raise £20million for Reform.

Aside from the disconnect between Reform’s public persona ‘standing up for the little guy’ – and their super-rich backers, there is the question of what their political intent is, other than as a political vehicle for their leader.

Farage’s various parties – UKIP, the Brexit Party, and Reform UK share the same backers and intent. But Brexit is done. Defending or explaining it isn’t something they want to do. Farage and Co’s only remaining message is to cry at some ‘great betrayal’ and mimic Trump’s fringe politics. The problem for Reform in Scotland is that immigration is not the concern it is south of the border, and having hitched themselves to the Trump circus while it was in ascendancy, they remain hitched to it as it descends into chaos and failure.

Second to this, there is a real problem that journalists assume complete continuity – a read across the whole of Britain. On Sunday there was the results of a Shock Poll Shows Reform UK On Course To Win Next General Election declaring “Labour would lose 246 seats and suffer historic losses in traditional heartlands.”

But the polling, which the media regurgitates as part of Reform’s inexorable rise, are no such thing. The polling shows them winning zero seats in Scotland, and, in fact, we know that a triumphant Farage would mean a resurgent Yes vote:

Labour’s Reform Messaging

This polling provided difficulties for Anas Sarwar who preceded the ‘stop the far right’ summit accusing the SNP of fuelling the rise of Reform UK. If that were the case then why is Labour’s decline in the polls a near mirror image of Reform’s rise?

It is true that the rise of support for what we’re still calling euphemistically ‘populism’ has to do with the failure of the centrist parties to respond to and address catastrophic social breakdown: rising inequality, poverty, and the housing crisis. But the problem for Scottish Labour is that their UK colleagues have been explicit in their efforts to ape and mimic Reform in a desperate attempt to stave off their electoral assault. There is no sign this is winning or winnable, and is widely seen as a disastrous strategy. It does make it ridiculous for SLAB to accuse the SNP of being the cause of Reform’s rise.

Very often the Scottish media simply regurgitates a sample line about Reform’s rise and assumes it will be uniform across the UK. The Times managed at least to point out that:

“Reform UK has claimed that its membership figure north of the border will eclipse Scottish Labour’s by the end of the month despite the party having no discernible Scottish policies”

Reform UK is an English nationalist party that is endlessly replaying the messages of Brexit: that all of your troubles are down to ‘bloody foreigners’. This will have some success in Scotland in 2026, but it will be extremely limited. The level of success any progressive forces in Scotland will have in fighting the far-right, of which Reform is a key part, will be in how much they are able to respond to the social crisis and offer genuine, credible solutions to the problems people face.